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Life and Death in East Timor by Janine di Giovanni Dili, East Timor You smell death before you see it. Inside the overrun garden of the independence leader Manuel Carrascalao, the sick, sweet smell leads to a corner where the well is full of bodies. The corpse at the top is covered with live worms. The body is bloated and discoloured, the skin leathery and burnt. The dead man's arms jut in front as though he had tried to prevent himself from falling farther down the well. He is not there alone. The Australian soldier guarding the destroyed villa reckons that there are nearly 30 bodies thrown inside. I peer down. I don't know how many there are, there could be five, or there could be three or four times that, stacked one on top of the other. But judging by the slug-like colour of the corpse I saw, they have been there about two weeks. All over Dili there are bodies. In a sewage tunnel in a remote and burnt-out shopping complex, a man in blue shorts, dead maybe two weeks, lies face up. You can see his ribs. His guts are ripped out of his torso and swim alongside him. His head is nearly skeletal. He floats among debris, sweet wrappers and moss. Pigs sniff the ground near by. Near the sea, overlooking the mountains, is a small river called Kampung Alor. In another time or place it might be idyllic; now it is contaminated. Floating among tin pots and long green weeds is a man of indistinguishable age, size and weight. He's wearing brown jeans. A crowd of children stand on the banks and stare. Near by there is more. Next to what once was the Prigondani restaurant in Hudi Laran district there is a vacant field. The corpse lying there for two weeks was buried yesterday by local people, who couldn't bear the dead man's indignity. "He has no name," one man says. "Maybe he comes from Sami, a nearby village, but nobody knows for sure." This is day three of a liberated Dili but the militia who killed these men are still on the streets. Major-General Peter Cosgrove, the Australian head of the peacekeeping mission, called it "a dangerous 24 hours". Sander Thoenes, the Financial Times Jakarta correspondent, was killed on Tuesday night by soldiers who were possibly militia, possibly Indonesian Army. Early yesterday morning United Nations soldiers go to inspect the body. In the distance is a column of heavy black smoke coming from the vicinity of the Santa Cruz cemetery, where in 1991 an estimated 200 people died, protesting against Indonesian occupation. Driving through ghostly streets, empty of people, it is clear that the militia has been at work. The houses are burning with freshly lit fires. Through the thickness of the smoke small groups of Indonesian soldiers getting ready to return to Jakarta are standing on corners smoking. Their barracks, as well as houses, are burning. It is clearly a scorched-earth policy designed to leave behind nothing that Indonesia built. The soldiers are not friendly. Who started these fires? "No comment!" they scream. One puts up a middle finger. Are they going back to Jakarta? "No!" another one shouts. In Aituri Laran, near Kuluhun, a proindependence village and scene of numerous clashes before and after the referendum on independence, the town is on fire. Either the militia or the military started throwing grenades into houses at 9am and burning them in a last-ditch attempt to destroy. Thick columns of smoke rise from the houses, loud explosions come from within. Soldiers with the Indonesian Army Battalion 744, which is based there, stand and watch. They say they didn't do it; the villagers say they did. "It's difficult for us to control the militias," says one soldier weakly. "We tell them to stop but they don't." Truckloads of Kopassus, special forces wearing red berets, drive by jeering at the flames. An old farmer emerges from his house: "It was the army, not the militia, who started it," he whispers. "I saw them. They had red berets." "Today they're burning Julio Varres's house," says Fernando da Cruz, a teacher who was shot in the hip by militia ten days ago. "Even though the UN troops are here, the militias are still in control." I walk home alone down a long, deserted stretch of coastal beach, hurrying to get off the street before the sun sets. There is such fear in the air. I am living in a deserted convent, sleeping on an old door on which I have spread my blanket and arranged my knapsack and bottles of water in a neat row next to it. I need some kind of order in the midst of chaos. I go to bed early, right after dusk. I hear the sound of birds still calling and see the glow of a cigarette: someone smoking right below my window. I sleep to try to block out the day; the bodies; the maggot; the guts spilling out of the man in the sewar. The smell. But when I sleep, there is no dream, no pictures, no image, no sound, no faces. Only blackness, strange and deep. © Janine di Giovanni |
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