The following is the second of two articles examining death tolls of 1970's East Timor war.

By Dino Patti Djalal

LONDON (JP): As an observer, I do not pretend to know the numbers involved in war casualties. I am more concerned, however, about determining who is actually to blame for the deaths.

This is important because some anti-integration activist tend to cite numbers of war deaths and liberally point the finger to pro-integration forces. This is not possible in a situation where guns were pointed in both directions.

War-related deaths which occurred in East Timor in the mid 1970's resulted from violence in and out of combat. We know that the combat fatalities happened during the Fretilin offensive, during the movement towards integration.

However, there is no objective reason to blame pro-integration forces for all these deaths. During the latter half of 1975, it was the Fretilins who had overwhelming firepower in what was essentially a one-sided civil war, having armed themselves with 27,000 weapons left behind by Tropas, with an estimated 50-100 bullets each.

It was the Fretilins who decisively outgunned their foes, inflicting deaths and destruction in an almost unrivaled way.

In fact, if one were to break down the 1980 census regionally, some of the most significant population dip occurred precisely in areas where the Fretilins were documented to have committed mass killings or areas controlled by them.

Just to cite a few examples: in Ailieu, the population was cut down from 39,986 (1974) to 16,990 (1979); during the same time, Suai's population declined from 42,119 to 30,039; in Manufahi, the decline was from 39,000 to 30,000.

The non-combat deaths relate to disease and malnutrition or starvation. During the war, malaria, dysentry and tuberculosis had reached endemic proportion, a combined result of massive dislocation of Timorese into jungle and swamp areas on the one hand, and the near absence of medical care, on the other.

Disease spread like wildfire among the nomadic bands where everything--including food and living space--was shared. Concomitantly, food crops became severely limited: in what was already subsistence agriculture, farms were left behind, harvests were missed, and barely anything edible was found in the jungle.

Disease and starvation, of course, does not choose sides politically, nor can it be blamed on any one group. In fact, even before the turbulence began, the Portuguese had warned as early as 1974 that there were signs of hunger in the area.

The scale of disease and starvation related deaths is not known, and in fact have not received much attention -- perhaps because they are not seen by anti-integration activists as dramatic enough.

However, many East Timorese would vouch for the fact that in certain zones of conflict the number of those who died from disease/starvation were greater than from bullet wounds.

Arsenio Horta, the brother of Ramos Horta who was detained by Fretilin leaders and traveled with them during the war, testified that "some 20,000 had died of starvation in Fretilin controlled areas." Although there is no way to confirm this, his comment does reveal that the scale of the problem was quite serious.

It is instructive to note that the thousands of Timorese who came down from the mountains in 1978-79 generally suffered from severe cases of malnutrition and deadly disease. In many instances, international relief workers recorded malaria as the main cause of death among them.

Additionally, many East Timorese would also verify that after the fall of Dili, there were vendetta-related deaths committed by East Timorese whose family, relatives or friends were murdered by the Fretilins.

Every man and woman murdered by the Fretilins left behind vengeful sons. It is impossible to determine its scale, but this type of deaths ought to be figured in war-death assessment, especially considering the culture of violence and the culture of vengeance was still quite strong in East Timor's society at that time.

By illustrating the effects of vengeance above, I don't seek to deny that there were casualties resulting from the pro- integration offensive and certain military clashes subsequent to integration.

However, it is clear, that the number constitutes a far smaller share of the whole population dip between 1975-1980 than what the anti-integrationists would claim -- more so if one considers the considerable losses also suffered by the pro- integration forces.

The Indonesian government maintains in ball-park terms that "war-related deaths numbered around 5,000 with another 25,000 victims of malnutrition".

Recently, there was yet another charge of "genocide". In the documentary Death of a Nation, John Pilger asserted that "at least one-third" of East Timor's population had been killed, and he even went so far as claiming that this was "proportionally worse than what Pol pot had done in Cambodia".

It is not hard to find from whom Pilger took his cue: James Dunn.

