Timor Leste's past: Let it be or bare it all?

Timor Leste's past: Let it be or bare it all?

John McBeth
The Straits Times
Asia News Network/Singapore

It was five years ago. Sitting at the kitchen table in a
small, nondescript house on Dili's sun-baked foreshore, the soon-
to-be president of Timor Leste was talking about the future.

"If you really want peace, if you really want stability, you
have to put everything behind you," said Xanana Gusmao, who led
the leftist Revolutionary Front of Independent Timor-Leste
(Fretilin) resistance forces against Indonesian rule. "If not you
will live under a trauma, the ghosts of the past. You can't see
the future."

Gusmao has known the pain of repression more than most. But in
the face of criticism from human rights groups and thousands of
his brutalized countrymen, he has stuck stubbornly to that creed
of reconciliation.

That is why he has been reluctant so far to release the 2,500-
page report of Timor Leste's independent Reception, Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (CAVR) on crimes against humanity
committed by all sides during Indonesia's 24-year occupation of
then-East Timor.

Contrast that with CAVR chairman Aniceto Guterres Lopes, the
quietly-spoken son of a former right-wing Timorese Democratic
Union (UDT) member, whose forewarned family had moved safely
across the border into West Timor at the time of the 1975
Indonesian invasion.

Lopes, who earned his law degree at Bali's Udayana University,
said that while he did not lose any family members to violence
during those 24 years and was never physically abused himself, he
still considered himself a "victim of the right to self-
determination".

Still, it seems ironic somehow that while Gusmao the guerrilla
fighter wants to bury the past and make up with his former enemy,
the 38-year-old lawyer is intent on keeping faith with history
and with those who suffered at the hands of the Indonesian
military.

"The report was not made just for the current government or
parliament," he said in a recent interview with The Straits Times
in Jakarta, where he was attending a meeting of the Indonesia-
Timor Leste Truth and Friendship Commission (TFC). "The report
and everything in it was made to guarantee our future."

The TFC is struggling to make itself relevant in the face of
widespread skepticism that it is merely there to whitewash the
past.

"There's no binding clause that requires the government to
implement the recommendations," he said, referring to provisions
which call for everything from the extradition of Indonesian
military officers to further international sanctions if justice
is not served.

"It depends a lot on the way politics evolves. The important
thing is to have the political will, otherwise the
recommendations will remain nothing more than that -- just
recommendations," he pointed out.

Indeed, Lopes appears to be as frustrated as anyone that
Gusmao continues to sit on the fruits of the commission's three
years of work which, together with two roomfuls of supporting
documents, is destined to become the country's historic record of
a period most East Timorese are trying to forget, if not forgive.
Lopes is also dismissive of the president's public criticism of
the report and its recommendations as being excessively
idealistic.

"If the president thinks the report is idealistic or not
realistic or beyond the government's capability to implement,
then that is a political problem," said Lopes, a native of the
border district of Bobonaro, where the Indonesian troops had made
their initial thrust.

"But it is not impossible that the government following the
next elections will decide to implement the recommendations. We
did our job, we produced the report and we made those
recommendations in our capacity as commissioners.

"We did not produce the report because of political
motivations or in response to political dynamics. It was
important that we had to think about how to manage the
expectations of all concerned, in particular the victims. We
didn't do this to please some people, but to keep faith with the
mandate that was given to us. If some people find the
recommendations too idealistic and impossible to implement, then
perhaps they should just accept them first and then explain why
they can't be implemented."

By all accounts, the task of questioning Timorese and taking
statements about their harrowing experiences has been a cathartic
experience. I was given an insight into all this by the CAVR's
legal adviser, Australian barrister Pat Burgess, when he gave me
a guided tour last year of the same prison on the outskirts of
Dili where political prisoners had been detained.

Much of what he told me then of their mistreatment is there in
the report, though his job was mainly to help bring about
reconciliation among the Timorese.

The experiences under the harsh Indonesian regime were still
fresh in many minds. But so too was the bitterness over the civil
war which erupted between Fretilin and the UDT before the
Indonesian invasion, tinged this time with guilt that went far
beyond the senseless loss of 3,000 lives.

It was that conflict which gave the Indonesians the gilt-edged
invitation to invade and prevent a supposedly nascent communist
regime from taking root in the heart of a region already
transformed by dramatic events in Indochina.

Burgess, who formerly headed the United Nations Transitional
Authority in East Timor's (Untaet) human rights unit, talked of
the tears that flowed at village reconciliation sessions as
people unburdened themselves of things they had not talked about
in 25 years.

Lopes and his panel were not immune to the same emotions. He
said that when the 36 commissioners got down to reading some of
the more stark chapters in the final draft of their report, "we
were all so traumatized that the meeting had to be adjourned
temporarily because we were all crying".

It was the same with the CAVR's 500-strong staff. "Perhaps
this can help explain the debate over the report's idealism,"
said Lopes, speaking in Indonesian.

"This doesn't mean the commissioners cannot be impartial. It
just means they have feelings. But conscience is not the only
consideration, there are other factors too, including political
realities. So it is naive for people to think of us as
unrealistic or inconsiderate of the national interest.

"The commission's two major objectives were the search for the
truth and the effort at reconciliation. In the process of
bringing families together, we obtained information from them.
From that data, we crosschecked and analyzed to produce a
conclusion. I don't think there is any binding clause that
requires the government to implement the recommendations. It
depends a lot on the evolving politics."

Lopes added that it is difficult to gauge the degree of
bitterness that the Timorese still feel towards the Indonesian
military. "The year 1999 and this year are quite different," he
noted. "Likewise the events of the past."

Gusmao, now the elder statesman, appears willing to let all
that go in the interests of securing the country's future. But
for Lopes, it is simply a matter of listening to the voices.

"We had a mechanism in which everyone we interviewed was given
the opportunity to convey their expectations -- and that is why
we felt the need to make the recommendations we did."