Walking into the Darkness

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Children from an orphanage in Dili

It initially surprised me when I heard her say it, but then it started to make sense. 'We're walking into the darkness.' A neighbour of the family I've lived with on my two visits to Dili was eloquently expressing what the Timorese population feels. All they have known for the last twenty four years has been suffering and horror and now freedom and building a country are almost daunting. Their current condition is awful and no one knows what lies ahead.

I first visited East Timor in the five weeks running up to the vote on August the 30th and for one week afterwards. What was remarkable was that they were facing death and terror from the Indonesian military and its paid killers, the militias, but kept on living and believing and never gave up. When the day of voting came, they voted with their hearts. Days later they were in danger of losing their lives. On the sixth of September, myself and my companion from the campaign flew out of East Timor on an Australian Airforce plane. From our plane window we could see flames rising from Dili.

It took two weeks before peacekeepers went in and by then the country was changed beyond recognition. Mass destruction and looting were common with many areas without tap water, electricity, and everywhere without phones. Many thousands of Timorese were kidnapped and forced at gunpoint over the border to West Timor. Many thousand others fled to the hills. Two months later I went back with some trepidation. How would it be changed? Would everyone I knew be alive? Most of all I thought of the large, Timorese family I had lived with during my visit. Would they all still be there?

Returning to Timor was revealed to be a joyful occasion. Within five minutes of my arrival, as I trudged down the road hoping to find a taxi, a mini-bus pulled to a halt next to me. It was Alito and Ameo, two lads from the family. I hopped onboard and hugged them and within minutes I was back at my old home and saw everyone. Everyone was alive. They hadn't expected I would come back and thought I might forget them. I told them not to be silly, how could I ever forget them?

They showed me around the house. They were some of the lucky ones, as it hadn't been burnt down, but had been robbed. No more cold water - the fridge was gone. Only two out of the six kitchen chairs were left. The TV was there, but only because they had taken it with them to the hills. For over a month they had lived outdoors in the hills with very little food and water and watched their city burn below them. Lito, a son in law, had tried to go back to the house for food, but while returning to the hills the military saw him. He had to drop the food when they shot at him. Once safe, he stopped running and started crying.

A couple of days later, Aluci told me about her adventures. She had been in the home when I left Timor, but it had been too dangerous to help and I had worried most about her. She'd had a tough time and had been away from home for over two months. Initially in hiding in the house then she was taken over the border to a camp in West Timor, then escaped it and hid for two weeks. She then travelled to another camp and managed to get a flight back to Timor. For two months she had been terrified of being killed or raped. She's seventeen years old.

What had happened to the Araujo family, happened to the entire population of Timor. Everyone had a story and a near escape, but remarkably all of my friends were alive. If I had lived in Suai, in the Western part of East Timor, that definitely wouldn't have been the case. There were two months of terror that afflicted the entire population. For many East Timorese still held in camps in West Timor, the terror is continuing. What I couldn't help noticing most of all is that all the Timorese I knew were thinner and older. Those two months had changed them.

The remit of my visit, other than finding my friends, was to talk to the different activist groups like the students or the womens' groups and find out the issues concerning them. Most of them had nothing and needed basics like computers and paper and chairs and desks. Yet, it was remarkable they were managing with so little. Someone, who had visited many countries after crises, said that the Timorese were getting their country going with remarkable speed.

What made the visit doubly heart-warming to me was a realisation that there was a still a place for the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign in Timor. While we can never fund these organisations to the same scale as the UN can, in many ways our support means more. We were with them before and they don't want us to forget them now.

I visited schools who were eager to get in contact with Irish students and practice their English. I met the Timorese scouts and they asked to me to contact the Irish scouts for them. Lito asked me to get him a dictionary. Our neighbour wants a walkman. It doesn't take much for us to help them and the small gesture means so much. One method of supporting the Timorese is by linking Irish schools to Timorese schools.

What they want to know most of all, in their new struggle to forge a new country, is that we have not forgotten them.