Empire of the East (19 page)

The low, breezeblock administration building of the orphanage was located in the centre of the town, and Sister Paola took us there and found us a room. A number of young Timorese girls were in the first stages of their midday meal when we arrived, and it came as a surprise that the nuns should have raised no objection to Portuguese songs sung between mouthfuls of pasta. These aspirants were almost painfully polite. One was detailed to bring us soft drinks, and having bowed to us on serving them she turned round to bow for a second time before leaving the room.

A Sister Marlene from the Philippines showed us the town and the orphanage. Much of Venilale was now open space. There was a brand-new church at the end of the town, and clustered nearby a group of original buildings in damaged condition. Principal among these was what appeared at a distance as a Roman ruin, but proved to be the Portuguese school, built in 1905 in classic style. This, imposingly sited on high ground, and reached by a monumental staircase, managed despite bomb damage to retain considerable dignity, and fostered a certain theatricality in its vicinity by people’s habit of placing themselves on the steps in gloomy contemplation of their surroundings. At the moment of our arrival one elderly man was standing alone, one arm thrown across his left breast, lips moving soundlessly, and staring out over the valley. At our approach he bowed and I bowed in return. Behind us, a few steps further down, a boy, also alone, plucked desultory chords on his guitar.

The orphans were housed a few yards away in a species of barracks built on the edge of a steep drop into the valley. There were two hundred of them, boys and girls in separate dormitories with bunk beds, the youngest a boy of two, and the oldest boys and girls of twelve. They were looked after by four Tetum women, said the sister, and many suffered from both tuberculosis and malaria, the tuberculosis patients being served their food on green plates.

We asked Sister Marlene if the large number of children in each woman’s charge caused problems, to which she replied that the children gave no trouble at all. ‘The children of the truly poor are very disciplined,’ she said, adding to this the remarkable information that such is the sensitivity of a young child that even before the age of speech a baby brought up by a mother who has escaped to the forest senses the presence of danger and can be relied upon to emit not the slightest sound. Sister Marlene told us that they often managed to keep mothers with their very young children for a while, or it could be arranged for them to come on visits. She found it sad that in cases where a child had been brought into the orphanage, and the mother had given herself up, or perhaps been released from prison years later, the child could no longer understand the mother’s (Tetum) language.

It was clear that whatever their feelings might have been for each other, a degree of collaboration existed between the military authorities and the Catholic Church in the matter of the orphanage, which, had it been seen as a disadvantage to the former, would have been instantly closed down. The fact is that the Indonesians saw all five religions acceptable to the state philosophy as potential allies in the struggle for stability. The two hundred children thus placed under protection constituted only a drop in the oceanic misery of the tens of thousands left largely to fend for themselves. But for the Catholics it was a step in the right direction, and there was propaganda in it for both sides.

Alongside their children the orphanage gave shelter to two celebrities, whom the mothers clustered at the doorway of the girls’ dormitory scurried away to fetch. The first to appear was Justina, wife of Xanana Gusmao, the Fretilin Resistance Commander who still held on in the mountains at the head of a force now reduced from an estimated ten thousand to a thousand or two elusive guerrillas. Despite the years of violence, illness and fear, Justina, now in her late twenties, retained the kind of beauty that transcends racial differences. Even wrapped in a dingy dressing-gown she stood apart. She greeted us in incomprehensible Tetum and with a lively smile. Through our interpreter we asked after her health, and she said that she had been sick but was now better.

Most of the women who had taken refuge with their menfolk in the forest eventually contracted tuberculosis, and when Justina was found to be suffering from this, Xanana persuaded her to return to occupied territory with their child in the hope of finding medical treatment. At that time their sector was encircled by troops, and she was shot and hauled off to prison, where she gave birth to a child by her gaoler before her release. Now, by some arrangement the orphanage had been able to negotiate with the military, she was here with Xanana’s three-year-old, and the gaoler’s offspring — still a baby in arms.

