CHEGA! GETTING THE FACTS OUT

Memory as the mother of wisdom                                        

In the 2012 British comedy film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the ultra-optimistic  manager Sonny explains away his dysfunctional business with the memorable line:  ‘Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end’.

Seasoned Australian human rights campaigner Pat Walsh, 74, has adopted this reasoning to explain his optimism as he struggles to help Indonesians know the facts of their country’s recent history – and take responsibility for the crimes “that have so deeply scarred Timor-Leste”.

His brief on behalf of a non-government organization [NGO] covers the 25-year occupation of East Timor, a Portuguese colony from the 16^th century till invaded by Indonesian troops in 1975.  It’s now the nation of Timor-Leste with a population of about 1.2 million. 

In the August 1999 referendum authorized by Indonesian President BJ Habibie, almost 80 per cent voted for independence.  The Indonesian army (TNI) was outraged. Aided by militants it embarked on what Walsh calls “flat earth retribution.”

He was among official observers of the vote but the team pulled out when it became clear the result would not be accepted peacefully by the TNI. 

Walsh returned three months later to a tragic scene. Up to 2,600 people had been killed or disappeared.  “From the number and destruction of so many Indonesian government buildings in town after town we concluded two things,” he said.

“Indonesia had planned to stay forever, and that having lost, had no intention of coming back.”

But Walsh did come back, and for the next ten years worked in Dili for international agencies, including the United Nations. His main job was with the independent Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, known by its Portuguese acronym as CAVR.

The seven East Timorese commissioners were tasked with ‘truth seeking’ for the period 1974 to 1999. Their  report  Chega! [Portuguese for ‘enough’] was published in Indonesian and Portuguese. To Walsh’s dismay there have been no mainstream media reviews or doctoral theses on the document.

Now a new five volume English version has been edited by Walsh after six months’ work in Jakarta. The study found almost 103,800 civilians died during the quarter-century conflict. Around 18,600 of them were killed or disappeared and at least 84,200 people died from hunger and disease.

The report has evidence from almost 8,000 victims, and includes sickening first person testimonies of rape and torture. Reading these made Walsh “very emotional … distressed and angry.”

His current job is with Asia Justice and Rights [AJAR], a European-funded NGO based in Jakarta ‘to strengthen accountability and respect for human rights’.

Walsh is distributing 1,500 boxed sets of Chega! to university libraries, NGOs  and media organisations. He’s criss-crossing the archipelago, lobbying politicians, showing videos and addressing law students, activists and anyone who’ll cock an ear. Condensed versions of Chega!, including comics, will be released next year.

“Many Indonesians still don’t know the truth about East Timor,” he said. “They accepted  President Soeharto’s line that East Timor was to Indonesia what Cuba was to the US – an offshore Communist enclave which could not be tolerated.

“That wasn’t true.  Fretilin [the political party fighting for independence] was not a Marxist or Communist movement, and it never wanted all Timor. Nor did it want to see the Balkanisation [fragmentation] of Indonesia.”

Walsh was speaking in Batu, East Java at Omah Munir, the museum celebrating the life of human rights activist and lawyer Munir Said Thalib who was assassinated in 2004. Although some of those allegedly involved were jailed, the masterminds behind his poisoning on board a Garuda flight have never been convicted.

Walsh’s presentation was titled Rediscovering Indonesia. The subtitle came from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus: ‘Memory is the mother of wisdom’.  To this was added: ‘But a lost memory is the mother of a mistake!’.

Walsh has a resume that punctures the image of reconcilers as unworldly theorists who can’t face the rawness of realpolitik outside their aid-funded offices. He has fronted the Vatican and the US Congress to plead for the victims of brutality in East Timor.

Walsh studied military strategy to understand how soldiers think.  He directed the human rights office of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid, and in 1983 co-founded the highly-respected magazine Inside Indonesia, now an Internet journal. 

Two years ago he was awarded the prestigious Order of Australia medal for his contribution to international human rights and reconciliation. These stripes on his sleeve have helped dissuade nationalists getting stroppy because an Australian is telling their history.

“I’m a sitting duck,” Walsh said.  “Many still blame Australia for the referendum and Indonesia losing its most easterly province.  So far no problems. My concerns are with the actions of governments, not the Indonesian people.”

Walsh was raised on a dairy farm in rural Victoria and educated in a seminary. For seven years he was a Catholic priest with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He taught Latin, then Indonesian.

Walsh eventually left the priesthood, married, fathered three daughters and turned to the quest for a just world.

His studies aroused a strong concern for human rights and abuse of power. In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, and Melbourne became activism central.  Scores of political refugees gathered in the Victorian capital and worked to tell the world what was happening.

When Walsh wasn’t there he was in Indonesia until blacklisted in 1993. Walsh told Immigration they’d got the wrong person because Pat is also a woman’s name; no deal.

