On our second day in East Timor we visited the Fretilin (Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor) leader and former PM Mari Alkatiri at his Dili home.
You’ll hear the full interview on LNL in coming weeks. Here’s a taste…
The little old lady is implacable. She has pushed her way through a crowd of youngsters and demands to be heard. We’re in what’s left of Aliembata, a village in the Viqueque district that survived the Japanese and the Indonesians only to fall victim to the East Timorese themselves. She has listened to the young men of the community telling us their versions of events – one shyly, the other shaking with intensity. But she clearly will not endorse them. She gestures around at all the destruction and says this is the worst in her long memory. She dismisses the Portuguese era and hardly wastes time on the Japanese. The Indonesians? How they behaved was predictable. But the torching of this entire community, this arson, was too much for her. She makes it clear that what happened here, just a few months ago, was the worst experience of her life. We’ve driven for several hours along roads lined with villages that had been put to the torch by the Indonesians. We’re told that the military would commandeer a fire brigade truck, fill the water tank with petrol, and spray it out on both sides of the road, - so that a single match could begin the devastation. But in her village the catastrophe was the work of her fellow countrymen.
This seems, to me, the greatest tragedy of East Timor – the one that imperils its future. The victims of the arson – and “victim” is their own word - have widely varying interpretations of what happened and why. For some, hostility focuses on Fretilin, suggesting they responded to their election defeat with this atrocity. Others hint at ancient resentments that have been building between ethnic groups for generations. Whatever the truth, there is another truth. The relationships between the East Timor people are now fragile and fractured, and the greatest task facing Xanana Gusmão and Jose Ramos Horta is not the rebuilding of infrastructure but the rebuilding of what made independence possible – a sense of national identity.
Tonight we rest in East Timor’s ’second city’ Bacau.
Phillip Adams
Enroute to Viqueque we drove into ‘The Valley Of The Widows’ in Kraras, the scene of a massacre of some 300 villagers by Indonesian forces in 1983. Our camera is at the hilltop memorial:
First of all I want to share with you the splendours of my accommodation. The ABC travel service, used to operating on a miniscule budget, have excelled themselves. I have been allocated a monks cell in a motel here in Viqueque. The hand-basin appears to have been recently ripped off the wall and the pipes protrude from the broken plaster. But even if they were to install a new hand-basin, to bring my accommodation up to the standards of my travel companions, there would not be a dribble of water. The shower head remains in situ but refuses to proffer a drop. There is a fan of sorts, but the plug is too broken to attach to a power point. But the bed! The bed is magnificent! Not quite one metre wide, it has the sort of mattress that would induce piety in a libertine. But there is wonderful room service. Your choice of malaria or dengue fever. In fact you don’t even have to order - the mosquitoes are thundering around the room now, as big as fruit bats.
At any moment the dry season will end with a few claps of thunder and the downpour will transform East Timor from dust and gravel to tropical excess. And our only hope is that it holds off for another couple of days as it would render our further plans to explore the place redundant. We’re just making it at the moment, our trusty 4WD enduring more mechanical insults from the wrecked roads than bare thinking about. If there were mechanical rights like human rights we would be guilty as charged for making it suffer such long and agonising days. But it’s all worth it – every encounter we have had has been extraordinary.
This morning began with further details on the Australian army’s activities in Same and this afternoon we visited an impossibly beautiful village in the ‘Valley of the Widows’, were we learnt of a vast massacre carried out on these people by the Indonesian forces. There’s a glimpse of our encounter on the website.
Phillip Adams
Before hitting the road again Phillip and Ceu took a few moments to smell the bougainvillea and marvel at the mountain peaks which dominate the skyline of Same - the capital of the district of Manufahi - and symbolise many different things to the town’s people:
This is a land where everyone smiles, but all the dogs snarl. It’s a paradox. You cannot meet an East Timorese or even pass one on the road without the dazzlement of a smile. But I’ve never been in any another country where the dogs refuse all entreaties for the pat of friendship. Timorese dogs don’t wag their tails. They drag them in the dust as they retreat. Their anti-human behaviour continues at night when every dog in the village starts barking. The canine chorus lasting until the roosters take over at dawn. How any animal survives up here – particularly at the end of the dry season – is mystifying. The cattle graze on dirt as bare as any of their Australian cousins do during the direst drought. The pigs use their snouts to excavate the same unpromising earth. What do the chooks eat? They peck at pebbles. Yet they survive, after a fashion.
I’m finding it just as tough myself as I’m now used to going into a local cafe and ordering a meal which turns out to be absolutely, utterly, inedible. By the time I return to Australia I’m going to look like Twiggy.
But there are other rewards.
Today we drove for the best part of eight hours to record one interview- with an eyewitness to the killing of four East Timorese during an operation by the Australian Defence Forces earlier this year. It’s an incident shrouded in mystery. Our interview raises issues that must be addressed. Discretion requires that we keep the details to ourselves for the next week. We’re in the ancient town of Same, where the Australians came barging in with their Blackhawk helicopters putting many of the townspeople to flight - it seemed reminiscent of the Indonesians. But this is a place with an ancient history of wars and uprisings.
Tomorrow, another long journey in search of stories along road that’s going from bad to worse, to ludicrous. And with a bit of luck I might find an edible meal.
Phillip Adams
The town of Maliana supplied a bed for the night, a place to eat and a song or two.
We were serenaded with a song for the future of
From an Australian “sacred site” in Timor-Leste - the infamous Flag House, in Balibo…
