APSN Banner

Military-backed reign of terror stalks Dili

Source
Agence France Presse - April 17, 1999

Dili – They lay hugging the floor, screaming and weeping in terror as the shots and rocks blasted through the windows at the front of the house, trapped and unarmed.

They were 30 of the some 126 refugees from earlier violence who had been camping for months in the spacious backyard of prominent East Timorese pro-independence leader Manuel Carrascalao's house in the East Timor capital Dili.

At the front of the house, beyond the smashed windows, were the attacking pro-Indonesian militia, at the back high walls which cut off all avenues of escape.

By the end of the Saturday the fate of the refugees was unclear – local residents described around 20 bodies strewn on the lawn in front of the house and another four in a garden next door.

An AFP journalist and a French radio journalist were inside the house at the time of the attack. They were roughed up at gunpoint and marched off when they walked out the house shouting above the noise of the firing that they were foreign journalists.

Only a handful of the terrified refugees managed to escape in the confusion to the nearby house of Nobel laureate Bishop Carlos Ximines Belo, where Manuel had been in talks with Irish Foreign Minister David Andrews.

In Jakarta Mario Viegas Carrascalao, Manuel's brother and a member of Indonesia's Supreme Advisory Council, confirmed that his nephew 18-year-old nephew Manuelito had been shot dead in the house. The AFP journalist was the last person to see him alive.

Mario said he had learned that the militia rounded up the refugees and carted them off to an unknown location. "This is the usual method when they want to get rid of people without leaving any evidence," he said.

The Carrascalao house was not the only target of the some 1,500 militia who criss-crossed the deserted city streets in trucks throughout the afternoon, targetting houses of known independence activists, trashing a newspaper office, the office of a human rights group, burning some buildings and beating up their occupants.

One foreign journalist who rode with the convoy for two hours described the grisly hunt, which went on for hours unchecked by police or military, all of whom stayed in their barracks.

"They stopped in front of targetted houses, started shooting, then burned them. At least five people they just set on and beat them. It looked as if two of them were beaten to death, I don't know," he said.

He said that as they drove past the military and police barracks in the city, they exchanged "high fives" with the troops inside. "How many did you kill today," asked one soldier, according to the journalist who speaks fluent Indonesian. "We put two to sleep, but we are not finished yet," one of the militia yelled back as the truck roared off on another mission.

On Friday, Manuel Carrascalao told the AFP correspondent in Dili: "They will probably put rifles in the ruins of our house so that they can say we attacked them. You can see for yourself that the only thing that could be used as a weapon here are the kitchen knives."

He and other pro-independence activists, who have learned to live with death threats from the Indonesia army-backed militia, had plenty of warning of the attacks.

Threatening leaflets distributed days earlier had list of names, and swore to "clean" the city of pro-independentists, enough to intimidate all but the toughest.

At nightfall, the few foreign journalists in Dili found themselves with their film confiscated under threat of militiamen carrying wooden staves, and the hotel was ordered not to serve them food.

Outside the city was eerily silent and dark, all shops shuttered and no one on the streets. There is not a soldier to be seen, the AFP journalist said.

Country