The recommendations in Chega! include reparation – from Indonesia and Australia which allegedly supplied arms to the TNI that were used against the Timorese.  So far - nothing.

“I’d like an independent Indonesian commission to examine how history is taught,” Walsh said. “Reparation isn’t money, but social services and support for victims.

“I feel a strong responsibility to ensure their voice gets out. I believe Indonesians will respond to this challenge.”

[Chega! Is on line at www.chegareport.net]

(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 December 2014)

BALIBO FIVE

THE HAUNTING RETURN OF THE BALIBO FIVE
© Duncan Graham 2006

It’s a pity radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Ba’asyir was cleared of wrongdoing by Indonesia’s Supreme Court during Australia’s Silly Season.

This is the normally slow-news period just before Christmas and into the New Year. Politicians, PR hustlers, ambitious academics and other column poachers and airtime thieves are at the beach taking a break from feeding the media with their pontificating and posturing.

The press and TV heavies are also hitting the surf and sand, so minor events often get a run beyond their normal value.

So it has been with the toothy whitebeard skilled in needling his neighbors, even recommending that Prime Minister John Howard take the Haj.

Now that would be news. But in the absence of the Protestant Howard heading for Mecca swathed in white - or any other solid stories - reporters have been asking and getting the predictable responses from victims of the Bali bombs. These are the outrages that Ba’asyir allegedly engineered as spiritual head of the militant group Jemaah Islamiah.

Innocent according to the new legal decision, but guilty in the court of public opinion Down Under. Understandably the badly wounded jurors tend to be deaf to the opinions of more learned commentators. These people, including Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty, remain unsurprised at the court’s decision because the circumstantial evidence used for the conviction was tissue thin.

All this was said before and at length when Ba’asyir was released in June after serving part of a 30-month sentence. But that hasn’t stopped the anger and accusations being recycled when there’s been little else to report apart from sport and bushfires.

Then another Christmas goodie with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer again warning holiday-hunting Aussies to steer clear of the archipelago because they might get bombed.

The State Intelligence Agency BIN reckons no problem, leaving us to think the Aussie spooks know more than the locals – or Australia has another agenda in maintaining travel alerts and talking about unspecified and uncheckable ‘credible threats’.

So here at the end of 2006 we have our long-suffering patient Ms AusIndo Relations sick yet again, with her condition likely to worsen in the next two months.

That’s because a coronial inquest is scheduled early next year to examine the deaths of the Balibo Five.

Many outside the Antipodes will be bemused by this shorthand term that refers to the deaths of five Australian newsmen covering Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of what was then Portuguese Timor.

The unarmed TV crews were allegedly shot dead by the Indonesian military at the border village of Balibo. Their bodies were then burned.

This is an issue that the Australian media has never abandoned. Nor have some of the victims’ families – particularly Shirley Shackleton widow of reporter Greg.

After more than 30 years and numerous inquiries you might expect no new evidence could be forthcoming. Wrong. Information has now become public that didn’t make it into the media during earlier closed-door investigations.

It’s claimed that two Australian officials knew of intercepted radio messages transmitted by the Indonesian Army during the fighting. These allegedly ordered the journalists to be killed.

Till now it has been argued that the men died in crossfire as TNI troops and Fretilin fighters confronted each other – in other words a tragic accident. Few in the Australian media believe this version.

Some of the TNI commanders involved are still alive and likely to be named at the inquest. Not the sort of coverage that will refresh Ms AIR.

In November Australia and Indonesia signed the so-called Lombok Treaty that’s supposed to make sure we all stay mates. Ms AIR’s wounds started to heal – but as many observers have pointed out soothing sounds among politicians doesn’t mean the hearts and minds of the electorate will follow the same song sheet.

Why should Australian taxpayers continue to help Indonesia when some of its military elite allegedly ordered the murder of our young men (all were in their 20s) who were just trying to do their job as neutral observers? (Indonesia ranks number two in Australian aid, behind Papua New Guinea).

And why should voters accept the Australian government’s present intentions when past administrations allegedly knew the killings were willful but put appeasement ahead of confrontation with its overcrowded neighbor?

There’ll be calls for the assassins to be prosecuted if the inquiry finds against them, but of course nothing will happen. If the masterminds behind the September 2004 Garuda airline slaying of local human rights activist Munir are untouchable, there’s no chance the executioners of foreigners three decades ago will ever see the inside of a courtroom.

For Indonesia this is a closed volume. For Australia the page is heavily book marked and the edges dog-eared.

We don’t expect the polygamous Ms AIR to expire – she’s being lavished with lots of top-level care from her two lovers. Unfortunately she doesn’t have too many friends elsewhere to wish her well, and they’re the ones that matter.

So here’s a New Year’s resolution we can all undertake: Let’s make 2007 the year we tone down the slander and make the effort to try and understand each other. In brief – behave like good democratic neighbors, explore a bit of reconciliation and take a breath of fresh air.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 5 January 2007)
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