Bone to Pick by Ellis Cose

Author:Ellis Cose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S and S
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

If societal reconciliation is truly about building a new and different society then East Timor has a huge advantage. The former Portuguese colony was occupied from 1975 through much of 1999 by Indonesia. In May 2002 it came into the world a new—and newly independent—nation, under the watchful eye of the United Nations. It was a country literally created out of chaos. During the years of an often-violent Indonesian occupation and freedom struggle, as many as 200,000 East Timorese out of a total population of less than 800,000 ended up dead. Following the vote for independence in August 1999, pro-Indonesia militias went on a final rampage. Hundreds were killed, tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, and virtually the entire population, terrified, took to the hills. By the time independence arrived, there was a great deal to reconcile and a hunger for harmony. And as has become the rage with emerging democracies, East Timor appointed a truth commission—or, as the East Timorese called it, a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation.

The key question confronting commissioners as well as the rest of East Timor’s leadership was, “How do you reconcile a country that was born out of a conflict so violent that perhaps a fourth of its population died as a result—a conflict that set villager against villager and caused massive numbers to flee?” As Jake Moreland, of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, observed, “Reconciliation was needed here from day one.”

When we met in late 2002, Moreland was pondering the plight of thousands of Timorese who had fled to West Timor, where many of them cowered in fear “of what the communities will do to them,” as Moreland put it, if they decided to return. Many of them—apparently most—eventually did return; but to get some sense of why they were so fearful, one need only reflect for a moment on what they and their confederates had done.

In a district of East Timor called Liquica, a small white stone monument in Liquica Church pays tribute to lives lost to unbridled violence. On the monument was an empty space, presumably for a photograph, along with a metal Jesus on the cross. In the church are small living quarters roughly the size of a small living room. In April 1999 that church, that room, was the site of a massacre.

The period was one of heavy intermittent violence—from which villagers sought refuge in the church. In April that violence crescendoed into a two-day siege. During the rampage, members of the local militia and Indonesian troops fired guns into the air and destroyed numerous houses. And they eventually turned their attention to the terrified villagers huddled together in the church.

They attacked the church with tear gas, and as the townspeople tried to escape, the soldiers fell upon them with rifles, machetes, knives, automatic firearms, and other weapons. They relentlessly pursued those who tried to flee. By the time the melee was over, upward of a hundred villagers were dead or seriously injured.

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