Eyewitness (45 page)

Past burning houses and roaming militia, the pot-holed streets of Becora, a Dili shanty-town stronghold of pro-independence sentiment, are deserted. Inside a burnt-out Catholic Church building on Dili’s waterfront eight charred, twisted bodies are decomposing in the tropical heat. The local representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says 25,000 refugees are walking or being carried on trucks or buses to Dili.

This could be the start of 1975 all over again: Indonesian soldiers’ killing, looting and burning that wiped out 200,000 people, a quarter of the population. Even the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia could not match that per-capita killing ratio. We don’t know exactly what has happened out there beyond the razor wire and milling militia. What are the loud explosions every couple of hours? Where are the militia racing to in their utilities and trucks?

In the mountains outside the town of Liquica, west of Dili, the proindependence guerrilla leader Matan Ruak is frustrated, knowing that his people are being slaughtered. But Ruak is under the orders of his commander, Jose ‘Xanana’ Gusmao, who is under house arrest in Jakarta, not to attack.

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United Nations Compound, Dili
,
Wednesday, September 9th.
The looting never stops. It’s brazen now: soldiers, police and militia are stealing whatever they can carry. Dozens of trucks filled with television sets, refrigerators and other household goods are parked on the road outside Dili’s military headquarters, ready to make the seven-hour dash across East Timor to the Indonesian province of Nusa Tenggara Timur. United Nations officials who went under armed escort to Dili’s wharf today saw looted goods still wrapped waiting to be loaded aboard Indonesian ships. There were bicycles, mattresses, coffee tables and countless other items.

‘All the good stuff like televisions apparently went early,’ said one of six UN officials to venture outside the besieged UN compound in days. ‘Now it’s whatever is left.’ UN officials have seen soldiers on motorbikes, men driving stolen UN vehicles and military trucks loaded with looted goods. ‘They intend to leave nothing behind,’ said one UN official.

Indonesia’s armed forces and their proxy militia have embarked on a campaign to steal everything of value from Dili and destroy all the major infrastructure including electricity plants, water supplies, the telephone networks and fuel storage supplies. The power, water and telephones were cut abruptly last night. A senior officer at military headquarters has been overheard to say that nothing will be left for independent East Timor. When up to 20,000 Indonesian police and soldiers based in the territory have fled, the main roads and bridges are expected to be detonated.

‘Make no mistake, this is being directed from Jakarta,’ said a high-ranking Western official in the UN compound. ‘This is not a situation where a few gangs of rag-tag militia are out of control. As everybody here knows, it has been a military operation from start to finish.’ UN officials estimate the damage will be in the billions of dollars. They say it would take decades to rebuild the territory’s basic infrastructure.

For 24 hours a thick pall of smoke has hung over the almost deserted town. Throughout last night and today a dozen fires could be seen. Huge explosions are heard every hour or so, indicating the Indonesians are using incendiary bombs to set buildings ablaze. This morning a UN storage depot was ablaze and UN vehicles were also burning. All commercial and many government buildings have been either looted or set alight. An entire block of central Dili is a smouldering ruin. The bakery selling the only fresh bread in town is gone. So too is the supermarket, the barber’s shop, the bookshop and the clinic.

The waterfront Hotel Turismo, which had been our home for many months, has been looted and the rooms and restaurant destroyed. All my belongings have been stolen: digital camera, mobile telephone, clothes. Almost all my colleagues in the UN compound have only the clothes they stand in.

The colonial home of East Timor’s former governor, Mario Carrascalao, has apparently been destroyed. It was a prime target because it was rented two months ago by the Fairfax organisation. The militia have made repeated threats to kill us. According to the UN all the houses rented by foreigners have been looted and either wrecked or burnt. Fifty of them had been occupied by UN staff until everybody was forced to flee. A house rented by several Australian Federal Police officers was burnt overnight.

‘We’ve lost everything,’ one of them said. ‘I have no idea what has happened to the wonderful family that looked after us.’

We knew our beachside house was doomed when the militia came around one night and painted a silver arrow on the fence, indicating it was marked for attack. The military commander’s house next door is untouched.

