continued from my
previous post
On September 24, Amnesty International detailed "credible reports
that 35 young East Timorese men were killed on board a ship bound
for Kupang from Dili on 11 September. According to an eyewitness
account, the bodies of the victims were dumped overboard. Amnesty
International has collected accounts of other incidents of East
Timorese being beaten and killed on boats leaving Dili." (Amnesty
International, "Fear, Intimidation and Forced Relocation in the
[Indonesian] Archipelago," AI Index: ASA 21/166/99, September 24,
1999.)
The situation in the concentration camps of West Timor, to which
much of the Timorese population had been abducted by Indonesian
forces, was no less grievous. John Aglionby wrote of the "refugees"
being "herded, sifted, and cut off." He cited one witness's
testimony that "Many of the men are [being] 'taken away for
questioning' ... The women have no idea what happens to their
husbands. Many have not returned." One woman reported a militia
camp guard's comment that "You may have got your country but it
will be a land full of widows." (Aglionby, "Herded, Sifted, and Cut
Off," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) A detainee who returned
safely, Domingos Dos Santos, told Agence France-Presse that
"pro-Indonesian militias were hunting down male refugees and
planned to kill them all." ("Timor Refugees 'Can Return'," BBC
Online, October 3, 1999.) On October 10, Timorese leader Xanana
Gusmao spoke of "more than 230,000 East Timorese [having] been
taken to camps in Atambua, Kefa, Kupang, Alor, Wetar and Kisar
where the men were selectively murdered, leaving only women,
children and the elderly." ("Gusmao Appeals to Indonesia to Free
East Timorese from Camps," Agence France-Presse dispatch, October
11, 1999.)
Occasional concerns for the fate of Timor's men were expressed by
prominent figures in the international community. The Deputy
British representative to the United Nations, Stewart Eldon, told
the U.N. Security Council on September 11 that "There are reports
of women and children being forced into trucks to be taken to West
Timor while men and boys are left behind. We know and we fear --
from Kosovo -- what that may mean." Most dramatically, in
mid-September the Canadian ambassador to Indonesia, Kenneth
Sunquist, raised the alarm over an apparent deficit of adult men in
the West Timor camps. His account appeared in the Toronto Globe and
Mail under the headline, "The Chilling Disappearance of East
Timor's Young Men":
Thousands of East Timorese men have disappeared en route to the
relative safety of refugee camps in the western section of the
embattled island, Canada's ambassador to Indonesia said after a
tour of the area. Ken Sunquist and Norway's ambassador here are the
first foreign diplomats to visit the camps in the West Timorese
capital of Kupang, home to more than 100,000 refugees fleeing
anti-independence militias responsible for an orgy of violence in
neighbouring East Timor over the past two weeks. "The refugee camps
themselves are filled overwhelmingly with women and children, so
we're wondering where the men are, whether they've been segregated
elsewhere, whether they're up in the hills in East Timor or if
there's some more sinister explanation," Mr. Sunquist said after
touring three Kupang-area refugee camps on Tuesday. "We tried to
ask these questions on several occasions but it's clear that the
people felt we were putting them at risk even talking to them.
There were lots of police around everywhere we went."
Most of refugees seen by the joint mission, which accompanied five
Indonesian cabinet ministers to Kupang, were older men, women and
boys under the age of 16, he said. "While we were at the airport,
for example, a plane came in with 171 people aboard, 150 of whom
were children under the age of 10, older women and several younger
men who appeared to have been wounded, but whether this was done by
the militias before they left or not we couldn't tell," he said.
(Paul Dillon and Jeff Sallot, "The Chilling Disappearance of East
Timor's Young Men," The Globe and Mail, September 16, 1999.)
In an interview on September 20, Sunquist expanded on his
perceptions of the situation:
The question is, for instance, the camps have women and children
but no men. What's happened to those men? You can either take one
approach, which is most of them went up in the hills to fight. That
is probably true for a lot of them. A second one is that they were
segregated. There's a lot of reports that say the men were
segregated. ... In fact, from what we've now heard, there are some
camps along the border which are almost entirely male. So maybe the
husbands, fathers, brothers, were segregated and are sitting in
camps by themselves. I really hope that's true. And then there's
the third one, that they were killed. No one, I mean, not anyone is
willing to say that they were killed, because they don't know what
happened to them. The wives don't know. They know they are missing.
But they don't know where they are. And that's what a commission of
inquiry [is needed for]. (Quoted in Richard S. Ehrlich, "The
Military and East Timor's Militias", The Laissez Faire City Times,
3: 38 [September 27, 1999].)
A Timorese man displays empty shell cartridges
from the massacre at Suai, September 6, 1999.
In addition to the apparent largescale gendercide of Timorese
males, at least one sizable massacre predominantly targeted
females, at the church in Suai on September 6. Up to 200 people who
had taken refuge in the church were attacked by militia members and
massacred. "The number of victims and their identities are
uncertain," reported The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy. "What is
known is that most were women and girls [and, according to other
reports, elderly men]. The evidence attests to that: the jumble of
bras, underpants and sanitary napkins on the steps leading up to
the church; the children's leg bones; a hank of a woman's hair; the
scorched skeletal remains of two women behind the church; the thick
bloodstain on a schoolroom door, covered by bougainvillea petals
baking beneath the sun. ... What happened was male savagery as old
as history -- rape, killing, burning, razing -- in a church, a
school, in the adjacent huge, grey, concrete shell of a cathedral
called Ave Maria under construction to the glory of God. Savagery
against the defenceless, as women and children usually are;
vengeance on a people who voted for independence from their
Indonesian military overlords and landowners." Afterwards,
surviving "women and children were carted away on trucks to
Indonesia's neighbouring West Timor province, about 30 kilometres
away, where they are still being held. The whereabouts of many of
the men is not known." (Valpy, "Rape and Murder in the Sight of Our
Lady," The Globe and Mail, November 1, 1999.)
A number of younger Timorese women are reported to have been killed
as known or suspected independence supporters. Reports also reached
the international media of young Timorese women being raped, or
abducted for use as sex-slaves. A representative of the aid agency
World Vision stated in mid-October that "Apparently when the
militias went on their rampage, they herded people into the
marketplace to make forced evacuations and during that time, many
young girls were dragged away and raped by the pro-integrationist
forces." ("Aid Agency Claims to Have Evidence of Mass Rape by
Militias," ABC [Australia] News Online, October 20, 1999.) Some of
the worst cases of sexual assault, accompanied by mass killing,
occurred at Suai on September 6 (see above). Rape was also
allegedly widespread in the detention camps in West Timor,
according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence
against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was sent to Dili to file a
report in November. (No special U.N. rapporteur on violence against
men was appointed, and no report on the subject filed.)
