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.