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Xanana: 'We resist to win'

[December 7 marked 20 years since Indonesia invaded East Timor. On August 18, 1983 former Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave de jure recognition to the Suharto government's occupation; the Australian Labor government is the only government in the world to do this.

From a prison cell in Jakarta, XANANA GUSMAO smuggled out a tape recording to JOHN PILGER of his views on East Timor's struggle for self-determination and the price of Western governments' support for the Indonesian regime.

This interview was first published in the London Guardian on December 2. Despite Pilger's attempts to have the interview published in Australia, the Canberra Times was the only establishment paper which ran it (in an abridged form), also on December 2. This version of the interview was published by Green Left Wekly on December 13, 1996.]

If a people's history of the 20th century is ever written recording the true distinction of those who led ordinary people against the onslaughts of power and greed, at the risk of their own survival, Xanana's name will join those of Mandela, Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh. At 49, his own life mirrors a national struggle and suffering which, until a few years ago, were consigned to historical oblivion by the "international community" and most of Western journalism.

Few images and reported words reached the outside world when Indonesian paratroopers landed in East Timor on December 7, 1975. The only foreign journalist to remain behind on the invasion day, Roger East, an Australian, was executed by the Indonesians.

Xanana was made leader of the resistance movement Fretilin, in 1981. With his beard and beret, he looked strikingly similar to Che Guevara and, like him, became a Pimpernel figure, eluding capture for more than a decade. In their frustration, the Indonesians deployed a tactic known as "the fence of legs". They forced tens of thousands of old people, women and children to march through the jungle in all conditions, "sweeping" the undergrowth for guerrillas and calling on them to surrender.

However, what Xanana and his men heard were voices warning them in the Timorese language, Tetum, which the Indonesians didn't understand. "You are in danger", they shouted. "Quick. Run now. We will cover for you." Thousands of civilians were caught and punished for this, often with death, demonstrating that the guerrillas were, and remain, immensely popular and the locus of a movement that has repeatedly regenerated itself. "The old men embraced me", wrote Xanana in his diary. "They cried out, `Son, carry on the fight! Don't ever surrender'. We were moved by this and swore to die for the homeland." In classic fashion, the guerrillas have relied on ambush; on several occasions frightened Indonesian units have tried to negotiate an "amnesty" for themselves.

In 1970 Xanana married Emilia, "in a registry office, after insulting the priests!" he wrote in his diary. They have a son, Nito, and a daughter, Zeni, now both in their 20s and living in Australia. Nito's only memory of his father is riding on his shoulders, each of them with an ice cream.

While Xanana was in the mountains, Emilia was terribly abused. Once, with the children watching, a pistol was rammed into her mouth and the trigger pulled. In 1990, after long negotiations, she was allowed to leave for Australia. On the day she was driven to the airport, hundreds of school children appeared out of the fields along the route and stood with their heads bowed in a defiant gesture of respect for her. When her plane landed in Bali she found a crumpled note in her pocket which read, in verse:

You leave us not forever
We do not forget,
You have helped Timorese women keep their dignity and hope,
Xanana remains and is not alone,
So you can leave us. Go!
Shout like Winnie Mandela!

Xanana was captured in a safe house on the outskirts of Dili on November 20, 1992 after one of his drivers was tortured. He was found in a concealed room beneath the floorboards. Interrogated day after day, he was confined in a small cell with a convicted criminal suffering from (highly infectious) Hepatitis B and who, on pain of death, was to report everything he said.

At the same time, hundreds of young East Timorese were rounded up and forced to declare their allegiance to Indonesia by drinking each other's blood, taken from them with a single syringe and squirted into a bowl mixed with wine. Such public acts of humiliation, often conducted near a church with a priest made to attend, have been turned into rituals of defiance, with people quietly chanting, in their own language, Xanana's words: "We resist to win".

Today the resistance consists of mainly young people who were infants when Xanana went into the mountains and whom the Indonesians believed they had "re-socialised".

Last July I made contact with Xanana in prison through an underground network which, since his "trial" in an Indonesian kangaroo court three years ago, has ensured that he continues as chairman of the National Council of Maubere (Timorese) Resistance. Strategy documents, poetry and Christmas cards have all been smuggled out. In messages sent from London in code, I proposed an interview on videotape.

Within a fortnight I received a hand-written note: "Dear JP I agree ..." It was signed "X". I had said in my message that I was concerned about what might happen to him when the interview was made public; that we could be under no illusions about the Jakarta regime's vindictive talents. His reply to me echoed the statement he had read out at his "trial" until the judge ordered him silenced. "As a political prisoner in the hands of the occupiers of my country", he told the court, "it is of no consequence at all to me if they pass a death sentence here today. They are killing my people and I am not worth more than [their] heroic struggle". Addressing any concern, he replied that any risk was his right to take and his responsibility alone.

As that message arrived in London, he was suddenly moved to solitary confinement. The previous occupant of his new cell, Indonesia's former foreign minister, Subandrio, spent almost 30 years there. Smuggling in a video camera was now out of the question. Instead, a miniature tape recorder reached him, along with my coded questions. His response is a personal record of the East Timorese holocaust and of a resistance movement that has survived solely on its popular base, without outside help. It is also a document of defiance; he calls Suharto, his jailer, a murderer and warns that unless the question of East Timor's self- determination is resolved, it could ignite an uprising in Indonesia itself.

