Graphic evidence of East Timor's plight
Review by Jon Land
Human Rights Violations in East Timor, a magazine-style booklet produced by the East Timor International Support Centre, contains photographic evidence of torture and murder by the Indonesian military and security forces in East Timor.
Dating back to the early 1980s, the photos reveal a systematic abuse of human rights calculated to break the resistance of the East Timorese people.
Last April, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jose Ramos Horta, displayed photographs of young East Timorese men being tortured at the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The photos had been taken by Indonesian soldiers who had sold them as "collector's items". Similar photos of young women being abused by soldiers, which were obtained secretively and released last November, resulted in international condemnation of the Indonesian occupation by solidarity and human rights organisations.
Despite the evidence, the Suharto regime maintains that such human rights abuses either do not happen or are exaggerated by the resistance.
Comments made at an international committee of the Red Cross seminar in November by major general Prabowo Subianto, Suharto's son-in-law and commanding general of the army's special forces, are typical of this line.
His paper stated that captured resistance fighters and members of the clandestine movement were well treated: "After receiving medical care, if they can prove that they have not been involved in any criminal activities, they are returned to their families and are given skills and capital to start normal lives". Any inappropriate behaviour by soldiers or police "would be an aberration, and not official policy".
The evidence presented in the ETISC brochure helps to expose this lie. The inside cover contains a warning about the graphic nature of the photos. As the statement explains, it is not for pure "shock" value that the pictures have been collated: "The expression 'human rights violations' is commonly used. But this abstract and distant term helps hide the fact that these violations ... are being suffered by people just like ourselves.
"Images can have an immediacy that transcends words and cuts through the abstraction. For that reason the ETISC decided to put this booklet together with some of the pictures that have been smuggled out from East Timor over the years — to try to awake the world to the situation there."
Introductions are by Horta and Bishop Hilton Deakin, chairperson of the East Timor Human Rights Centre. Deakin notes that, "In spite of the continuing oppression, many still pursue policies of economic advantage and military accommodation, and use a language of silence over abuses of human rights. There are even those in Australia who would wish to see the asylum seekers who fled this oppression removed from our midst."
Background information on human rights in East Timor is sourced to the East Timor Human Rights Centre, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
Copies of Human Rights Violations in East Timor can be obtained through the Australia East Timor Association in Melbourne, PO Box 93, Fitzroy, 3065 Victoria; phone (03) 9416 2960 or email