| |
Comment on this article
The Land that Knew Hell
For those who survived the massacres in East Timor, justice depends on historical truth. Ben Kiernan is helping them find it.
November/December 2003
by David Case
David Case has written for Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. He was a Ford Environmental Journalism Fellow in Indonesia in 2002.
Several hours north of Australia by turbo-prop plane, on a narrow coastal crescent below rugged mountains, lies Dili, capital of the world’s newest independent nation. In the center of Dili, not far from the harbor, is the chief executive office building of the young government of East Timor. Above its entrance hangs a UN-blue tarp bearing the Portuguese words “Palacio das Cinzas”: Palace of Ashes.
From out front, on one of the many pleasant lanes that transect this quiet city, passersby can see the sun shining straight through the openings where the second-floor windows should be. The roof is gone. The intact floor of the second story is all that prevents monsoon downpours from flooding the president’s office below. Inside, the cement walls are heat-
curdled and stained black; twisted steel reinforcing rods jut at odd angles from the ceiling.
Formerly a department of motor vehicles, the edifice was one of many across East Timor that were burned during the summer of 1999. On August 30, in a UN-sponsored referendum, the populace voted overwhelmingly for independence. The Indonesian military’s response was to unleash thousands of murderous militia troops, who were so thorough in their work that, when the aggression was finally suppressed and international relief teams showed up, the relief workers had nowhere to stay. They resorted to leasing a huge floating hotel and sailing it into Dili’s harbor.
Four years later, the new nation is recovering not only from the 1999 hostility, but also from the preceding 24 years of military occupation by Indonesia, which left a quarter of the population dead. Peaceful and picturesque but dirt poor, East Timor has no resources to repair the burned-out buildings that line its streets. And so for now, its first president, Jose Alexandre “Xanana” Gusmao, makes do with this charred carcass of a building. His staff works in cubicles separated by flimsy plywood.
It’s nine o'clock in the morning, and the president is late to work; an assistant says that his meeting the night before lasted well into the morning hours. At the door of the Palace of Ashes, guards lean against an old wooden desk and smoke clove cigarettes, filling the lobby with a pleasant, spicy scent. Inside, as the day heats up, guests sit waiting on tattered upholstered chairs. They glance indifferently from time to time at a cartoon playing on a television in the corner, its colorful animated figures barely visible behind a blizzard of static.
Among the guests is Ben Kiernan, a tall, slender man with a well-trimmed beard and thick hair, brown but graying. For his audience with the president of East Timor, he wears khaki pants, a black short-sleeved polo shirt, and gray high-tech running shoes, and has brought along his 16-year-old son, Derry. Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale, recruited in 1990 for his expertise in Southeast Asia. Fifty years old and originally from Australia, he is popular among students, and it’s easy to see why. An avowed egalitarian—he would never think of excluding his son from this visit with a head of state—he is generous with his time, and he has an uncanny ability to make people feel welcome, important even, in his presence. One night after Kiernan has delivered a lecture in Canberra, I watch him give his e-mail address to a nervous undergrad seeking guidance. “I’m traveling so it might take me some time to respond, but I will get back to you,” he assures her.
Kiernan is a scholar of comparative genocide—a professional chronicler of atrocity. For a quarter century he has studied some of humanity’s most vile events, starting with a dissertation on the Khmer Rouge regime in Phnom Penh, which was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. In 1998, he put Yale at the vanguard of a new academic field by founding the university’s Genocide Studies Program, the first in the country, according to Business Week. It has conducted work on Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, and the Holocaust, among others.
But Kiernan has never been content to limit his work to academics. He is also known as a spokesman for the often-forgotten victims of mass murder. By 1978, as a young PhD student, he had begun urging Western nations to stop supporting the Khmer Rouge and to prosecute its leaders. The fight would pit him against Washington, which backed the regime for more than a decade. In the mid-1990s, when his side finally prevailed, Kiernan won a U.S. State Department grant to document the regime’s crimes. The grant, administered by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, enabled him to uncover the cache of records that, for the first time, irrefutably demonstrated that the Khmer Rouge leaders had personally ordered the torture and murder of citizens. The records paved the way for a UN tribunal.
