'Keep struggling': the spirit of the East Timorese underground

May 10, 1995
Issue 

By Max Lane

SYDNEY — "I hope people will be active and participate in the May 13 protests around Australia", Elino Santos told Green Left Weekly on May 3. For Santos, being "active and participating" has been a way of life in East Timor. From 1989, he was part of the extensive clandestine network of resistance activists. He has recently arrived in Australia to join his family.

"I was working in an office in a school in Los Palos and was approached by people I knew in the town. 'Do you want to help the resistance?', they asked. Like so many other young people, I quickly joined up", said Santos.

"My main work was helping the estafeta, the couriers from the hills from the resistance leadership and the guerillas in the mountains. The estafeta from the mountains weren't able to go down to Dili to pass on information. I was from Dili, so every time an estafeta brought orders or information I'd have to take off for Dili. Sometimes we needed to help them with other things, such as helping to get equipment, especially rubber boots."

According to Santos, this soon raised suspicions at the school, especially on the part of the headmaster. All the teaching staff were from Indonesia and seemed to have little solidarity with the East Timorese.

"They mostly exploited the students. They arbitrarily raised the school fees from Rp1500 per month to Rp3000 per month and kept the money for themselves. They held a meeting to discuss it but never invited any of the East Timorese staff." Santos added that the students aren't allowed to speak Tetum, the local language.

The headmaster told the Kodim, the local military command, about Santos. "'Why you are off to Dili all the time?', they quizzed me. But I made sure I always had a doctor's certificate. And anyway, I told them, there were also no medicines available in Los Palos."

Soon afterwards another courier was arrested, and one of Santos' fellow activists had to leave Los Palos. It was getting too hot. "The resistance then told me that I should head back to Dili too. So in October 1991 I returned."

In Dili, the clandestine movement is very developed, said Santos. Lots of young people had joined the many groups in Dili or in one of the villages. Orders from the mountains are conveyed from mouth to mouth through key contacts. The Indonesian military know this, so the intelligence agents are watching all the time.

"Sometimes the intelligence will sit outside somebody's house all the time. And they will try to make friends, to win you over. 'Oh, come on, let's have something to eat.' And they will buy us a meal. They'll try to make jokes, sometimes even offer to lend us their motor bikes. They call it trying to 'ambil hati' — win your heart", Santos joked.

"They thought we were resisting them just because we were frustrated or something like that. They mostly wasted their time trying to win somebody's heart, while everybody else got on with organising."

In Dili, Santos remained a contact for the estafeta, making sure that information and instructions from headquarters in the mountains were spread amongst the groups. He also arrived back in Dili soon after the killing by the Indonesian military of the young student Sebastiao Gomes. It was two weeks later that the biggest pro-independence march and rally took place, which ended with the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1991.

Santa Cruz

"The night before, activists met together and prepared the banners and placards", said Santos. "You have to prepare a long time in advance and have to be very careful even about little things. For example, the intelligence was always on the lookout for anybody buying ink or especially spray paint in the shops. Sometimes I would dress up in paint-covered overalls so that the intelligence watching the shops thought I probably worked with paint."

This was how all the placards, the pictures of Xanana and the special T-shirts were made, said Santos. "The T-shirt had the word 'OJETIL' written on it or a picture of OJETIL's symbol, the loriko bird." OJETIL is the name of the Free East Timor Youth and Students Organisation. The plan was for a march from the church to the cemetery after the mass for Gomes, but of course it ended in the massacre.

"My brothers, Alico and Agio, were a part of the march — luckily they survived. The gunfire could be heard all over Dili. As all the people fled the area, news of the massacre spread everywhere. I tried to get close to Santa Cruz but the roads were blocked off", Santos remembered.

"Soon afterwards, in front of the stadium, there was a truck load of soldiers and a young boy who seemed to be afraid of the soldiers. He started running and they beat him to a pulp. I don't know if he died, but he lay there and didn't move at all after they finished beating him. Everyone had to seek safety in their homes."

For the following two weeks, all over East Timor everybody was under suspicion by the military. "Many young people were picked up during that period. December, January, February, March, everything was quiet. But then, the young people involved in November 12 were identified and picked up by the military and dispersed to all the districts to remain under the surveillance of the local military. They were supposed to be re-educated as well. But the estafeta were soon making contact with some of them. One of these young people almost got caught carrying an estafeta on the local military commander's own motor bike."

November 1991 had an even bigger impact than that. "So many people volunteered to hep the resistance after November, 1991", Santos emphasised, "and not just young people. People of all ages — mothers and housewives, everybody. Things really expanded after that."

Public protests

Between early 1992 and late 1994, the resistance took every opportunity to hold actions when foreign delegations and journalists visited. The most recent were the demonstrations that followed the clashes with some migrants from Sulawesi that took place during the APEC meeting in Jakarta in November 1994. This was also when 29 East Timorese students occupied the US Embassy.

In the aftermath of that, foreign journalists began arriving in Dili, and the resistance planned a demonstration, to follow a mass. "There were some groups ready with placards and posters. After the mass, three or four journalists arrived. Straightaway they opened up the placards and banners. Then some agent provocateurs started throwing stones. Soon the military arrived with pistols and tear gas. Five or six young people were dragged away by the military and beaten."

Santos noted the massive difference in the deployment of the security apparatus at the time of the riots that followed the clashes with the Sulawesi migrants and when the masked so-called ninja gangs emerged in January 1995.

"After the clash with the migrants, there were patrols everywhere, every night, in fact 24 hours a day. But we knew something was up in January when, all of a sudden, all the night security patrols disappeared", Santos explained.

"Then the ninjas started operating. They caught and beat people, or ransacked homes, and sometimes raped. The ridiculous thing was how the military always denied that there were ninjas. Whenever we reported incidents to the authorities they just denied everything, even when ninjas were caught with intelligence ID cards on them!"

Santos' assessment was that part of the military's plan was to set Timorese against Timorese to distract attention from the Indonesian military's human rights violations. "They wanted to be able to say, 'See, it's Timorese attacking Timorese'."

But, says Santos, everyone still follows the call from the leadership in the mountains. "Don't give up, keep struggling, keep working. We will continue the struggle for our own country."

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