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)