These days, when he’s not busy running the Genocide Studies Program or writing his history of genocide in the past five hundred years, Kiernan focuses his energy on East Timor. In 1999, he says, he saw a video clip on television of “an Indonesian-trained militia soldier hacking to death a Timorese, with a machete,” and ever since he has been trying to help East Timor recover. The chance is remote that the men who supervised the barbarities committed here will be held accountable. That would require an international tribunal, and while the UN has raised this possibility, East Timor’s leaders, running a country that is poor, internationally unimportant, and dependent on good relations with its former tormentor, can hardly spare the diplomatic capital needed to ensure that it materializes. Meanwhile, Ben Kiernan is doing his best to make sure the matter doesn’t slip into oblivion.
Kiernan will spend part of the summer of 2003 chasing down transcripts of Radio Fretilin—clandestine broadcasts by Timorese resistance fighters, who used two-way radios to communicate with sympathizers in Darwin, Australia. During the Indonesian occupation, Radio Fretilin was often the only way for information about the military’s atrocities to reach the outside world. “Radio Fretilin brought to the public’s attention facts that were difficult for the Australian government to see published, because of the close relationship between Canberra and Jakarta,” Kiernan explains. “The transcripts are a unique source of information on the worst crimes.”
And this morning, as the rising sun radiates withering heat into the lobby of the Palace of Ashes, Kiernan is waiting to interview Xanana Gusmao, who was often the voice of Radio Fretilin in the Timorese mountains and who is one of the few people alive who can be aptly compared to Nelson Mandela.
Finally, a small caravan of SUVs pulls up to the door. The guards at the desk leap to attention, and order the waiting guests do the same. Then the president strides through the burned-out lobby, nodding to his people.
President Gusmao, whom the Indonesians incarcerated for years, has an office strangely reminiscent of a prison cell. It’s a stark cement room with bare floors. The sole window, a small one near the ceiling, lets in almost no natural light. As a gesture to the room’s status, the walls have been painted; they are pale blue. On them hang recent pictures of Gusmao with the leaders of countries that once regarded him as an enemy: George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, and Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri.
When Kiernan enters the room, the president rises, flashes a smile, and embraces him, slapping his back. “Great to see you! How have you been?” he says, in richly accented English. The two men met in March 2001, when Kiernan headed a delegation of Yale’s East Timor Project to Dili, and then a month later when Gusmao delivered an address at Yale. (The East Timor Project is an assistance program initiated by the late Episcopalian bishop Paul Moore Jr. '41, a longtime fellow of the Yale Corporation. In 1989, Moore, one of the first Westerners allowed to visit East Timor since the Indonesians invaded in 1975, was so shocked by what he saw that he vowed to help the East Timorese.)
In the president’s office, we sit around a simple coffee table. Gusmao is pleased to hear that Kiernan has been producing scholarly work about his country. He needs foreigners, he says, scholars like Kiernan with iron-clad reputations, to make the world understand what happened here. Kiernan just delivered two lectures on East Timor in Australia, and an essay by another scholar is included in a recent book he co-edited, The Specter of Genocide. The essay’s author, Professor John Taylor of South Bank University in London, has been a visiting fellow at the Genocide Studies Program.
Kiernan tells the president that he is researching the East Timorese resistance—“Genocide scholarship hasn’t paid much attention to attempts to oppose genocidal regimes,” he explains. Gusmao is eager to fill him in on the details. So while guests wait in the mounting heat of the lobby, for the next two hours the president of East Timor relives, in halting but heartfelt English, the years of the occupation.
Before independence, Gusmao spent years on the run as a revolutionary in the mountains. When East Timor’s resistance was badly splintered, he unified it and rebuilt it into a spectacularly tenacious movement. Gusmao was known to deliver passionate speeches to inspire his people, his body sweating and trembling, his words bursting out like machine gun fire. Today, in an open-collared, steel-gray shirt and black dress trousers, his thick salt-and-pepper beard trimmed, the president cuts a more genteel figure. But as he talks, he keeps shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He chain-smokes, crushing the butts in an ashtray that quickly overflows.
For 450 years, East Timor was a Portuguese colony, a trading post for sandalwood on the fringe of the archipelago that became the Dutch East Indies. In 1949, the Dutch were ousted and the islands were unified as Indonesia—except for East Timor, which remained Portuguese. Then in 1974, a coup in Portugal ushered in a leftist government that was sympathetic to the colonies' aspirations for freedom. An independence movement blossomed. Its acronym, Fretilin, stands for Revolutionary Front for Independent East Timor. The East Timorese dreamed of self-rule.
