East Timor's wounded psyche told

East Timor's wounded psyche told

Guns and ballot boxes; East Timor's vote for independence;
Edited by Damien Kingsbury; Monash Asia Institute 2000;
Paperback 201 pages.

MELBOURNE (JP): For an Indonesian, even one who is conscious
of the nation's faults and shortcomings, Damien Kingsbury's Guns
and ballot boxes is not an easy book to read. It is emotionally
wearing, to say the least.

You keep hoping that what you are reading is not true, and
that if you turn another page it will tell you just that, but you
know very well there will be no such let up. So you keep reading
until the disbelief, frustration and anger are so all-consuming
that you have to stop and throw the book down. And throw it down
hard. And the next day you pick it up again, still hoping for a
glimmer of relief.

Not surprisingly, the chapters that stand out as courageously
hopeful are those written by Xanana Gusmao and Bishop Carlos
Belo, two East Timorese leaders with the unenviable task of
cleaning up the awful mess and rebuilding the nation from
scratch.

The book focuses on the events and issues surrounding the East
Timor poll of Aug. 30, last year, the subsequent results of which
were that 78.5 percent of East Timorese voters chose independence
from Indonesia.

Six chapters of the book are first-hand accounts of people who
were in East Timor during voter registration, the poll itself,
vote counting, and the violence and atrocities that devastated
the territory afterwards. These are given a wider context by
other contributors, who place the East Timor tragedy in a global
picture.

Reading the accounts of Anthony Smith, Helene van Klinken,
Peter Bartu, Hidajat Djajamihardja, Annemarie Devereux and Damien
Kingsbury, even with an eye ever vigilant to detect any bias on
the part of the writers, it is difficult to avoid accepting the
facts.

Individually and collectively, the accounts reveal that
Indonesia did not fulfill its obligations as specified in the
tripartite agreement signed on May 5, 1999, in New York. In the
agreement, the Indonesian police guarantee security for both the
pro-integrationists as well as the pro-independence groups. Yet
various eye-witnesses told the increasingly and alarmingly
familiar story of the police standing by while the pro-
integrationist militia bullied, terrorized even murdered those
suspected or known to be pro-independence.

It would be easy to dismiss the writers' reports as anti-
Indonesian bias. However, doing so leads to one of the baser
moral crimes of denying other people's sufferings to avoid one's
own responsibility for those sufferings. It is not only an insult
to those who suffer, but also a blow to one's own integrity.

One of the best and most sobering chapters was written by
Hidajat Djajamihardja, a senior Radio Australia journalist, who
went to East Timor to cover events surrounding the poll. Hidajat
not only relates his experiences, on more than one occasion being
heavily persuaded by military authorities not to put them in a
bad light, even physically assaulted, but also provides a
comprehensive overview of the media in Indonesia during the New
Order era.

In doing so, Hidajat modestly conveys the message that he was
not carrying out a particularly heroic act in the context of what
Indonesian journalists have for decades had to go through in
their day-to-day work.

For that reason the fact that nothing has been written about
the Indonesian journalists who were terrorized, even shot at,
while covering the same events, is a yawning and to a certain
extent hurtful gap.

If, in this era of germinating democracy, there is also a
reawakening of nationalism, it is only natural. However, to
achieve mature nationalism, the fervor does not necessarily have
to be accompanied by a denial of the more unflattering parts of
history.

Guns and ballot boxes after all, tells of only one corner of
Indonesia's wounded psyche. Now for the healing.

-- Dewi Anggraeni