In Tent City Camp, Refugee Relives E. Timor Massacre

They came, Joao Breto remembers, with cans of gasoline and death lists, and worked in a methodical, businesslike way. Not until their work was done and almost everyone lay dead did they pause, before moving on, to dance little jigs in the streets of Emera.

Joao, 15, barefoot on his army cot in the tent city that Australia has set up for 1,500 East Timorese refugees, told in a flat, matter-of-fact voice of witnessing the Emera massacre. Only his twitching hands and darting eyes hinted at the terror that hid behind his outward calm.

The militiamen, accompanied by Indonesian soldiers, entered the mountain town in a loose military formation on Sept. 4, an hour after the United Nations announced results of a U.N.-sponsored election five days earlier in which East Timor voted overwhelmingly to sever its association with Indonesia in favor of independence.

“They went to the independence leaders’ houses first and burned them,” Joao said. “Then they called women and children out and burned the other houses. If any man or boy tried to come out too, the militias pushed them back inside so they would be burned alive. I can still hear the screaming.

“Some of the people were killed with machetes. I don’t know how many died, but many. Maybe 100, 200. Mostly the militiamen were very quiet as they did the killing. The only thing I heard anyone say, until they started whooping and dancing after the massacre, was ‘You dog, you don’t have any right to independence.’ ”

Joao, who said he fled when he saw the Aitarak militiamen in their black T-shirts approaching and watched the massacre as he crouched behind a cluster of coffee bushes at a hillside plantation nearby, fell silent. Then he added: “What good did it do to kill so many people? Everyone’s still for independence.”

Like Joao, the other refugees in Darwin’s tent city were huddled in the U.N. compound in East Timor’s capital, Dili, a week ago, thinking that they well might die. They were wild-eyed then, with gaunt faces and empty stomachs. Today, their fear and hunger gone, their relief is palpable. Old people smile. Children laugh and play. Young men with guitars sing songs. Their escape from East Timor’s hour of desperation is truly a blessing, the Roman Catholic bishop they fondly call Jo Jo tells them.

The refugees will not be in Darwin long. More displaced people--these from Kosovo--are moving out of military barracks in the states of Victoria and Western Australia to be resettled in apartments. Once the East Timorese have been given complete medical checkups, they will be taken to the vacant barracks or back home if the international peacekeeping force being dispatched to their troubled homeland in the next few days can restore security.

“The Indonesian government keeps referring to the civil war in East Timor,” said Bishop Jose “Jo Jo” San Juan. “And I say, what civil war? We have no guns. This was the killing of an unarmed civilian population--not a war. For months we lived with the background music of gunfire, and the gunfire was not ours.”

San Juan, who was in the residence of Dili Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo when it was sacked and set ablaze by gunmen, said: “We knew there would be trouble after the vote, but no one thought it would be so organized or so intense. What happened is a shock to us all.”

To a person, the refugees in Darwin agree on two things: The violence in East Timor was executed as part of a well-planned military scenario, and it was carried out with the active participation of the Indonesian army and police. Operation Clean Sweep, as the generals called it, was a sophisticated exercise involving ships and planes, the targeting of key independence leaders and the Roman Catholic Church, and the command and control of 13 militias.

Sister Esmeralda remembers how for three days and nights militias prowled outside the gates of the Canossian Sisters Convent in Dili, looking in at the clustered refugees much as a cat would at a caged bird. On the fourth day, Sept. 4, one of the men scaled the fence and opened the gates for others to follow.

“I don’t know where I got the courage, but I went up to him and said in a very strong voice: ‘What are you doing here? You do not belong,’ ” recalled Esmeralda, who stands not 5 feet tall and clenched her fist in anger at the memory.

Ordered out of the convent at gunpoint, she defied orders to report to the police station and led her refugee flock of 700 to the U.N. compound a few hundred yards away. There she found a satellite phone and called the Vatican.

“It is no longer safe to be a priest or nun in East Timor,” she said.

The refugees in Darwin are but a fraction of the estimated 200,000 East Timorese displaced by the militia anarchy. Besides the many living under militia control in camps in West Timor, there are others clustered in the mountains of that province, awaiting U.S. airdrops of rice and blankets.

“We’re the lucky ones,” said Marcelino Belo, 29, who had thrown up his hands in reflex when a militiaman fired at him at point-blank range. The bullet took off one finger of his left hand and grazed his scalp.

“It’s not a big thing compared to what happened to others,” he noted.