However, the Indonesian government of President Suharto had other plans. Suharto sought, first by charm and then by force, to annex East Timor. Japan, Australia, the United States, and other Western nations largely sided with Indonesia, because Suharto controlled vast natural resources and was a staunch anti-Communist ally. Moreover, the U.S. military was eager to safeguard its access to the extremely deep straits off East Timor, where nuclear submarines could slip undetected between the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Despite the international opposition, Fretilin declared independence on November 28, 1975. Little more than a week later, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger indicated to Suharto that they would not oppose an invasion. The next day, troops poured in from the sea, land, and sky.
As John Taylor describes in his book East Timor: The Price of Freedom, the atrocities began within the first hours of the war. The invading troops rounded up hundreds of civilians and executed them at the wharfs in the center of the city; they forced onlookers, including the next victims, to count as they dumped the bodies one by one into the harbor. Soldiers pried terrified children from their mothers' arms before shooting the women.
In the coming twenty-four years, while the West remained mute, the Indonesian military inflicted a nightmare on East Timor. The troops deprived villagers of food for months, bombing fields so crops couldn’t be harvested. Some soldiers treated the East Timorese like playthings. According to a dispatch by Radio Fretilin, troops forced women to work in the fields, pulling plows like water buffaloes. Other testimony, submitted to the Australian senate, describes soldiers at a beach near Dili throwing children through the air before smashing their heads on rocks. Near the same picturesque beach, troops tied rocks to the legs of horrified East Timorese and dropped them from helicopters into the sea. By 1981, about 170,000 people—a quarter of the population—had been killed.
For a week and a half in Australia and East Timor, in taxis, over meals, on a three-hour bus ride, and, once, even before the morning’s first latte, Kiernan and I discuss mass murder. We talk about the history, geopolitics, and trends common to a phenomenon that has killed over 30 million people in the twentieth century. He is just as conversant with the Roman destruction of Carthage as he is with the atrocities in Europe in the 1940s. The Roman and Nazi genocides, he says, have a lot in common, “including a cultural prejudice, a militaristic expansionism, and an idealization of agricultural society. Both the Romans and the Nazis were driven, in part, by a contempt and fear of their urban entrepreneurial opponents, the Carthaginians and the Jews.”
One of the characteristics of genocides, Kiernan argues, is that powerful nations often deny, disbelieve, or show indifference to them. “When the Nazis embarked on the conquest of Poland and the extermination of millions of Jews, Poles, Roma, and other ‘undesirables,’ Adolf Hitler asked a revealing question: ‘Who ever heard of the Armenians?’” Kiernan says. The answer, of course, was no one. “Yet only a generation earlier, the Young Turks had killed two-thirds of the Armenian population. Hitler believed that the world would let him commit genocide with impunity.” Likewise, Kiernan points out that in Rwanda in 1994, Hutu leaders watched the world’s indifference to genocidal crimes in Bosnia and concluded that they too could get away with murdering their ethnic rivals, the Tutsi.
“While perpetrators of genocide seem to have benefited from their own comparative analysis of the potential and possibilities for genocide in the modern era,” Kiernan has written, “the rest of humanity has so far failed to learn all the lessons from the past that could lead to meaningful intervention in such catastrophes.” He founded the Yale Genocide Studies Program to support scholarship that would elicit these lessons: research and documentation, but with a mission. “Genocide is one of the most pressing human issues,” he tells me. “The GSP contributes to the prevention of genocide.”
The program began in 1998, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as a series of weekly seminars. Although it continues to sponsor lectures—more than a hundred to date, by intellectuals from all over the world—it has grown into an interdisciplinary research center, with projects in partnership with Yale’s law, medical, divinity, and other schools. The GSP (and its precursor, the Cambodian Genocide Program, which Kiernan founded in 1994) regularly assists foreign nationals from countries afflicted by genocide; its experts have trained dozens of Cambodians, East Timorese, and Rwandans to create databases for evidence. It has a project underway to compile digital satellite maps, with a grant from the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, showing the “before” and “after” of genocides in Bosnia, Guatemala, Sudan, and elsewhere.
Most of its scholarship, however, falls into one of three categories. One of these is the effort to discern long-term factors like poverty, war, and trauma, that may contribute to the rise of genocidal regimes. For example, says Kiernan, “Trauma often repeats itself from generation to generation. In Yugoslavia, the traumas of many Serbs who were victimized during World War II produced the second-generation traumas of Bosnia in the 1990s. Research- ers are exploring whether trauma is transmitted from parents to children by their behavior, so that children subconsciously relive or re-enact the violence to which their parents were subjected. Slobodan Milosevic may be an extraordinary example of this. Both of his parents committed suicide.”
