We arrived in Dili on the morning flight from Singapore, looking curiously at our fellow passangers—many of whom turned out to be Cuban doctors—and endlessly curious at what this country would bring. We waited for our visas, looking with wide eyes at the UN police, somehow excited that they came from different countries yet were somehow here; and everyone on the plane, it seemed, had something to do here. Only a few of them looked like they could be holidaymakers or tourists. We chatted about skiing in Switzerland with the South African in line for the visa in front of us, but without asking what brought him here. Visas are available to pretty much anyone on arrival for US$30, and each person’s name, passport number, and other information is entered by hand into a large ledger book, whereupon the visa itself—a large stamp with blanks to be filled in by the actual immigration officer—is issued. We retrieved our bags and found Juvenal, “Juvy,” our host’s driver, and set off through Dili.
My first impressions of Dili is that it is unlike anything I’ve seen so far. The people selling fruits and vegetables on the side of the road were familiar, but the general state of things were more reminiscent of pictures I’d seen of African villages than of anything I’d seen so far in SE Asia. A few burned-out or destroyed buildings were to be seen, here and there, a marked contrast to the Palacio da Governo (or however it’s called)—still splendid, despite being a historic Portuguese colonial building in a country with a rough history—and the done-up waterfront promenade, full of people out for walks and cuddling couples. A giant zig zag of one-way streets, though I was soon lost on the many corners and turns we had taken from the airport, the city is actually quite small and not too difficult to navigate. One stretch of road seemed to be a giant open-air market, congested with taxis and motorbikes and everyone on the streets, hauling around produce and hawking water and gasoline.
Our host lives on the south side of town, in buildings set amid leafy gardens—a mini jungle—and featuring a large terrace with large bamboo furniture. We’re shown our little bamboo-hut, a simple two-room affair offering all the comforts we need and a mosquito net to boot; the (bucket) bath is just around the corner. We’re given the keys to a little blue SUV with which we immediately and enthusiastically fell in love, and we set off, armed with the map in the Lonely Planet, to tour around Dili. The one-way streets are confusing, driving on the left is confusing, and watching out for kids, pedestrians, carts, motorcycles, people who suddenly stop, change lanes or do much of anything suddenly and/or without signaling, and the traffic lights we almost never see complicates the driving a bit, but we each take a turn and are soon on our way, with only minor detours (and a complicated reverse movement). The good thing about driving, though, is if you do something relatively “crazy,” i.e. stop suddenly, decide you really wanted to turn and so skip across several lanes to do so, or reverse by backing into traffic and blocking both directions, traffic adjusts, you’re not honked at angrily or glared at by the police, because everyone is doing the same thing.
Another point of mention is the continued presence of the UN, who, it seems, spend all of their time and likely inordinate quantities of gasoline driving about the city. Every fifteen seconds you see another UN vehicle, most of them “Polis”. Sometimes it’s just the U or just the N (as the other letter has fallen off). Perhaps they get awards for how many times they can drive every street in Dili in one hour, but at least none of this all even looks halfway serious.
We park at the promenade, walking past the fruit and the fish markets, seeing groups of young Timorese in school uniforms just hanging out, sitting around and chatting; here, it’s mostly separated by gender, though one young pair is visible strolling along the sand and another young pair—as a grinning boy hinted—was hiding in the bushes. A lot of people were just hanging around, watching the football game or just sitting, and empty bottles and wrappers littered the low grass and weeds. A falling-down statue paid homage, I assume, to independence, but the words were faded and grass was beginning to sprout from between the pavestones. The heat was oppressive and we moved sluggishly, sweating profusely; athletic-looking types jogged up and down the promenade and performed painful-looking contortions.
We drove up to see Jesus, perched high on a hill on the East side of town, built by the Indonesians a symbolic 27 metres tall, to represent Timor-Leste as Indonesia’s 27th province. It’s a nice (read: sweaty) hike up there, but the views are stunning, and the white sandy beach on the back side looks promising, curving along the inside of the cove and shimmering promises of white sand and solitude. The mountains stretch up above, here a deep, vibrant green, almost glowing. Sitting up on a hilltop and looking out to sea is like watching the stars – it gives a prescient sense of one’s own insignificance.
Juvy picked out our dinner, a massive Tuna fish the length of his arm and surely destined to feed another ten or fifteen people, plus chicken and chips and rice and vegetables – yet somehow, despite massive quantities of food we did them justice. The restaurant was directly on the water, graced by a gentle breeze as we perched on moveable furniture. Dili seems to be a very small world, so it was almost unsurprising to run into people our host knew, and only slightly more surprising to run into one of the few people with whom I’d made contact. It’s a city of 300,000, of which only a portion (though a noticeable one) are foreigners, so it’s not surprising that everyone knows everyone.
