Atambua tragedy may not be the last

Atambua tragedy may not be the last

By Aboeprijadi Santoso

AMSTERDAM (JP): Disarming the militias without breaking up
their masters' local networks may be too little and too late.
Xenophobic nationalism in response to the international
condemnation of the Atambua killings reveals a syndrome common
after a painful decolonization.

The issue is no longer to free East Timor from Indonesia, but
to free Indonesia from East Timor.

One year on, the Army backed militias remain active,
attempting to keep control of thousands of "refugees" they forced
to East Nusa Tenggara.

The killing of United Nations workers in Atambua was a direct
consequence of last year's violence in East Timor. It was a
continuation of New Order type actions, which President
Abdurrahman Wahid's administration should urgently reform.

The militias could have been disbanded much earlier if Army
commanders had had the political will to do so.

Any colonial occupation army has to rely on parts of the local
society. In East Timor, the Indonesian Army relied on the
traditional landlords or chiefs (liurai) and rallied support by
sponsoring pro-Indonesia political parties.

But once UDT, the party of Mestizos deportados, came into
bloody conflict with the popular, nationalist, left wing,
Fretilin group in the mid-1970s, the civil war was instrumental
to control the territory.

The mobilization efforts, however, failed to sustain political
strength as the two other land owning classes -- the deportado
and the Church -- were increasingly alienated to Indonesian rule.

As the old social structure was virtually destroyed in the
course of war and occupation up to the early 1980s, some
deportado became allies and were placed as governors and
bureaucrats, while others turned to the resistance.

As a result, the civil war lost its real base and changed into
an opposition against foreign oppression. Despite this changing
reality, the myth of "civil war" was maintained to justify
Jakarta's rule and resist a referendum.

It was this ongoing failure that provided the need for the
"pro-Indonesia militias".

By the late 1970s, the Army started to recruit local youths as
civil defense members, carrying munitions to the jungles and
mountains. They witnessed persecution, massacre and starvation of
their compatriots, including their own families, in operations in
the Matebian area.

Many survivors went to study in Java, joined the underground
resistance, protesting at embassies in Jakarta from 1994 to 1997.
Others ended up in Europe and some returned home and have become
leaders of the new nation.

Indonesia, in a very short time, turned a whole generation of
Indonesian educated East Timorese into independence fighters.

Since the economic boom of the mid-1980s, former president
Soeharto's military in East Timor had plenty of time and
resources to mobilize recruits.

Other recruits were trapped in patron-client relationships
with wealthy generals, who -- like Javanese aristocrats, Chinese
warlords or mafia bosses before them -- tended to aggrandize
their might and prestige by maintaining followers.

By the mid-1980s, as neither side could win the war, political
efforts were intensified. With networks of clandestine resistance
growing, the need to penetrate local society and to Timorize
local Army units was recognized, so the fiction of "civil war"
could be maintained.

Gen. Prabowo Subianto, previous commander of the Army's
special forces, built the Gardapaksi militia and there were
reports of "ninja" units operating at night.

Maintaining the militia was no longer simply to keep power,
but a part of the state terror operations. But it was not until
late 1998, as the autonomy proposal was negotiated, that former
pro-integration militias were revived.

The liurai families with landed interests of chief Joao
Tavarez, the Army's old allies of the 1970s, resumed their role
as warlord gangs, which included younger thugs like Eurico
Guterres.

Except for these specific groups, there seems to be few
significant links between the Army and the militiamen.

The greater part of the present-day militias was created only
last year and, in contrast to the youths who later joined the
resistance, they were mostly little educated, unemployed and
drunken men.

"We just want to live in peace and enjoy gambling," Guterres
told this writer last year. So they easily became a tool of their
masters.

Next, president B.J. Habibie's much hated "second option" was
soon followed by Tavarez's inauguration in Batugade as commander
of a new front covering all militia units.

With counterfeit money made available, the next step was to
train and arm a few hundred new militiamen in all 13 districts.

By some calculation, it was thought possible to ensure a small
victory at the voting. So optimism grew that East Timor would
stay with Indonesia.

In July, a public show welcoming Megawati Soekarnoputri in
Dili was impressive. By mid-August the Red-White flag was visible
all across East Timor as if the people enthusiastically joined
the celebration of Indonesia's Independence Day.

But the reality was exactly the reverse. Deception en masse on
the part of the East Timorese, as this writer witnessed, was
massive. Presumably, it became necessary as it was feared since
the attack in Liquisa in April, that Army elements and the
militias wanted to ensure victory by intensifying the violence.

Indeed, one expert on Indonesia, Ben Anderson, recently argued
in the Portuguese journal Politica Internacional that the
resistance might have instructed the public to participate in
Indonesia's general election in June, to convince some generals
in Jakarta that the East Timorese were loyal, so as to secure the
self-determination vote in August.

The disappointment was great as the East Timorese cast their
vote for independence. "The (East Timorese language) Tetum
vocabulary does not have words for 'thank you' and 'sorry'," one
Jakarta TV station commented with regret, reflecting the
incomprehension among the political elite.

It sounded like the Dutch colonial ideology, blaming the
colonized natives as ondankbaar (disgraceful).

But most hurt were the militias and their masters. It must
have been very painful for Army intelligence officers to have
been humiliated, Anderson argues, explaining the anger and the
destruction in September 1999.

The decolonization of East Timor created shame and bad losers
as the masters of the militias felt their honor had been
besmirched. Never had the Army been humiliated, its interests
threatened and its esprit de corps injured as when foreign troops
in the name of the United Nations arrived.

Thus began the post-colonial pain for Indonesia -- manifested
in the Atambua attack and xenophobic nationalism. Last year,
jingoism targeted Australia, now the UN. One minister, not a
Timor war veteran, even dreams of East Timor returning to
Indonesia.

Unfortunately, war veterans usually carry their trauma for too
long. In the Netherlands, debates on the painful decolonization
of Indonesia have gone for years as former colonial soldiers
denied any war crimes; traumatic as they are, they still refuse
to recognize Aug. 17 as Indonesia's Independence Day and to
welcome J."Poncke" Princen, a former Dutch soldier who turned
into Indonesia's independence hero.

Many American Vietnam war veterans went through social dramas,
inspiring Hollywood Rambo films.

Problems of post-war trauma can be resolved through lobbies
and political parties -- not by revenge on humanitarian workers.

As East Timor has never been part of Indonesian nationalism
and is now free, the Indonesian Army needs to free itself from
its decolonization crisis, which apparently has gone beyond
control.

Hence, the Atambua tragedy may not be the last. It highlights
the necessity for an international tribunal to prosecute those
guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in East Timor
back to 1975.

The writer is a journalist, based in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands.