East Timor 1999:

Had the killing largely subsided by the time Australian troops arrived?

A research note by TOM O’LINCOLN

In trying to determined this, I first consulted the 2003 version of James Dunn’s East Timor: A Rough Passage to Independence. It puts firm dates against the worst killings (pages 355-357). Remember that Australian troops arrived in Dili on 20 September, and in the provinces some time after that. Dunn offers the following dates:

• In Suai, the worst massacre was on 6 September .
• In Dili the latest date he can confirm is also 6 September.
• In Maliana, the main massacre was on 8 September.
• In Lautem he confirms a date of 25 September, resulting in 9 deaths – horrible enough, but not a large enough number to change the general picture, which is that the worst killing seems to have happened by 8 September. This was before Habibie and Wiranto announced (on 12 September) they would accept peacekeepers, and well before the troops arrived.
• Even in Oecussi Dunn says “the main killings occurred on 8, 9, and 10 September”. Oecussi is an enclave surrounded by Indonesian territory, where Australian troops didn’t arrive until 2 October. If there was any place the Indonesians and their militia could have committed full scale genocide well after the ballot, this was it. Yet on Dunn’s account it seems the worst violence subsided before Howard committed the troops.

A second, quite authoritative source is The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation which reported in 2005. The Commission’s dates for major massacres are somewhat different but broadly consistent with Dunn’s, except that they do show more significant violence in Oecussi in October. Not, however, anything genoicidal.

In addition to these major atrocities, there many cases involving smaller numbers of killed and disappeared. The Commission details them in a long table under paragraph 886. I went through and recorded every episode that had a definite date. In cases where it said something like “around 10-12 September” I allocated them a bit arbitrarily. The results appear in a table below. The process was difficult and someone else’s count might be slightly different, but the patterns are clear enough.

74 incidents occurred in the eight days from 4 September (announcement of the poll results) through 11 September (just before before Habibie and Wiranto announced they would accept peacekeepers). The next six days (12-16 September) were a second, less intense phase with 27 incidents. The following four days (17-20 September saw 5 incidents. Put another way, the first period saw 9.25 incidents per day, the second saw 4.5, and the last period saw 1.25.

So it does appear the violence was subsiding by the time the Australian troops arrived on 20 September.

Once they had arrived, signalling a humiliation for the TNI, a number of further incidents did accompany the beginning of the Indonesian withdrawal. The Commission records 7 incidents on 21 and 22 September and a number thereafter. It attributes some of this to the TNI rather than the militia. On the other hand John Martinkus (p. 375-378). reports militia violence after the troops arrived, which he ascribes to them being “cornered” after they were abandoned by the TNI. Whatever the exact interpretation, this final spasm of violence wasn’t prevented but if anything caused by the arrival of the Australians.

Note that the above analysis also seems consistent with the views of another expert, Max Lane, who wrote in 2003:

"The truth is that the peacekeeping force, the International Force for East Timor (Interfet), played no role in either securing East Timor's independence or protecting its people. Interfet soldiers arrived in East Timor after the Indonesian government and military had agreed to respect the September 1999 independence referendum and withdraw. When Interfet did arrive, they took no action to prevent some final acts of destruction by Jakarta-backed forces as they fled. Interfet's main role was to help rebuild some of East Timor's damaged infrastructure, such as roads and bridges."

Asked by Australia had intervened in 1999, East Timor resistance fighter Naldo Rei told an interviewer in June 2008: "I think there was a lot of pressure from Australian people - like bus drivers, train drivers, schoolteachers and unions - on the government in support of our independence from Indonesia. The Australian government felt that pressure, but they didn't do anything until the Indonesian army had finished killing us anyway. Australia's intervention into East Timor was an invasion. A colonialist invasion. Why else did successive governments support our oppression and genocide for so long? The Howard government did not want to miss an opportunity to grab Timor's oil."

I note also two other sources:

Rodney Tiffin writes about the time after the 4 September ballot: "The following week, from 5 to 12 September, was the bleakest, most depressing, most desperate period of the crisis." (p. 67). The Department of Foreign Trade discusses violence between 4 and 11 September, after which it refers to "what had happened". (p. 129) Both of these are consistent with the view that the worst killing occurred shortly after the ballot.

Sources:

Chega! Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. Available at: http://etan.org/news/2006/cavr.htm

James Dunn, East Timor: A Rough Passage to Independence., Longueville, Sydney, 2003.
Max Lane, "East Timor, Iraq and Jose Ramos Horta", Green Left Weekly, 12 March 2003.

John Martinkus, A Dirty Little War, Random House Australia, Sydney, 2001
Naldo Rei, interview: "Ex Falantil Guerrilla Says: Get Australian Hands off East Timor", Socialist Alternative No 129, June 2009
Rodney Tiffin, Diplomatic Deceits: Government, Media and East Timor, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, East Timor in Transition 1998-2000: An Australian Policy Challenge, Canberra, 2001.

Table: Killings and Disappearances in East Timor, September 1999

Source: the Chega report (details above). The “major incidents” are taken from the Executive Summary and the “other incidents” are drawn from a table included under paragraph 886 (p. 284ff), chapter 7.2.

Date in September	No of “other incidents”	Major incidents
1	2
2	1
3	2
4	8	(Ballot result announced)
5	9	Dili
6	7	Suai
7	13
8	6	Maliana
9	12	Maliana, Passabe, Lactos.
10	9
11	10	Various
12	3
13	7
14	5
15	3
16	9
17	2
18	0
19	1
20	2
21	4
22	3
23	0
24	2
25	1	Lautem 9
26	2
27	1
28	0
29	0
30	1