The following is the first of two articles examining the death tolls in East Timor in the 1970's.
By Dino Patti Djalal
LONDON (JP): There is little doubt that human casualties during the turbulence in East Timor in the mid-1970's were considerable. Those were violent times.
However, discussions on the casualties have been generally within the context of propaganda. This is unfortunate, because the subject, sensitive as it may be, is important and deserves objective scrutiny.
Not surprisingly, casualties have been focused on by Fretilin activists in exile and non-Timorese elements critical of integration.
From time to time since 1976, rumors of "200,000 deaths" or worse, "genocide" have won some ears, but by and large these theories never gained currency.
Of late, however, John Pilger's film Death of a Nation, which has been shown in Britain and Australia and may reach millions more in other countries, has attempted to revive and reinterpret the subject of deaths in Timor in a more reckless fashion than before.
Having seen the film in London, my impression was that Pilger was so busy looking for conspiracy and fabricating controversies that he not only left many stones unturned but also went far beyond typical tabloid journalism, outdoing even the most sensational Fretilin propaganda.
To get a fair estimate of the death toll, one would need an extensive account of the deaths in various zones of conflict throughout East Timor at different points in time, which seems beyond the resources of all involved, as even Fretilin can not account for losses within its own ranks, let alone the civilian population.
The fuss over the issue originated in 1977 in the person of James Dunn. A former Australian consul in Dili in the 1960's, Dunn had clear sympathy with Fretilin.
He visited a Fretilin controlled Dili in October 1975 and had established an active working relationship with them.
Dunn claimed that he had interviewed Timorese refugees in Portugal and that they mentioned that 50,000 to 100,000 people had perished, but it was never established how they came up with this figure.
In fact, many things rendered the credibility of this claim highly at risk: the names of his sources were blacked out (which made verification impossible); they were vulnerable to shady promises of migration to Australia; and, somewhat embarrassingly to Dunn, it was found out later from the Indonesian Red Cross that these refugees had left East Timor well before the pro- integration offensive in late 1975.
The refugees never saw 50,000-100,000 people dead; if anything, they were simply struck by the sight of deserted villages in places they visited and on this basis asserted that tens of thousands had perished.
Whatever the case, months later following a Presidential amnesty on Aug. 16, 1977, tens of thousands of Timorese came down from the mountains: some 53,000 through Sep. 1978, 80,000 more in late 1978, and another wave of 40,000 in early 1979, bringing the total to 173,000.
Hence, by the end of 1979 the testimony of the refugees could no longer be used as the basis to assess human casualties. The exodus effectively answered what had happened to the "perished" villages. Would Dunn be willing to reveal the names of his 1977 sources and have them cross-examined by credible authorities?
In a recent article published in the UK, Pilger referred to Dunn's report as an "Australian parliamentary study." James Dunn was never an MP; he worked for the parliament's library. His trip to Portugal was neither commissioned nor funded by Parliament; it was sponsored by left-wing organizations in Australia such as AFCAO and Australia State University.
In 1980, the government published a census which showed that the East Timorese population had declined since the pre-war years.
The 1980 census recorded 555,350 East Timorese, about 69,000 less than the 1973 census figure of 624,594. If the growth rate of 1.6 percent held up to 1975 then the population would have been 645,000.
In reality, it is quite difficult to determine the precise extent to which the population declined: whereas the 1980 Indonesian census was the first census ever conducted by way of head count (by handing out identity cards), the Portuguese relied strictly on second-hand information from Timorese liurais (tribal kings) which were never verified.
Portugal's indirect census yielded room for exaggeration because some liurais, eager to project size and clout, were believed to inflate the number of tribesman.
Apart from this, the 1980 census did not account for the remaining Fretilins in East Timor's jungles, which narrowed the population even further.
Thus, the Indonesian government does have a case in asserting that "the true difference will never be known". But whatever the decline, it is certainly not an automatic indication of war- deaths.
Other factors explain why fewer people lived in East Timor by 1980: the post-1975 migration of thousands of East Timorese to places outside Indonesia, mainly Portugal and Australia (there are now 15-20,000 Timorese living outside Indonesia); the unspecified number of Timorese who had gone to other parts of Indonesia, either to study, to find work or for other reasons; and those who died of natural causes or criminals acts.