For days Dili’s streets have remained deserted except for rampaging militia, police or soldiers. A UN official today described a group of dazed-looking people walking towards Dili’s wharf, where more than 4000 people were waiting for ships. UN officials have confirmed that almost all of Dili’s suburbs are deserted. Specific houses appear to be have been targeted, particularly those of independence leaders and supporters.

Residents of the suburb of Becora, a pro-independence stronghold, said the militia and military went from door to door dragging out people who were hiding inside. They were loaded onto trucks at gunpoint.

The UN has hundreds of reports of people being kidnapped and put on military or civilian planes and ships against their will with nothing but the clothes they stand in. Some were even thrown on to a ship departing for Irian Jaya. ‘The entire town has been cleansed of people,’ a Western official said. ‘It’s similar to what the Khmer Rouge did in Phnom Penh in 1975.’

Some residents who risked execution to return to their homes were seen today picking through smouldering rubble. An American activist, Allan Nairn, who sneaked past Indonesian soldiers guarding the UN compound at dawn, returned after three hours to say nearby houses were deserted of people. Almost everything of value had been taken. ‘One old man hiding out shared a plate of rice with me,’ he said. ‘I was just climbing over back fences and walking through people’s living rooms. The doors were all open.’

When the militia eventually saw him he wrapped a red and white cloth across his body, the colours of Indonesia’s flag, and walked down the centre of the streets back to the compound.

When the two-vehicle UN convoy arrived to check a food warehouse, militia started to gun the motors on the motorbikes they were riding and shouted abuse and threats. A shot was fired at the departing convoy. A second five-vehicle UN convoy was confronted by an angry 50-strong militia gang brandishing firearms and machetes. A stand-off developed. Indonesian soldiers who were supposed to be providing security for the escort did nothing to intervene. The convoy managed to obtain only a small amount of water before one of the militia members smashed the rear window of a UN vehicle with a machete. The convoy dashed backed to the UN compound, where basic supplies of food and water are quickly running out. About 100 UN staff and 2000 refugees sheltering in the compound have only a day or two of basic supplies left.

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Darwin, September 11th.
The destruction of the capital is greater than anybody could imagine. Hundreds of houses are blackened shells. The doors of government offices are ajar. Banks, cafés, hotels, boarding houses, service stations: all burnt or trashed.

One building – the police station – hides one of the most shocking of many shocking stories that have emerged so far from East Timor’s killing fields. Two days ago Ina Bradridge, wife of Mr Isa Bradridge, 45, of Ballina, walked the corridors of the station looking for a toilet. According to Mr Bradridge, who told her story last night after evacuation to Darwin, she happened to glance inside a large building that she knew was once used as a torture cell for political prisoners.

‘My wife told me she saw bodies. Thousands of them. Stacks of bodies went up to the roof. I know it is hard to believe but it is absolutely true. My wife saw arms and legs and dripping blood.’

Now, from the safety of Australia, Bradridge plans to do a lot of talking on behalf of his wife, who can’t speak English, in the next few days. ‘They [the Indonesian military] are going to obliterate everybody,’ he said before boarding one of the evacuation trucks with his family. ‘The East Timorese have a choice … they either leave or die.’

Leaving Dili to fly out in the same R.A.A.F. shuttles that take out the Bainbridges, we drive in silence through the mass destruction, past street after street of smouldering ruin. There are looters and thugs carrying pistols who walk with the arrogant swagger of the victor. But Dili is basically empty. In five days 70,000 people have gone. The bare-footed teenagers with fresh fish tied to their poles are gone. The clapped-out taxis, the naked kids playing on the debris-strewn beachfront, the old people hawking Portuguese-era coins who used to bother us at the hotel, the people who used to sit in the gutter every morning and read the local newspaper. All gone. Dreadful things have happened: here is a child’s bike twisted in the middle of the road; here are pools of dark liquid on the pavement. It looks like blood.

Our drive from the besieged United Nations compound starts with a volley of shots from Indonesian soldiers who are supposed to be guarding us. We all duck for cover, even the 12 soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles who have been ordered to act as human shields on each truck. We think it’s a pretty good bet the thugs on the streets, most of whom we suspect are Indonesian police or soldiers, will not want to hurt their own people. But nobody believes the word of the Indonesian military any more, not in Dili anyway.