Fashion and fad, in their way, have touched even such far-off places as this, with a craze for the adoption of Western first names. The isles of Indonesia were full of Victors and Henrys, and it was no surprise to find that Justina’s friend, whom we next met, was Selina, another pretty young girl with a child. Part of the military’s policy seemed to be to try by hook or by crook to deprive the resistance fighters of the solace of their womenfolk, while leaving them encumbered with children who decreased their mobility. When a Fretilin unit was reported in an area it was normal for it to be attacked from the air with bombing round the clock. At the end of this softening-up a pause might be called in the attack to allow women wishing to do so to surrender. In this instance Selina found herself involved in a subterranean deal in which forty mothers would be allowed to ‘come out’, bringing with them one child apiece. By accident or design this plan fell apart, and Selina alone finally appeared, bringing with her fifteen children. The first reaction of the waiting commander was to shoot the lot — in the context of this war a by no means extraordinary reaction — but for once a more discerning view prevailed, and there was no slaughter of innocents. The girl was ‘abused’ and imprisoned, but when seen to be in an advanced state of tuberculosis, released with her child into the care of the orphanage.

The orphanage kitchen was a cavern under the school ruin. Skeins of blue smoke clung to the brickwork among filaments of soot from the ceiling, and such was the visibility that it was hard to make out through the mist the details of the damage suffered by the further wall. Two Timorese cooks were at work in a scene from
Macbeth,
the first using a pole to stir the soup in a vast pot suspended over an open fire, the second brushing the crumbs of earth from some root vegetables before tossing them in the pot. The fire’s reflection had coated both women’s deeply lined faces in yellow sweat. They were barefoot with distorted crippled toes, and dressed in rusty black jerkins and sarongs. Bundles of vegetables waiting to go in the pot lay scattered among the assorted debris on the earthen floor. At the moment of our arrival two women woodcutters were hacking branches from this to be exchanged for soup.

‘When I came here and saw this for the first time,’ Sister Marlene said, ‘I felt a moment of dismay. I was on the point of tears. Surely we can do better than this, I thought. We offered to clean the place out, put in some shelving where food could be kept, and fit them up with a decent stove. They wouldn’t hear of it. It all had to be left just as it was. They had a ceremony years ago when they started the kitchen, so everything was taboo. What they call leluc. If we change anything round without asking, the cooks will walk out on us. And we have to remember that they are very good cooks.’

‘So they’ll go on keeping the vegetables on the floor.’

‘Maybe they’ll come to us of their own accord one day and ask for the place to be tidied up, but I can’t really see it happening.’

The sister had to be back for vespers and we parted company at the top of the main, and only, street. By this time the evening
passeio
had started, with lone promenaders and small groups — well-spaced and keeping their distance — on their formal but leisurely way to the far end of the town and back, a matter of three-quarters of a mile, taking forty minutes to complete. This staid procession was disrupted in places by the invasion of numerous children, and some of these, spotting my daughter with her blonde hair and travel-stained dress, surrounded us with wonder and delight and then followed us in droves. A very thin, tall man, with sweeping white moustaches, spats and cane approached, hand outstretched. It was clear by now that a smattering of Portuguese was the key to acceptance in Venilale. Apologizing, I did my best with what I had, and bowing, he replied in English, ‘It is enough, sir, that you do me the honour to address me in my own language.’

Everyone exchanged bows during the ceremony of the
passeio,
and although most of the citizens I had observed had emerged from small, recently built houses of a standardized design, certain airs and graces had not been wholly dispensed with by those who had known better times. Some bows, starting at the waist, were ingratiating and profound; others little more than a slight inclination of the head. Of old the
passeio
had served as a marriage market, with the eligible bachelors of the town lining up to follow hard on the heels of the ranks of giggling girls. Now the regulars were old: three elderly ladies dressed gauzily in what might have been re-made curtains, a man entitled
Primeiro Cavalheiro
who had enjoyed the right to be paid a half escudo for every horse shod in town, the
Capitao das Festas,
in charge of Venilale’s once frequent celebrations, an eccentric old convert to the Tetum religion who carried a splendidly plumed cockerel, cradled like a child in his arms.