He also offers Indonesia terms of reconciliation that would allow the world's fourth largest nation to reclaim some international respect worthy of its own struggle for independence against the Dutch. He distils his anger for "complicit foreign governments", such as the British, Indonesia's biggest arms supplier, and the "cynical" Keating government in Australia.

I had asked him to send me some of his poems, knowing that this had helped to sustain him during his years in the mountains. Although he replied that "I consider myself neither a poet nor a writer", the verse he sent is spine-tingling. Listening to the tape, which is 60 minutes long, it is clear he is speaking in a small and empty space. Towards the end he is rushing and speaking more closely to the microphone, presumably for fear of being caught. He ends with a personal message to me -- "un grande abraco" -- a big hug -- and signs off with his title, "Commandante". The following is our conversation, conducted literally a world apart, thanks to others I cannot, alas, acknowledge.

Tell me about growing up in East Timor. What memories do you have of peace?

I was born in Manaruto one year after the Japanese withdrawal. My father was a primary school teacher, and I had to enter the [Catholic] seminary. I worked as a fisherman, wharfie and draftsman until I finally got a job in the civil service, which was the ambition of all the assimilados (those regarded as "assimilated" with the Portuguese). My entire youth was a difficult experience which I tolerated by virtue of a will to win in life.

The Portuguese legacy was a strong part of our cultural identity. But for some of the "educated", as those who had spent time behind a school desk were called, the struggle to uproot ourselves from our native culture often caused a crisis of conscience.

How do you remember the day of the Indonesian invasion and the weeks and months that followed?

I was on the Lois river with our troops, who were trying to stop the advance of the Indonesians after their assault on Balibo and their murder of five Australian journalists. We were stunned by the sheer number of aircraft. Dili was under attack from the air and naval gunships. Three days later we witnessed the sacking of the city, the plundering of everything from taps and bathtubs to window panes and doors. In the cemeteries they desecrated tombs, ripping from them gold rings and crucifixes. Everything was loaded on to cargo vessels while frigates shelled the coast.

The killing was indiscriminate. They murdered hundreds of people on the first day, including the journalist Roger East. Like him, many people were brought to the harbour where they shot them one by one, as the Nazis did. Anyone, women, children, the elderly, anyone who dared venture outside their homes was shot down. They smashed down doors, firing their weapons inside at anybody and anything. They smashed up churches, leaving them full of urine and faeces.

What happened as the months turned into years and the world remained silent?

Between 1977 and 1978 large numbers of people surrendered. Their men had been murdered, their scanty possessions pillaged and their women raped. In Uatulan, for instance, all those who could read and write were massacred, and in some villages only women remained. In those years the Indonesian troops would tie people up and leave them outdoors, naked and exposed to the harsh heat and the cold of the night while, little by little, they would cut pieces from their skin, their arms and legs. They often cut off their penises or their ears, which the victims were then forced to eat.

Each village had a detention centre which held the able-bodied men and women. At night their bodies were disposed of. From 1980 we tried to tell the world about this, but no one was listening. It is this which the murderer Suharto calls "returning to the people of East Timor their human rights!"

What were the conditions you and your men had to endure during the 17 years you were in the mountains?

We were constantly on the move and exposed to heat and heavy rains. We suffered a lack of food, medicine and clothing, as we stayed just ahead of the enemy. It was not uncommon to be on the march for three weeks, sleeping two hours a night and chewing dried meat and coconut.

In his diary Xanana wrote: I climbed the hill. Sad silence, desolation, grass spreading its cover over short-cuts and paths, struggling to smother the cabbage and potatoes, the only sign a human hand had ever been there. Every ridge, every stone, every brook and tree had witnessed such tremendous suffering. The seven of us marched in silence. All the scenes of past months rushed back into mind. We could feel the voices of the dead ...

Another journey to the West of Matebian. Six weeks of pain and daily fighting. I couldn't sit down, I couldn't stay standing up and I couldn't bear to lie down. I used to roll around on the ground as if possessed. How I cried! Many is the time I wanted to commit suicide. I couldn't stand that terrible kidney pain. I used to drink huge amounts of tea made from leaves, peelings and roots.

The sympathy in the eyes of the warriors offended me. I would avoid the ineffectiveness of words. I tried all possible and imaginary cures, I put up with the boiling steam and leaves heating my arms. I was vanquished, beaten. Not that I really believed that the steaming remedy would warm up my kidneys ... I just needed to believe something in order to keep me going.

Were you able to see your family and under what conditions?

I was unable to.

Is there a poem of yours that expresses something of the East Timorese struggle?

Xanana sent one called Generations:

Names without faces
Hearts stabbed
with memories
of the tears of children
shed for their parents ...

