By Ted Kleine
“Are there children among them?”
The scene, which lasted less than five minutes, was a re-creation of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, the best-publicized atrocity in Indonesia’s 23-year-occupation of East Timor. The massacre–or “incident,” as the Indonesian government calls it–killed anywhere from “a couple” (the consulate’s figure) to 271 (ETAN’s figure) Timorese who had gathered at the grave of Sebastiao Gomes, an advocate of Timorese independence slain by the Indonesian army. The slaughter was captured on videotape by a British journalist. After the tape was broadcast, left-wing activists around the world took up the cause of freedom for East Timor, a former Portuguese colony that occupies half an island at the southeast end of the Indonesian archipelago. On the seventh anniversary of the massacre, reenactments took place in front of Indonesian consulates and embassies all over the world and at Santa Cruz Cemetery itself.
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The story of East Timor has everything that outrages the left: a small country is attacked–for its oil!–by a bullying neighbor, and the U.S. not only looks the other way but continues to sell the bully guns and helicopters. According to Matthew Jardine’s book East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, East Timor was preparing to become independent from Portugal in 1975 when Indonesia invaded, provoked by the tiny country’s large offshore oil reserves. Days before, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had assured Indonesia’s President Suharto that an attack on East Timor would not be viewed as a hostile takeover, an agreement some call “the Big Wink.” Since then, 200,000 Timorese–nearly a third of the population–have been killed or have died from hunger and disease. Because East Timor is so obscure and because Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most-populous country, is such a promising market, the rest of the world was slow to notice and slower to condemn. But after the Santa Cruz massacre, support groups began springing up in the U.S. and Europe, and in 1996 two leaders of the Timorese independence movement, Jose Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Belo, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
One of the couple’s guides, a former political prisoner, told horrifying stories from the torture cells: of Timorese having their fingernails pulled out, their genitals shocked, their organs ruptured by metal poles shoved down their throats. “Everyone you meet has either been tortured or knows someone who has,” says Simpson.
Jeffrey Winters, a professor of political economy at Northwestern University, has authored several books on Indonesia. Last month he was barred from the country after accusing its minister for the economy, finance, and industry of cutting a shady business deal with a U.S. mining company. “I would say the vast majority of the Timorese want an independent country,” says Winters, who’s been to Indonesia “hundreds” of times. “It’s one of the reasons Jakarta doesn’t want a referendum. Otherwise, why do you need tens of thousands of occupying troops?”
