East Timor: The story of a freedom fighter

May 12, 1993
Issue 

CONSTANCIO PINTO, exiled former executive secretary for the National Council of Maubere Resistance, headed a delegation of East Timorese youth which toured North America in April. They spoke to some 30 missions at the United Nations, lobbied members of the United States Congress and spoke to campuses across the country. The following is the personal story that Constancio Pinto told during the tour. It has been abridged for length.

I was 12 years old when the Indonesian military invaded my country. I fled to the mountains with my family and for three years hid in the jungle. We had little food, no medicine and no weapons to defend ourselves with, but we were not alone. Thousands of East Timorese families had fled into the mountains like us to escape the terror of the invasion; others fled to Australia or Portugal as refugees.

During those years in the mountains, people were dying all around me. Many were killed by the Indonesian military; others died more slowly through starvation or disease.

When I was 15 years old I went to the front line as a guerilla fighter. At the time, the Indonesians controlled all the food-producing areas and the people were starving in the mountains. We were fighting to protect and feed them — as well as for our right to self-determination. I fought the Indonesians for eight months, then I trained as a nurse.

In September 1978, the Indonesian army arrested me and my family in Remxio village south of Dili. Again I watched my people die every day. Many of the people I knew were interrogated, tortured — and then they disappeared.

After our arrest, we were forced to learn the Indonesian language and sing the Indonesian national anthem. For two months I studied this new language and then, to survive, I worked for a police commander as a tenga bantuan operasi, which is like a carrier or very lowly servant.

In December 1978 I returned to Dili with my parents. Somehow we and the other families who survived the terror in the mountains had to reconstruct our lives again. My father and I worked as labourers to take care of our extended family. In January 1979 I was at last able to continue my education at Externasto de St Jose, a Portuguese school run by Father Leao da Costa, the only Portuguese school still operating in Dili. But it too was closed by the Indonesian army after the massacre of November 12, 1991.

I finished school in 1988 and became a teacher of religion at this school. This was my cover for work in the resistance. I sent food and medicine to the fighters still in the mountains and kept them informed about what was happening in Dili and the other towns and villages occupied by the Indonesian army. I also monitored what was happening abroad.

One of my main tasks was to develop the civilian resistance by uniting all the independent groups resisting the Indonesian occupation. I began this work in 1986 with a small cell of seven people. Our code was 007! The umbrella organisation at the time was known as the Revolutionary Council of National Resistance (CRRN). In 1989, CRRN was transformed into CNRM — the National Council of Maubere Resistance. CNRM is a non-partisan clandestine coalition of all East Timorese nationalist groups, including student organisations, our army Falantil plus the two major parties, Fretilin and UDT.

In 1990 I was elected secretary of the executive committee of the CNRM. My work included meetings with resistance leaders in the jungle and coordinating all clandestine activities in the towns and villages.

In 1991, after the resistance leader Xanana Gusmao had made an offer to participate in UN-sponsored talks without preconditions about the future of East Timor, we invited an Australian lawyer and journalist, Robert Domm, to secretly interview him for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I organised the visit, escorted Domm through the mountains to Xanana's camp site and acted as his translator. After Domm had finished his interview, I talked all night with Xanana, then escorted the Australian back to safety.

Three weeks later, Xanana's camp was surrounded by Indonesian troops. Xanana escaped but the Indonesians took everything he had left there, including a photograph of me and a copy of the taped interview with Robert Domm.

The Indonesians arrested me on the morning of January 25, 1991, my birthday. I told them I would never forget the birthday present they gave me — for, after the police had finished with me at the station, I had blood coming out of my nose, my ears, my eyes and my mouth. My body was swollen all over.

The beating continued from nine o'clock on the morning I was arrested until 10 o'clock at night. They stripped me, and after every question they kicked and punched me all over and jabbed me with their outstretched hands in the abdomen to purposely cause damage to my internal organs. They beat me even while I was bleeding.

They repeatedly threatened to kill me, to throw me into the sea. They called it mandi laut ["bathing in the sea"]. They threatened my family too. They said that if I didn't tell them what I was doing and where Xanana was, they would harm my parents and my wife. They told me I would be responsible for whatever happened to them.

After the beating at the police station, I was transferred to Senopato II prison, where I was interrogated by Captain Edy Suprianto and Lieutenant Colonel Gatot, the head of intelligence in East Timor. That interrogation continued for four days non-stop. The Indonesians worked in shifts and rested — but they forced me to stay awake the whole time. When they finished with me, they threw me in a cell alone. There was no mattress, no blankets, so I slept on the bare cement. It was very cold.

There were 13 other East Timorese political prisoners in that prison while I was there. These people had been detained three months earlier and had all been tortured: with electric shocks, cigarette burns and knife cuts. One, Abilio Sarmento, had a broken jaw, and another political prisoner, David Talofo, was suffering severe mental trauma when I saw him.

One week after my capture, I was released on condition that I present myself to Captain Edy and Colonel Gatot three times a week. Even then, my movements were monitored by Indonesian intelligence. Sometimes they came to my house and continued to interrogate me about the underground organisation and about Xanana. And each time I presented myself to the police station, the Indonesians threatened me and tried to force me into betraying.

Although I didn't know it at the time, Indonesian intelligence had lied to the international media after my capture and boasted that I was a double agent. This was another of their clumsy attempts to undermine the resistance in East Timor.

