John Birmingham - Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

SHORT BLACKS

1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease: On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom

2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City

3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds

4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

5 John Birmingham The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

6 Anna Krien Booze Territory

7 David Malouf The One Day

8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea

9 Robert Manne Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange

10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog

11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address

12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

Published by Black Inc.,

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Copyright John Birmingham 2001

John Birmingham asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

First published in Quarterly Essay 2, Appeasing Jakarta: Australias complicity in the East Timor tragedy, Black Inc., 2001.

This edition published 2015.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Birmingham, John, 1964 author.

The brave ones : East Timor, 1999 / John Birmingham.

9781863957670 (paperback) 9781925203516 (ebook)

Short blacks ; no.5.

Political atrocitiesTimor-Leste. AustraliaForeign relations

Indonesia. IndonesiaForeign relationsAustralia. Timor-Leste

History. IndonesiaHistory.

327.940598

Cover and text design by Peter Long.

JOHN BIRMINGHAM is the author of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, three popular fiction series and two Quarterly Essays.

THE DOGS OF LOS PALOS

T he Battalions nickname was strictly and bitterly ironic. The Brave Ones. A fighting unit with a proud history of child murder, rape, plunder and riot. You could tell when Battalion 745 had passed through because of their signature legacy of shallow graves, burnt buildings and drinking wells crammed with the mutilated remains of the dead peasants they were pledged to protect. In September 1999, they were quartered at the eastern end of Timor, at a barracks complex just north of Los Palos, a forlorn sort of place which had never really recovered from the fighting of 1975.

The town, a market centre, sat on a wide plain, a plateau really, the remnant of a huge primordial lagoon which had been pushed up out of the sea with the rest of the island millions of years ago. The ground rose slowly to hills in the south and lay within the confluence of two climatic systems, arid and baking to the north, wetter and somewhat milder to the south. Primal forest survived in these parts, around the base of the mountains where Falintil, the armed wing of resistance to Indonesian rule, had retreated before the advancing invaders in 76. Mostly, though, the land was given over to grazing and rice paddies, one of the few areas of Timor not dominated by the soaring, broken-backed cordillera running down its spine. Within Los Palos, low-rise, prefabricated steel buildings threw back the suns glare as fiercely as the whitewashed limestone walls of the surviving Portuguese architecture, the best of which could be found in a Catholic college about five kilometres north of the town centre. Los Palos had been abandoned by its inhabitants during the invasion, most of them fleeing to the apparent safety of the nearby mountains, and the Indonesians, taking affront, had sacked the town.

Still, as one traveller wrote later, it wasnt so much that Los Palos had been savaged in the war. More that it had been depersonalised, like a settlement at the edge of a volcanos footprint, where the habit of living for the moment is engrained. The people lived here, thought the writer Norman Lewis, not by choice but by an accident of fate, among temporary structures of corrugated iron, and they somehow kept going with a minimum of security and hope. The area had always been a centre of resistance to the invasion. A lot of young boys from Java, Madura and Bali had died around here, and the Indonesian armed forces had taken more than a generous measure of revenge on their behalf. When Lewis journeyed through the district shortly after the travel ban on East Timor was lifted, he found an empty land known locally as the dead earth, because those who had filled it were gone. Driving along the coast road, it was possible to see traces of disappeared villages, outlined by strange geometrical beds of wild flowers or phallus-shaped gourds which had grown up within the boundaries of their ruins. Human activity, wrote Lewis, had come to an end.

Battalion 745, the Brave Ones, were tasked by Jakarta with making sure things stayed quiet. They were a territorial outfit, a bunch of second-raters, with a good percentage of their numbers made up by local men. Their training, equipment and operational doctrine were all inferior to the main force units of Kostrad, the armys strategic reserve, and Kopassus, the fearsome and much-hated special forces. They were not quite as bad as the militia, the military equivalent of those scabrous, stringy-legged wild dogs that haunt the streets of so many towns throughout the archipelago. But 745 were not what youd call a disciplined or even a remotely formidable military force. Unless you happened to be an unarmed Timorese paean. In that case, as Ambrosio Alves discovered on Thursday, 9 September, an encounter with the Brave Ones could be just about the worst thing in the world.

The ninth was a busy day. Nearly a fortnight had passed since the referendum on East Timors independence, and Jakartas vengeance, the razing of the new nation, was well advanced. World attention, so distracted in 1975, had hardened against the Habibie governments mishandling of the ballot, but Jakarta seemed to be playing it out, buying as much time as the TNI (the Indonesian Armed Forces) and its militia surrogates needed to finish their work. On that particular day, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas called for more time to allow Indonesia to restore order. APEC foreign ministers meeting in Auckland had just demanded that Indonesia stop the killing, but Alatas and his ambassador in Canberra complained that a 48-hour deadline was unreasonable. A fairenough assessment, given that the 23 000 heavily armed troops and paramilitary police on duty in the province had so far proved themselves entirely incapable of stemming the violence. On the same day, the Australian government, facing a karmic payback on two and a half decades of weasel words and collaboration, announced it was doubling the size of its contribution to any peacekeeping force. The Governor of the 27th Province, Abilio Soares, who had deployed all the resources of state at his command in the effort to secure a vote against independence, said that Indonesia might not ratify the result anyway. TNI chief, General Wiranto, insisted that East Timor had become calmer after martial law, a claim dismissed by the Secretary General of the United Nations and met with weary contempt by the rest of world. The United Kingdom and New Zealand demonstrated their faith in the Generals word by dispatching warships to the island; the United States Congress prepared a bill cutting off military aid as UNAMETs (United Nations Assistance Mission East Timor) compound in Dili came under heavy machine-gun fire. The few remaining staff were refusing to leave, saying they feared that one and a half thousand East Timorese who had taken shelter within their walls would be butchered as soon they left. As New York delayed their departure, Jos Ramos-Horta said the United Nations would be leaving them to almost certain death.