Sitting on a hillock outside a Polling Center, Ainaro
East Timor. How did I end up here? The story as I tell it is this: I’d first heard, even just heard, of the country when I was a freshman or sophomore at don’the University of the Philippines. APCET (Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition for East Timor, methinks) had invited Ramos-Horta to speak on campus and then president Fidel Ramos barred him from entering the country. In some circles, particularly in UP—which holds academic freedom above all (or mostly) else, there was a furor, and I was dimly, dimly aware of it. I really don’t know how the incident seeped into my consciousness, but my mind retains an image of Ramos-Horta’s face on a poster about the event. That was in ’93 or ’94. Probably a consequence of international attention on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.
santa cruz cemetary
in 1991, to protest the killing of sebastiao gomes, a student activist, hundreds of timorese in dili walked in a procession to the santa cruz cemetary, where indonesian troops trapped the protesters and killed a reported 271 people with hundreds of others injured, hospitalized and 'disappeared'.
In September ’99, I had just moved to Singapore. On the daily commute to hang out with Junior at the Yacht Club, I’d read the Straits Times—its coverage of Southeast Asia especially. Somehow, I followed the developments in the news as the 1999 referendum for independence in East Timor unfolded. I’d complain to Junior: why hasn’t the UN intervened? Then, why have only the Australians sent troops? Et cetera.
In April 2000, I was thrilled to discover the Singapore International Film Fest. My graduate studies and scholarship hadn’t yet started yet, and Junior and I was still living very simply on his salary. I was surviving on a contract for some technical writing (a procedures manual) from the Yacht Club. But I allowed myself this one luxury: to watch as many films as I could in the week and a half of the film fest. One of which was Punitive Damages.
Punitive Damages is a documentary about a young Malaysian student activist named Kamal Bamadhaj. It’s about the underground student movement in East Timor that developed in the 1990s. It’s about the human rights groups and NGOs in Australia and elsewhere that supported this movement. It’s about Kamal, killed among the Timorese massacred in the Santa Cruz cemetary by the Indonesian military. And the case lodged by his family in American courts that indicted the culpable parties, though none have been brought to justice.
At the screening, they sold copies of a book of Kamal’s journal and essays and analyses by his sister, Nadja, of the political context of Kamal’s life and death: the Suharto regime, the occupation of East Timor, and military oppression in other places such as Aceh and Irian Jaya. I read the book avidly and finished it fairly quickly, poring over it through silent evenings in the little bedroom that was home then.
christo rei or christ the king, a massive statue overlooking built in dili by, oddly enough, the indonesians
In Kyaw’s class on social movement theory, I decided to write my course paper on East Timor. I read books and books on the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor and on Fretilin especially. John Taylor, Helen Hill (who I met in Dili, completely randomly, last Thursday!), Noam Chomsky, Matthew Jardine, Constancio Pinto, Ramos-Horta, Joao Saldanha—through these authors, I tried to understand what had happened in East Timor. Pinto, an underground movement student leader who fled to the US, is now ambassador to the US. Saldanha is the lead candidate and president of the Partido Republikan. I attended their campaign rally at Kampo Demokrasya.
So I’ve got this paper. I presented a version at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2005 in Shanghai and Kasarinlan Journal of Third World Studies is interested in publishing it.
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