Our first full day out on our own sent us on a few errands before we headed out for the beautiful coastal road towards Liquiçia (pronounced, I think, LI-ki-sah). The road is a narrow two lanes, barely wide enough for dual directional traffic, and crumbling a bit at the edges like a bit of toast. Leaving town it winds its way along at the base of the hills, passing properties owned by oil companies and something which looks like a factory or manufacturing area, sprouting ugly steel out of the flat ground like metal insects; heavy trucks carry the product on down the road. But shortly thereafter the scenery gives way to little thatched bamboo huts sprinkled among the grassy shores, more or less with the look that most tropical beach resorts try—and fail—to imitate. We see little houses or structures rising out of mounds of earth, like meter-tall anthills sprouting a wooden and thatched canopy. Are these houses? My guess is some kind of underground storage, but perched not much above the water table, that doesn’t seem likely. After a straight stretch, misleadingly enticing us to believe we could go faster—this when we still believed the challenge of the road was its curves, and before we learned better—we were surprised to see the cars in front of us at a standstill; they’d stopped to negotiate a particularly tricky pothole.
Pothole. If the name originated because the holes were the size of pots, the Timorese variety needs to be called bathtubholes. Sometimes there was even more hole than road, and sometimes even then there wasn’t even enough shoulder to avoid the damage and we had to ease the car in and hope nothing on our undercarriage got stuck. It’s not that you have to slow down for rough patches, you have to come to a full stop and inch your way across. An added obstacle to driving is relatively small, usually black, brown, grey, or mottled colored, and tends to wander over the pavement, sometimes halting in the middle, with an apparent supreme indifference to death on four wheels bearing down on it: goats on the road.
We reached Liquiçia, deciding to go on to Maubere, porque no? As we trundled on our merry way, a bit of tantalizing beach caught our attention, and we determined that it was absolutely necessary we test out said beach for general swimability and because we were sweating, almost literally, buckets. Of course, as any little girl who plays soccer knows, changing in public without being arrested for indecent exposure is not problematic but looks ridiculous, so by the time we had each made it into our swimsuits we had attracted a noticeable crowd. And upon discovering that (a) a dip was sufficient and (b) the current was strong such that we left it at that and changed back into our civvies, the entire shade shelter near our car was filled with two dozen grinning faces watching our every move.
On the road again. We made it to Maubere, we made it past Maubere, and eventually turned around to have a gander at the Portuguese fort on our way back to Liquiçia, where we stoped for Nasi and veggies, and coffee. Squinting in to the sun and already sweating profusely, we wanted to have a look in, and take pictures of, the town of Liquiçia. Eleven years ago, in April1999, when over two thousand internally displaced were taking shelter in the church in Liquicia, members of various armed militia, with either overt or tacit cooperation with Indonesian military and police, attacked the church.
“They started to shoot everyone. Men whom they found outside the Parish house were hacked down. The militia members were accompanied by Kodim troops and the Brimob elements. They entered the residence of the church and they started to kill people with machetes and shoot people in the house. At the time there were still women, children and men in the complex. They started to kill the men first because they were closer to the door. The men had pushed the women and children to the back.”
Brimob troops assisted in the attack by throwing tear gas into the parish house, forcing the refugees to come out. As they ran from the church, they were hacked with machetes and knives, or shot. Pastor Rafael’s account continues:
“I saw the Brimob members break the parish house window and throw tear gas repeatedly into the Parish house until those who were sheltering inside ran out because they could not stand their eyes hurting. As the community ran out of the Parish house the Militia started to kill the men, but they did not kill the women and children. The children and women were allowed to leave the complex, whereas the men were hacked down.”
From the Robinson report, p.194, from the deposition of Pastor Rafael dos Santos.
The exact number of casualties is not known, as the bodies were taken away and dumped or buried in unknown locations, but many sources place the figure at between 30 and 60. Everywhere I go I hear ghosts. I didn’t ever know these peoples, but I have read many of their stories and the feeling of walking on hallowed ground stays with me as I walk the dusty streets. The place has a desolate, almost abandoned air; it doesn’t seem like anyone actually lives here, and there is barely a soul to be seen near and far. A row of buildings forlornly stretches up the hill, but we head instead towards the broken-down football pitch and what might once have been a playground for children. There are no children, and cows graze on it now. We take pictures of some baby goats in the gutter next to the street, and a few of the almost deserted-looking place. A few old villas hint at better times long gone, a few rolls of barbed wire here and there hint at darker times not too distant, but none of it holds many hints as to what the future might hold.
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