| Subject: Liliana:
the dark side of E Timor's struggle for freedom
The Australian 19 Dec 99
Liliana: the dark side of freedom
Specialist treatment is the only hope to
give a little Dili girl a happy future, reports Walkley Award winner JAN
MAYMAN
LILIANA is a child of East Timor, the
world's newest nation for the new millennium.
Eight years old, she is just one victim
of the military savagery that devastated her land after its people voted
for freedom from Indonesia.
Photographer John Kenneth and I found her
after a long search in the chaos of Dili.
We had a letter to her father from his
refugee brother in Britain.
Through a mutual friend, he had pleaded
with us to find Liliana and somehow get her to Australia for medical help.
We learnt that her right eye had been
destroyed by shrapnel when Indonesian soldiers and militia gunmen fired on
3000 Catholics sheltering in their church grounds.
They took refuge with their spiritual
leader, Nobel Laureate Bishop Carlos Belo, when the Indonesians launched a
campaign of terror and mass destruction against the East Timorese after
they voted for independence last August.
Scores of men, women and children were
killed or wounded in the September 6 church bloodbath, described by an
official Indonesian human- rights report as a site of mass murder.
Liliana was just one of the casualties.
Some were killed in the bishop's private
chapel now roofless, empty and abandoned.
There are bullet marks and sinister
stains on its walls and bullets still lying on the floor.
A bullet-scarred Madonna statue is
faceless and stained with gunpowder.
Nearby is a sign saying that the chapel
was dedicated to Mary, Queen of Peace.
"They slaughtered us like
animals," said Liliana's father, Macario Trinidade, his eyes dull
with anguish.
"We were unarmed and helpless. When
they shot Liliana, I hugged her to me as she screamed and fainted.
"It was all I could do, I thought we
would all die, my wife, Luisa Maria, and our baby Erena, aged three.
Liliana was bleeding from her eye and from wounds in her head."
After the first round of killings, the
Trinidades saw their beloved Bishop Belo confronted by Indonesian army
officers.
"They told him he had to leave
us," Mr Trinidade said. "He pleaded to stay but they made him
go. Our bishop insisted on praying with us before he went. He told us to
remain quiet and not to move. Then the militia took him away in a car.
"We feared he would be killed, that
we would be shot, too. After he left, we gave up our lives to God and
prepared to die.
"We had already seen a man we knew
killed right in front of us. We saw Green Berets (Indonesian commandos)
shooting people as they tried to escape. Blood was everywhere."
Mr Trinidade, 30, a former clerk, was
anxious to have it recorded that he saw Indonesian army officers trying to
halt the frenzied violence.
"I could see them trying to restrain
the soldiers," he said.
"I heard one officer, Colonel
Caitano, say 'The shooting must stop'. I was in panic, but I remember
hearing him say this."
He added: "One of the militia was a
good man he tried to protect us. Eventually, the commanding officers
managed to regain control."
As the dead and dying lay around them,
the terrified congregation watched for hours as TNI and militia troops
burned the bishop's residence and chapel, then removed evidence of their
barbarity.
"We saw many of our friends dragged
off, some dead, some still alive," said Mr Trinidade.
"We have heard that others were
chained together and thrown in the sea to drown.
"We know many were taken off to
prison camps in West Timor.
"We do not know what has happened to
them."
Tens of thousands of East Timorese are
still missing today.
After the massacre in the bishop's
compound it was a whole day before Liliana's parents could get medical
help for her, and have her empty eye socket stitched up.
Although she still smiles often, she is
nervous and restless and complains of odd feelings in her head.
Her parents fear that life-threatening
pieces of shrapnel may be lodged in her skull.
"We want to take her to Australia
for treatment so she can have an artificial eye, but we have no
money," Mr Trinidade said.
With his family, he exists now on rice
handouts from international aid agencies, like most of the East Timorese
population.
He shares a small, two-bedroom house with
11 other people and is grateful that, unlike most houses in Dili, it still
has a roof.
There is no electricity, gas, plumbing,
phone system, television or radio.
Cooking is done on an open wood fire.
Like most other East Timorese, the Trinidades have to walk everywhere in
40C heat with up to 80 per cent humidity.
The scale of destruction in Dili is
mind-numbing. It is a city of ruined and mainly roofless buildings, where
East Timorese clear rubble with their bare hands in the blazing heat
because they have no tools, let alone bulldozers.
Clean water is scarce and expensive, so
they are forced to drink from polluted wells. Children are dying every day
from gastric and respiratory diseases.
Tuberculosis is rife and medical clinics
are overwhelmed with patients.
Hospitals, offices, shops, libraries,
banks and vehicles everything was destroyed or looted by the retreating
Indonesian army in what Indonesia's own government human rights
investigators called an "orchestrated scorched-earth policy"
supervised by senior army officers.
Tension is mounting now in Indonesia,
where army leaders are calling for their accusers to be punished, and
warning of more military violence if they are forced to stand trial for
war crimes.
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