Our drive from the besieged United Nations compound starts with a volley of shots from Indonesian soldiers who are supposed to be guarding us. We all duck for cover, even the 12 soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles who have been ordered to act as human shields on each truck. We think it’s a pretty good bet the thugs on the streets, most of whom we suspect are Indonesian police or soldiers, will not want to hurt their own people. But nobody believes the word of the Indonesian military any more, not in Dili anyway.

Streets are littered with burnt-out buses, cars, and motorbikes. Nobody has bothered to move them out of the way. Many buildings have B.M.P. or Aitarak painted on them. B.M.P. stands for Besi Merah Puti or Red and White Iron, the militia group based in Liquica, 40 kilometres west of Dili. Aitarak or Thorn is the name of the Dili-based thugs who do the military’s dirty work. On one building somebody has scrawled in Bahasa Indonesian: ‘the result of a wrong choice’, a reference to the 30 August ballot when 78.5 per cent of eligible people voted for independence.

We pass under a blue banner which declares that after East Timor’s ballot the UN will stay. We all believed that once, before this evil madness. But here they are departing in fear, almost 500 UN civilian police, international staff and 350 Timorese who were employed by the UN. Only a small group stay behind to try to ensure there is not a slaughter of hundreds of refugees who have been living with us for days in the compound, scared of an attack. We embrace and shed a few tears; hardship provides strong bonds of friendship.

Only a few hundred metres from the compound, trucks parked outside a military barracks are loaded high with furniture. These killers are going, but when? And here is the clue to how to stay alive in Dili: display a red and white cloth, the colours of Indonesia’s flag. Every truck in the barracks is draped in red and white. A lone man on the pushbike wears a red and white headband. Soldiers wear red and white patches. Even the military truck taking us to the airport has a red and white cloth tied to the side mirror.

Our drivers choose a route clear of debris. Past the Catholic cathedral, the one built by the Indonesians, which is untouched, unlike the waterfront home and chapel of Bishop Carlos Belo. There was terrible bloodshed there when the militia, soldiers and police attacked refugees last Tuesday. You only had to look at the bloodstains to establish that. The truck we are in drives slowly past the Portuguese restaurant where we enjoyed fresh fish most nights and where the militia came one night and made a noose, indicating they wanted to kill some journalists. The real business end of town is now in the western outskirts in a suburb called Comora.

We drive past the two-storey Australian consulate, which was abandoned in great haste two days ago after the militia had spent two days terrorising the diplomats. The high-iron gate is open and Indonesian soldiers are walking inside. We see the militia in greater numbers along the road from the consulate, towards the airport. One pushes an empty trolley, his head down, almost running. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything left to loot. It is here that for the first time we see ordinary people. Hundreds of women and children are camped out in the grounds of Dili’s main police station.

We were greatly relieved to see an R.A.A.F. Hercules plane and Australian troops waiting to greet us at Dili airport. They were tense and business-like, searching our bags and checking names off lists. Shortly before we fly out of the town hidden by thick smoke, a Garuda 747 landed and taxied to the vandalised arrival and departure hall. Commercial flights had stopped days ago so I asked a soldier what it was doing here. ‘There will be three Garuda flights today to take people to other parts of Indonesia. There will be nothing left for them here. There will be many flights.’

As I walked to the plane, dozens of refugees being herded off trucks waved. They were the waves of desperate people.

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Dili, Monday, September 21st
. The thugs disappeared quickly from Dili’s streets. When the first Australian soldiers arrived today in full combat dress, their rifles at the ready, the militiamen pretended they were the very refugees they had terrorised for weeks. Some of the killers, rapists and looters walked in small groups along debris-strewn streets waving at the Australians who began arriving shortly after dawn in huge cargo planes from Townsville and Darwin in what will probably become Australia’s most significant military operation since World War II. But the militia no longer carried the rifles given to them by the Indonesian armed forces or brandished their machetes, knives or home-made pistols. A couple were confronted by heavily armed New Zealand soldiers on Dili’s docks but handed over their pistols without argument.