A second area of research is on methods to punish perpetrators and help survivors recover. One project, run by psychiatry professor and GSP deputy director Dori Laub, is exploring ways to help Holocaust survivors in Israeli psychiatric hospitals. Because society provided them with no opportunity to share their ordeal, Laub writes, “their traumatic experiences remain encapsulated, causing the survivor to lead a double life: a robot-like semblance to normality with incessant haunting by nightmares and flashbacks.” Laub—who has vivid memories of his own internment in a World War II labor camp, Cariera de Piatra, where his father perished—is testing whether the illness can be treated by creating “an ongoing, videotaped testimonial dialogue between the patients and caregivers.”
Some of Kiernan’s own scholarship focuses on the GSP’s third research category: searching for the early warning signs of potentially genocidal movements. “I identify the common characteristics of genocidal regimes, and compare them to emerging political groups to see if they might have genocidal tendencies,” he explains. In theory, “if you find evidence of a particular sect or faction that exhibits the ideological elements that are already identified in previous genocides, you could have a way of predicting or anticipating a genocide should this particular group come to power. The racial rhetoric of the Hutu regime, for example, foreshadowed the 1994 bloodshed by a year or more.”
When the young Ben Kiernan chose to write his undergraduate honors thesis at Monash University on Cambodian history, he had no idea that the decision would lead him to spend his life studying genocide. He had planned to be a schoolteacher. The son of a Catholic solicitor and a part-Jewish full-time mother, Kiernan was the oldest of seven children born and raised in Melbourne. He learned from his father the importance of tolerance and human rights. His maternal grandfather, Abraham Gershon Silk, was a Polish Jew born in Australia. In the last year of Silk’s life, he told his grandson Ben, who was then 16, that he regretted not trying to help his relatives in Europe during the Holocaust. He had never heard from them afterward. “They are probably all dead,” he said.
After graduating from college in 1975 and working briefly as a tutor, Kiernan won a government scholarship for doctoral work at Monash. Again he focused on Cambodia, which by then was in the grip of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal Maoist revolution, led by Pol Pot. The outside world knew little about it. Western journalists and academics had learned immediately that they were not immune to the regime’s blood quest, and the United States and other Western nations were not eager to jeopardize their warming relations with China, a close ally of Cambodia.
For his PhD research, Kiernan got as close as he could to the atrocities, interviewing refugees in France and on the Thai border. In 1979, the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot, and Kiernan spent eight months in Cambodia over the next two years gathering victims' testimony. Out of this research came the books How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985) and The Pol Pot Regime (1996). Both were extensively cited by the UN commission that eventually recommended an international tribunal on the Cambodian genocide.
The Reagan and first Bush administrations, however, continued to recognize the deposed regime—which was waging guerrilla warfare from the jungles of northwest Cambodia—rather than the Vietnam-backed socialist government that held power in Phnom Penh. Thanks to Washington’s backing, throughout the 1980s Pol Pot’s deputies occupied Cambodia’s seat at the UN,
a situation Kiernan found appalling. He lobbied against it from every available podium. “Diplomats and politicians would try anything to make me go away,” he recalls. The U.S. government changed its position during the 1990s. In 1994, Congress passed the Cambodia Genocide Justice Act, mandating the administration to seek the evidence necessary to try the Khmer Rouge.
When the State Department contracted Kiernan for the job, he found himself suddenly provided with money, an office, and a staff in Phnom Penh. But many who had supported the Khmer Rouge, including the Heritage Foundation and Senators Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, attacked the investigation and Kiernan’s personal character. Someone dug up an article that Kiernan had written in an undergraduate magazine before he entered graduate school (an article he had long ago retracted) and used it to tar him as a communist and a Khmer Rouge sympathizer. (At the same time, he noted in Human Rights Review, the Khmer Rouge were calling him an “arch war criminal” and an “accessory executioner of the U.S. imperialists.”)
Nevertheless, within months, Kiernan had established the Cambodian Documentation Center in Phnom Penh to gather and catalogue evidence. Among tens of thousands of other documents, he and his staff found the smoking gun that Con-gress sought: the 50,000-page Santebal archive, which showed that Pol Pot and other senior leaders had directly supervised the mass killings.
That there would be a jackpot like the Santebal archive, Kiernan explains, is a consistent trait of genocides. “The paper trail is usually extensive,” he says. “The orders have to be written down, acknowledged with another piece of paper, and the results recorded with another. To destroy so many people is a massive bureaucratic operation.”
