East Timor
East Timor
Edhina, an East Timor woman, sits in front of her grass hut in a widow’s village, a village with no men. She is wearing the woven fabrics of her people - bright reds, blues, and greens, like the birds that once lived in the trees surrounding her village. Like many Timorese, who lived in villages outside of Dili, she witnessed the invasion in their capital by the Indonesian soldiers, who she calls the Javanese. Now, she speaks about the invasion and her experience during the occupation.
That
morning I woke to this big noise of planes
saw
parachutes and planes covering the morning light.
In
the afternoon, some villagers came...
told everyone they must come to Dili
to
surrender.
My
husband was out in the fields,
I
did not know what to do.
So
I took my children and went with my sister, my neighbors.
On
the way, we saw the soldiers with some trucks.
We
thought they would drive us.
But
right there, on the side of the road, they divided us:
women,
babies, and old men on one side, boys and men on the other...
Then a Javanese soldier screamed an order.
We heard machine guns,
saw the boys and men die right there.
We thought they would kill us next.
We just picked up the babies,
ran screaming, wild...
Later, my sister went to look for her husband, her son.
They had been in the fields with my husband.
On her way, she met a friend, who told her,
Don’t bother
going there.
I have just
seen my cousin being eaten by a dog.
They are all
dead.
Only the dogs
are alive.
We
were very frightened and ran to the bush...
to
the interior,
to
the mountains, where there is no water.
There
were so many people – from all the villages.
We
were running all the time and we were weak.
When
people died,
we would just lay them next to the dead animals.
There
were 40,000 of us there –
on
the mountainsides, in the valley –
that’s
what the fighters said...
I
had never seen so many people together....
Then, they started to bomb us from the air.
We were like animals running from one place to the other.
On the way we ate whatever we could find, leaves, roots,
bugs.
In the daytime we went into caves or under rocks to
hide.
We could only come out at night to sleep in the open
air.
We slept anywhere, in the rain, in the mud,
even near the dead animals.
Many of the men from the other villages left...
to join the resistance.
Some killed their wives...killed their sisters, their
daughters...
just took the machete...
they did not want the soldiers to have them.
Those
Javanese –
they
bombed us twice a day, in the morning and then in the afternoon.
Four
black planes – we called them scorpions
they
had a tail that curves up at the back...
Then
they dropped these two bombs – you call it napalm.
I
saw the flames...
heard
people screaming.
I
was on another mountain but I could see well...
By
the time we got there everything was burnt,
no
grass, nothing except ash.
You
couldn’t see where bodies had been,
Nothing
except ash, a sort of yellow ash, like beach sand.
After several months the soldiers surrounded us.
They tortured the men
and sent us women to a refugee camp.
They beat us with tractor chains, rifle butts,
and burnt us with their cigarettes.
They kept beating us until we were unconscious.
Then they could rape us without resistance.
Twenty-four year...twenty-four years
they
have controlled our lives.
Now
we have nothing.
Before
we had, but now we have nothing.
They
burnt down our buildings, flattened our homes,
sprayed
their chemicals to kill our crops and livestock.
Now,
there is no food, the water is unclean.
I
try to take care of these children,
the
children without fathers,
the
children of soldiers.