At the far end of the walk in the old days a café once existed called in Portuguese ‘The Elegant Tea’, where they served nothing but coffee, brandy and wine and played records of
fados
imported from Lisbon. In those days four guitarists accompanied the
passeio,
and there was still one — the boy we had seen on the school steps — who was described as temperamental, but came along when he felt in the mood.

A
FTER THE INITIAL ATTACK
, and the almost unopposed occupation of Díli and the villages in its vicinity, the invasion’s impetus had shown signs of flagging. Apart from the elite Green Berets and paratroopers, the invasion force was poorly trained and lacking in combat experience. Infantry battalions had been largely recruited from peasantry of the flatlands of Java, many of whom had never seen a mountain before and had to be guided like crocodiles of schoolchildren through the dense tropical forest. In these unfamiliar surroundings there were numerous unexpected casualties through ‘friendly fire’, and it was to be expected that sometimes paratroop drops would be made in the wrong place or on the heads of their own floot-slogging infantry.

Resistance to the occupation was in the hands of the Fretilin (Frente Revolucionaria de Timor L’Este), the leading political party at the time of the invasion, which withdrew with its small hastily put together army to the mountains of the North. Here it was handicapped by the large number of civilians it had to take under its wing, and by the absence of air-cover.

At this time a talk of stalemate began to be heard. The situation was remedied after the Indonesians’ successful approach to the British and US governments for the supply of specialized counterinsurgency aircraft, notably the British Aerospace Hawk, described in a press-release as ‘ideally suited for use against ground forces in difficult terrain’. Up to this point Fretilin strategy had been based upon its control of the country’s mountain areas. From this time on the army could stand back and wait for saturation bombing of the mountains, in which a large part of the population had taken refuge, to do its work. Venilale, and all other small towns tucked away inaccessibly in their highland redoubts, now found themselves in the front line of combat. Venilale was badly placed in an area dotted with prime targets for the planes. It was built on the shoulder of a hillside overlooking a wide plain backed by a huge volcanic shape, similar to that of Vesuvius although perhaps twice its size. This magnificent, awe-inspiring and solitary mountain, clothed in dense forests and riven with clefts and gorges, is Matebian — in Tetum, Soul Mountain — a place of sanctuary since pre-history, and still revered by a largely animist population. Here history, reshaped as folklore, recalled the facts of conquest and enslavement by which a tradition had been established. In times of trouble villagers over an area widespread in all directions from the sheltering skirts of the mountain left their homes to take refuge there — in the belief that in the sandalwood forests they were invisible to their pursuers. There they were prepared to live for months, even years, upon the berries, the edible roots and leaves, the grubs and insects which the Soul Mountain provided in abundance.

Reports of killings in Díli and in the western towns had left their neighbours to the east aghast, and now, with the news that under cover of the planes the invaders were on the way, the traditional stampede to Matebian and the Bibileu Mountain, a few miles to the south, began. Thus Venilale, Baucau, Lospalos and many mountain villages were virtually emptied. It was an abandonment viewed by the Indonesian military as a hostile act, and deserted villages went up in flames. At Matebian the first of a series of encirclements was put into practice, with a large number of civilians, including children, forced to march ahead of the troops closing in on the mountain. Meanwhile, in two months of 1978, seven hundred to eight hundred bombs a day were dropped by planes round the clock. For the most part those captured in such round-ups received short shrift.

On 23rd November 1978, about 500 people who had assembled at the foot of the mountain in the belief that they were surrendering were executed by Indonesian soldiers. Shortly afterwards, in Taipo, 300 people were killed in a similar way; elderly people were burnt alive in their houses, women and men tied together and shot, and children executed in front of their parents … 118 people killed on the southern slopes of Mount Matebian between 15 and 17 April.