My capture in 1991 came at a time when the resistance was preparing for the proposed visit to East Timor of a Portuguese parliamentary delegation. We saw the visit of the Portuguese delegation as an opportunity to show the world what was happening in our country — for we knew there would be foreign journalists accompanying the delegation.

The Indonesians were doing everything they could to intimidate the population into submission. On October 29, the Indonesian army ambushed the Motael church in Dili and killed Sebastiao Gomes, a 22-year-old student who had sought sanctuary there. Soldiers surrounded the church, broke into it and shot Sebastiao in the stomach. He bled to death on the steps of the church.

I was to be next. The military knew of my role in the resistance because they had forced some of the detainees to admit, under torture, that I was still their leader. On November 1, Matino Alau, an Indonesian intelligence policeman, held a meeting at his house to plan my recapture and possible execution.

I was informed of this at three o'clock that afternoon on my way home. Instead of going home, I went into hiding. I could not even say goodbye to my wife or my parents, and I have not seen them since that day. To contact them would have been to risk their lives as well as my own.

I heard later that the army had surrounded my house and interrogated my wife and parents, then waited for

my return. At the time, my wife was five months pregnant with our first child. He was born after I left Dili and is now one year old.

To our great disappointment, the Portuguese delegation never arrived. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Pieter Kooijmans (who is now the foreign minister of Holland), did visit Dili, however, and we desperately wanted to show him what we were suffering. On November 10, I met secretly with students and other members of the resistance and together we decided to organise a demonstration in his honour.

We held the demonstration on November 12, a week after Sebastiao's funeral. It is our custom to remember our dead seven days after the funeral by placing flowers on the grave. We call it ai funan midar, which means "sweet flowers".

The mourners not only brought flowers but banners too, which they hid underneath their jackets then unfurled as they marched to the cemetery. Many believed the presence of foreign journalists would protect them from the direct vengeance of the Indonesian military.

Our plan was to demonstrate peacefully. None of the marchers did anything to provoke the Indonesian troops. But as they passed one of the government buildings, the police agents provocateurs began throwing rocks, breaking windows and beating the demonstrators with sticks.

The Indonesian military had prepared an ambush. One, two, maybe five minutes after the marchers had entered the cemetery gates, the military opened fire. I was hiding in a house 500 metres away and could not see what was happening. But I heard the gunshots and screaming. I also saw the Indonesians throw the dead and wounded onto trucks for the drive to the military hospital. There were several trucks.

Two American journalists, Amy Goodman and Alan Nairn, were in Dili at the time of the massacre. When they saw the Indonesians raise their M-16s, they stood between the soldiers and the demonstrators in an attempt to prevent bloodshed. But the soldiers just kept marching into the crowd, firing their guns.

After the killing, the soldiers arrested many of the demonstrators, including some they had injured. Many of these young people have not been seen since.

At noon — about two hours after the shooting — I told one of the mothers who was looking for her son, to go to the hospital to see if he was amongst the wounded. When she arrived, one of the Indonesian soldiers said to her, "Please go to Tasi Tolu and see your son. The grave is still open for you." She was not allowed inside the hospital. Our official death toll was 271.

After the Santa Cruz massacre, my photograph was circulated throughout East Timor and Indonesia on state run television and in the press. I was a hunted man. I remained in my country for a further seven months, sleeping in different houses every night or in the jungle. Any one of the people who gave me shelter could have betrayed me, but no-one did. This is proof of the effectiveness of the resistance in East Timor.

I eventually escaped by car to Kupang in West Timor, and from there travelled to Jakarta, where I remained in hiding for a further five months. I arrived in Lisbon in early November 1992 to continue my work for the East Timorese resistance in exile. I am now CNRM's representative in Portugal.

Not long after I arrived in Lisbon, Xanana was captured in Dili. At that moment many people thought his capture marked the end of the resistance, but the struggle does not depend on just one person; it depends on the determination of the East Timorese people. Xanana's successor, Mau Huno, has now also been arrested — but again he is just one man.

We know that we can never win a military victory against the might of Indonesia; we are but half a million people against 180 million Indonesians. Our victory must be a political one based on international law and justice.

Many of the decisions that will affect our future will be made in Washington and New York. That is why we toured North America — to tell the people of North America about what is happening in our country and to urge them to put pressure on their representatives in

government to resolve the conflict in East Timor, to stop sending military hardware and economic aid to Indonesia until that country recognises our basic human rights, including our right to self-determination.

At the Human Rights Commission in Geneva earlier this year, I witnessed a significant shift in US foreign policy that gave me hope.

On March 11, the US and Canada, plus governments from the European Community, the Nordic states, with Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Costa Rica, co-sponsored a resolution condemning the Indonesian government for its human rights violations in East Timor. The resolution was carried 22 votes in favour and 12 against, with 15 abstentions. This was the first time a resolution on East Timor had been successful at this important UN forum.

One resolution in far-off Geneva does not stop the intimidation and human rights abuses in Dili and other parts of East Timor. Nor does it facilitate a UN-sponsored act of self-determination, especially when there are an estimated 40,000 Indonesian troops still stationed on East Timorese soil as part of Operasi Tuntas (or Operation Once and for All). But the Geneva resolution is a sign of change and something for the international community to build upon.

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