More than death
made them utter their last word in every tear the cruel spectacle ...
the whimpering of a mother
without energy upon her body are etched
the blemishes of anguish
depleted

The rags
which cover her
in tatters
in the din of her own flesh
cruelly scorned
by the Indonesian soldiers one by one
on top of her

Inert, the body of a woman
becomes a corpse
insensitive to the justice
of the dagger
which has liberated her from life

and in the meantime...
blows of the rifle butt resound
in the tear drops
of the very same children

A father pays the price
for the last "no" of his life
and ...

the tears dried
in the memories of the children
replaced by the sweat of the struggle ...

Extremely significant. In the early years American Bronco and Skyhawk aircraft relentlessly bombed and machine-gunned the camps and wells of the refugee population. And the new aircraft sold by Britain will invariably be used in East Timor.

As for the denials that the Hawks will not be used against us, the Western powers, concerned primarily with profits, have made these lies the condition for the continuing sale of arms and ammunition. The British Government must accept its share of moral responsibility for the war in East Timor. [The imminent sale of 24 Hawks provides Jakarta with precisely the approval it requires that it may continue to persecute and murder with impunity. The sale, by British Aerospace, follows a "soft" loan to Jakarta of 80 million which Britain's Overseas Development Minister Lynda Chalker delivered in person last May. Despite Amnesty's report that repression and violence were worse in East Timor than at any time since the Santa Cruz massacre, she announced that "human rights have improved in Indonesia".]

What do you say to Australia's Prime Minister Paul Keating and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans when they argue that Australia has no choice but to form a close "partnership" with Jakarta?

Never have I encountered in the whole world two more cynical and insensitive Labour party politicians as Messrs Evans and Keating. The Australian Labour Government has shown itself to be without principles. To the point where Canberra has even stooped to kow- towing to the Suharto regime, this is truly a disgrace. They are traitors of the conscience of the Australian people.

But what about the historical debt that the Australian people are said to owe the East Timorese?

I belong to the generation which grew up immediately following the Japanese occupation. As a child I knew that East Timor fought to ward off Japan's invasion of the Australian continent. Yet Australia claimed victory! If there is a military threat to Australia today, it comes from Indonesia. Logically, East Timor would serve as a bulwark against Indonesia in the defence of Australia. But no! Due to its fear of an Indonesian invasion, every Australian government since 1975 has given its approval to the taking by force of the small territory which 50 years ago saved Australian soil ... and it recognises the criminal 20- year occupation as the best option for us. [The Australian government was the first to defy the United Nations and recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, in 1985. Keating and Evans have tied much of Australian foreign policy to "doing business" with Suharto. In the past year, the Australian military has been integrated into Indonesia's war effort in East Timor, training the same units of special forces that have committed some of the worst atrocities and welcoming to Canberra, as an honoured guest, the general responsible for the massacre of 270 unarmed demonstrators in Dili in 1991.]

Has the East Timorese resistance any suggestions for a solution?

We propose a process that gives everyone the right to debate integration [with Indonesia], autonomy or independence, based on the UN's understanding of east Timor's legal-political status.

After a period of time we propose a plebiscite to be carried out under international supervision. If the East Timorese freely opt for integration, we will make every effort to maintain a climate of peace and understanding. But if the people decide upon independence, Indonesia must be prepared to respect this. The regime is now aware that the case of East Timor is a far greater threat to its credibility than any other domestic problem. Until a few years ago Indonesian society was closed. Now human rights are better understood, thanks to the revelation of their violations in my country.

There are also signs that Suharto is no longer sure of who his friends are, now that most of the old guard have returned. Not all of them can be made ministers, and the new generation of generals are now anticipating their share of benefits from the regime, which has already begun to promote the idea of the immortality of Suharto. If the Indonesian opposition fails to recognise that the time has come for mass-mobilisation and risk- taking, it will die out.

What can people all over the world do to help bring about freedom in East Timor?

Go out on the streets and protest in front of the nearest Indonesian Embassy, as they do in Australia. Put the lie to Indonesian claims that the problem of East Timor is a domestic one for Indonesia. During the African colonial wars, [the Portuguese dictator] Marcelo Caetano was mobbed in the streets of London and forced to return to Portugal like a bandit fleeing from the police. Actions such as these are worth more than a million letters written to Suharto or UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali. This is what the British people should do. Show the regime that it will never be free of public displays of repudiation for as long as the question of East Timor remains unresolved.

You are now in solitary confinement, Could you describe your cell, and the possessions you are allowed to have?

I am under the supervision of military intelligence. Everything I do is recorded every day; everything: the hour I wake up, what I do then, and the hour I go to bed. I am not permitted to mix with other East Timorese prisoners or with other so-called "subversive" inmates. I am only allowed to receive Red Cross visits twice a year. If my family wish to visit me at other times they are not allowed. Intelligence officers visit me regularly and ask me stupid questions. I am in a cell three metres by four metres with an outside area 10 metres long. I can see the sun through the iron bars. I don't have a lot of possessions, as you can appreciate. [He has been offered exile but has refused it until all East Timorese political prisoners are released.]

Like any human being in such confinement, your spirit must ebb and flow. When you are not at your strongest, what restores you?

The memory of my people's sacrifices and an awareness that no sacrifice I could make could compare with the sea of blood that has washed over my homeland. And so I do my best to overcome my own difficulties.

John Pilger