In Pilger's film, Dunn commented that prior to the civil war, "East Timor had a population of 698,000 and it was just growing at 2 percent per annum. That means that today East Timor ought to be 980,000 or more, close to a million, assuming it did not grow any faster.

The Timorese population, if you look at the recent Indonesian census, is at the most 650,000. It is incredible. It is worse than Cambodia."

It appears that two decades later, Dunn still could not resist the temptation of playing a clever number trick. By placing the pre-war figure at 698,000 Dunn was contradicting and inflating his previous figure of 650,000 (in his own article on East Timor written in 1978).

By placing the present population at "650,000 at best", Dunn is excessively deflating the 1992 population figure of over 755,000 in East Timor.

In any case, Dunn's calculation, which was the sole basis of Pilger's allegation, suffered from erroneous methodology.

Dunn was speaking as if there had ever been one million people in East Timor and that this then declined to 650,000, whereas it is perfectly clear that East Timor's population never had a chance to grow to one million people at any point in time.

One million was simply the projected figure for uninterrupted population growth in East Timor over 18 years, based on 1975 population figure. But we know that the turbulence in the mid 1970's significantly dented this projection to the extent that, for reasons explained above, by 1980 there were only 555.000 Timorese in the province.

Hence, by 1980 it became plainly clear that it was no longer possible for East Timor's population to multiply to one million today. To reach one million in 1993, the population would have to grow by 80 percent since 1980, or an annual average of 6.6 percent.

We know this is not possible under any circumstances.

It would only make sense, therefore, to compare the present population figure with the known, actual 1980 figure, as opposed to comparing it with the absolute projection of one million. One would then find that East Timor's population, far from declining, has actually grown 35 percent between 1980-1992, or an average of about three percent annually.

Even if one were to discount the small number of non-Timorese migrants (around several thousands) in the province, one would still find that indigenous growth was significantly larger compared with the pre-war growth of 1.6 percent.

If "genocide" has no factual basis, why do some persist in saying it?

The fact that few circles are listening is a measure of the active work of the anti-integration network abroad. Their strategy is based on a simple public relations textbook basics: if you spread a message by as many sympathizers as possible and have it repeated over and over again, someone out there will hear you, and a few will even believe it.

Whereas Indonesia's East Timor diplomacy concentrated on government-to-government channels and important multilateral forum such as the UNGA, the anti-integration network is being actively supported by the media and NGOs which have much greater "broadcasting power."

Today, some of these NGOs have become important players in the international scene.

There is also an answer why the term "genocide" was deliberately picked out. By the late 1970's, the world had become quite sensitized to the genocidal practice of Pol Pot in Cambodia, and much of the verdict against Pol Pot rested on such notoriety.

The Fretilins had hoped to catch this same wind. By that time, the Fretilin were in desperation for political and diplomatic support: votes in the UN had dwindled, Fretilin's military activity in East Timor was defeated when Nicolau Lobato was shot in a government raid, and the integration process was fast consolidating itself.

Against this background, the term "genocide" was invented as no more a rhetorical bait than the rumor of "concentration camps" in East Timor, which turned out completely wrong.

Several conclusion can be drawn from the above. First, because war casualties tend to be spoken up by anti-integration elements, the subject matter has been excessively used as part of public relations offensive, at the expense of an objective and fairly reasonable estimates of human losses.

Not surprisingly, exaggerated versions of war casualties in East Timor have come exclusively from dubious sources, using erroneous methods of comparing population counts. In fact, it is quite remarkable that the figure of James Dunn, a well-known sympathizers of the Fretilins, has come up again and again in this "debate".

Secondly, judging from census results, it appears that certifiable human losses did occur between 1975-1980, though not necessarily throughout this period. However, rising population records subsequent to 1980 indicate the absence of extraordinary deaths.

Within the 1975-1980 population dip, only a portion can be regarded as war-related deaths, and from this a smaller segment as combat-related deaths, and from this even a smaller share attributable to the pro-integration forces.

The writer is an Indonesian political scientist currently residing in London, UK

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