A way of healing people in E. Timor

A way of healing people in E. Timor

DILI, East Timor (JP): How do you cheer up whole villages hit
twice by armed gangs killing and burning everything in sight?

"With competitions -- sports, boat races, cooking, singing,"
says Father Yosef Daslan of the Liquica parish in East Timor's
western region.

Months after the September 1999 violence that drove Timorese
into hiding following their vote for independence, the priest
returned from his hometown in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, to find
members of his congregation sitting around glumly on the streets.

They needed cheering up and the contests worked so well that
an international organization is donating bicycles for races in
the next contest.

"We decided to hold it every year," Daslan told The Jakarta
Post. He was speaking in his office which is also the priest's
official residence -- and now also a monument to the massacre of
April 6, 1999.

The priest, who replaces Father Raphael dos Santos who
survived the attack, displays the new tiles, window panes and a
dark spot of dry blood missed in the cover-up of crucial evidence
only three days after the April killings.

The church, he says, now must help people recover their
courage to speak up. But it turned out that the first urgent need
was "to be merry".

The assault by pro-Indonesia militias is now among cases
investigated by Indonesia's Attorney General's Office. The attack
was part of the tension ahead of the Aug. 30 referendum and in
September, the violence was repeated. Once again, Liquica
residents fled to the hills.

Figures of both the April and September attacks for Liquica
alone have not yet been formally released -- but there are some
100 widows and scores of orphans in Liquica and nearby Maubara --
among them witnesses of both tragedies.

The mourning here is for both the deaths and the absence of
knowing where bodies lie for many of them. Adding to the pain, as
in all areas ravaged by violence in East Timor, is that close
relatives are among the attackers.

Witnesses of family losses are easily found -- the young
journalists who witnessed parents being shot dead when attempting
to escape in the late 1970s; a witness of a massacre in Los Palos
in the 1980s.

"I was about 10, I was sitting on a boulder at a distance," a
native of Los Palos said. "I saw a line of men in fatigues giving
orders to the second line in front of them, or killing those who
hesitated."

The second layer was ordered to kill some 30 men and women,
the source recalls, and he later learned that similar killings
occurred in three other villages.

Similar to women in Liquica, in Maliana's Balibo area, Inazu
Colo cannot yet discuss reconciliation. She would like to know
where her husband is buried -- as she is sure that he is dead
along with seven other men abducted in September 1999.

Inazu works in the very house where she and other women took
food to their men every day, until one day she was told by a
neighbor: "Go home, he is no longer here."

The house, which initially belonged to a militia leader, is
now the local headquarters of Xanana's organization, the National
Council for East Timor Resistance (CNRT). It is right across from
the remains of a building occupied by five journalists from
Australia, Britain and New Zealand before they were killed in
1975.

The building, an abandoned shop, has been continuously used by
residents as a shrine to pray for all those whose remains are
found in the area.

Similar to Father Daslan, a women's group, Fokupers, has also
tried to help victims recover. Far from the reconciliation plans
to accept back "those who robbed my husband", in the words of one
Liquica widow, and far from the courts, the healing rituals aim
for the first step in healing victims -- finding their voice.

On the surface, Laura says, Timorese "have grown used to gang
fights; we've become hardened". But once the women began to talk,
"they cried and cried".

One healing ritual took place in the Kararas village in
Viqueque district, the site of a 1983 massacre of some 1,000
villagers, which witnesses say was conducted by the Indonesian
military. Laura said the women talked of their children fathered
by soldiers who raped them.

Abortion was out of the question in the Catholic community,
and the illegitimate youngsters had grown up without school,
rejected for inexplicit, yet clear, reasons.

There are reportedly scores of such children, who pose yet
another challenge for those working in healing and
reconciliation. (anr)