On one side, a priest, the guerrilla husband, Our Lady of Fatima. The daughter and son-in-law, in the best tribal wedding style, swathed in colorful traditional fabrics and horned hats that could have belonged to a Viking. On the other side, the imprisoned brother, condemned for wanting the country freed from Indonesia.
The people framed on the walls of Linda’s living room watched me that Saturday in September 1998. The eyes on Indonesia-occupied Timor always seemed to monitor someone. Sitting on that sofa, I had the same sensation of walking through some streets of the capital Dili or through the corridors of my hotel.
That day in particular had been tense. It wasn’t easy to get permission to go up to the guerrilla’s central camp in the mountains. It would be the high point of more than a month covering the Timorese struggle against the invasion and of as many weeks interviewing key people in other countries in order to understand the war in this corner of Asia that, lo and behold, speaks Portuguese.
Just in case, he had closed the account at the hotel. I left luggage, money, notes, documents with a sister at the Convento das Salesianas. The army wouldn’t have the courage to invade the nuns’ house. Not at that moment, when Indonesia was trying to secure international support to get out of an unprecedented economic quagmire — a crisis that paved the way for Timor’s independence.
“Julio called me. Said he had a problem. You’re going up alone with the messengers,” Linda said. The presence of Julião, who I was close to, gave me a feeling of tranquility.
When I visited the Santa Cruz cemetery, where, in 1991, hundreds of youths were massacred by the Indonesian army during the burial of a member of the resistance, he sidestepped an approach by soldiers. Images of the deaths helped alert the world to the ongoing atrocities.
Moonless sky, dark night. The stars competed with the streetlamps to see who lit the least on the streets of Dili, the capital of East Timor. Dry. Thirst. Sleep. There was no time to rest or eat. The sun had already set when a jeep came to pick me up. I was asked to enter quickly, as there might be a spy nearby. “So you are the Brazilian? I thought you looked like Ronaldinho.”
We jumped from house to house between Dili and the interior of the island, always waiting for a window of opportunity to advance safely. In one of the residences, they began to discuss the best path to take, in Tetum – the most important of the dozens of native dialects and, therefore, one of the official languages. Despite the lessons, the only language he understood was the buzzing of mosquitoes.
We started the walk at midnight. For six hours, we walked almost non-stop, most of the time inside a river, with water up to our waist, so as not to leave any traces. When we arrived at the guerrilla’s central camp, it was dawn. Most of the guerrillas were already on their feet.
Commander Taur Matan Ruak came to me. Smiling, he invited me for coffee. It was the first time that someone from a Portuguese-speaking country had entered the central camp of Falintil (Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor Leste). Fourteen years after I interviewed him, amid grenades and sacks of rice, he would go on to be elected the third president of independent East Timor.
When accompanying an armed patrol to check the terrain and search for possible spies, I saw, from the top of a mountain, a true natural fortress. On one side, a gorge, an obligatory passage for anyone who wanted to enter or leave. Outposts atop it made an enemy invasion nearly impossible. On the other, a series of difficult-to-access cliffs guarded by fixed posts.
The island goes from sea level to the almost 3,000 meters of altitude of its summit, the Tatamailau, in 40 km in a straight line. Despite living practically surrounded by water, the Timorese are more a people of the mountains than of the sea. Some, however, venture outside. José Ramos-Horta helped lead the resistance in exile, an action that led to him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. A month before meeting Matan Ruak, he managed to interview him in Lisbon. With independence, he became the second president elected in 2007. And this Friday (20), he takes office again.
There was no heavy equipment, no cannon or bazooka in the guerrillas. Only light weapons and grenades. The same noises of rifles hitting the chest, arming and disarming were heard all day. The main source of material was the arrest of Indonesians in quick robberies. “We steal their weapons, they steal ours, we steal them again and so on,” explained one of the guerrillas.
Xanana Gusmão, even in prison, was considered Falintil’s top commander. Called by some as the Timorese Nelson Mandela, he was the first president elected after independence. A few weeks after leaving the camp, I interviewed Gusmao at Cipinang Prison in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. He carried a hidden tape recorder, a false ID that the East Timorese resistance had fabricated to impersonate a local citizen, and an intense fear of being caught.
The three meals at the camp took place on a strict schedule. Deer, eel, monkey – game meat in general. Rice, pasta and pepper. The guerrillas did not go hungry, either with the help of the Timorese or international organizations. In front of my thanks for being served, the reprimand: “Everyone does their chores for the good of everyone. It’s not necessary to say that here”.
Building fraternity is not easy. The resistance of the Maubere population to annexation, which took place in 1975, made it possible for differences that blocked the consolidation of national union to be channeled towards a single objective. At the same time, it strengthened symbols of a Timorese identity, such as Catholicism and the Portuguese language, which were not so relevant under Portuguese rule.
Despite episodes of political violence in the last 20 years after independence, including the attacks on Ramos-Horta and Gusmão, democracy and freedom of expression in Timor are much greater than in other nations in the region. The main enemy to be defeated is still poverty – the country depends on oil exploration at sea and the sale of coffee, and more than 40% live in poverty.
Guerrillas were happy to find a Brazilian. They believed that we were rooting for their freedom and they saw our country as a stronger cousin. I confess that I was ashamed to say that the overwhelming majority of us did not even know of their existence. Brazil, which practically ignored the island in the years of occupation, helped after independence, sending teachers and technicians. Then the support cooled down.
After one of the longest days of my life, I rolled over on one of the camp beds, made of bamboo, raised a few feet off the ground to avoid scorpions and snakes. The mosquitoes wouldn’t let up, which led me to a pact: help yourselves, but in silence. Then I realized how expensive this deal was. On his return to Brazil, with a fever that did not go down, he would stay in hospital for a long time with a severe case of malaria.
On my living room wall, framed Timorese still watch over my daily life, reminding me all the time that freedom is not a gift, but a collective construction. And that armies can be swallowed up by the resistance of a people.