In East Timor, the evidence-collecting role is being led by a UN-sponsored committee: the Commission on Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation. Kiernan is following its progress and helping with documentation where he can. Before his audience with President Gusmao, he takes me to hearings organized by the commission.
The hearings take place in the courtyard of a former Indonesian prison. Several cells have been preserved, including miniscule, lightless solitary-confinement chambers and one cell whose doorway is partly blocked with concrete. A truth commission official tells me that the Indonesians used to fill the cell with water, forcing prisoners to stand for hours or days at a time.
We walk in past photographs of famine victims—children squatting in the dirt, their skin clinging to their bones and the submissive look of starvation in their eyes—and take seats in plastic chairs, huddling up with interpreters. The witnesses sit behind a banquet table, protected from the sun by a canopy. All day, amplifiers blast their solemn words to the crowd, and cameras broadcast them across the country. There is, however, no sign of international press.
Today, the topic is the late 1970s, when civilians were indiscriminately driven from villages, detained in camps, and later resettled in the lowlands in an effort to deny aid to Fretilin fighters. A soft-spoken man, Francisco Soares Pinto, tells about life in the camps. There was no food, so the 6,000 inmates quickly exhausted the coconuts that grew on the grounds. Some ate banana stalks, which made them sick. Many succumbed to beriberi and cholera. Others starved. As many as 50 people died each week. Later, Soares was thrown into prison—the very prison where the hearings are being held—because his family remained in the mountains, where they might aid the rebels. The guards forced him to strip, he says, and crawl all day back and forth across the same courtyard where he now sits testifying, until his hands and knees wore literally to the bone.
Another witness, Maria Josa da Costa, a neatly dressed woman with a troubled face, recounts her experience during the “encirclement and annihilation” campaigns. These began in late 1977, after the United States, France, and Great Britain provided planes and ammunition that bolstered Indonesia’s “counter-insurgency” capabilities. In 1978 the military attacked da Costa’s village. “Warships fired from the sea, warplanes attacked from the air,” she recalls. Soldiers doused the brush with gasoline, then torched it before marching in. The scene recurred all over East Timor. Da Costa, who was a teenager at the time, watched her grandmother scream for water as the flames swallowed her.
In the Palace of Ashes, Gusmao lights another cigarette and tells Kiernan about Fretilin’s struggle to alert the world to the Indonesian violence. In May 1981, the Indonesians had begun using a new tactic against Fretilin (and its armed wing, called Falantil). They forced some 80,000 East Timorese men and boys to join arms and form human chains across the island, and then marched this “fence of legs” through the mountains to flush out revolutionaries. Fretilin, vastly outnumbered from the start, was soon demoralized and its troops drastically reduced.
It was in this grim time that Gusmao took command. He resuscitated Fretilin, unifying its splintered factions and taking it underground to more effectively oppose the Indonesians, who by now had near-total control of the island. He became a legend to the shattered populace. From their hideouts in the rugged, sun-parched mountains of East Timor, the resistance fighters had only one channel of communication: a Wagner 50-watt single sideband transceiver. They kept the transmissions short, because the Indonesian troops shelling them from below could trace their position from the radio signal. When the broadcast was over, they ran. The biggest problem was that the battery that powered the radio was extremely heavy. “We had a very strong man to carry the battery,” Gusmao says. “His nom de guerre was Hadomi.” After six months Hadomi could barely handle the load. Gusmao’s men struggled to keep the transmissions going, but the Indonesians killed Hadomi and eventually Radio Fretilin was silenced.
Gusmao agrees with Kiernan that an archive of Radio Fretilin transmissions would be a key historic record today. But he isn’t convinced that it was worth the cost at the time. “We tried to denounce the atrocities,” he says. “But the world was indifferent.”
In 1992, Indonesian soldiers captured Gusmao in a hideout near Dili. Fortunately for him, East Timor was finally drawing some international attention. The Pope had visited in 1989, and in 1991 an undercover British journalist had filmed Indonesian troops opening fire on a funeral procession. The Indonesians couldn’t simply dispose of the Fretilin leader in a remote ravine, as they had done with his predecessor, Nicolau Lobato. Gusmao was given a life sentence (later commuted to 20 years) and imprisoned in Jakarta. But he was able to smuggle messages out regularly, and some scholars believe that he was even more effective in captivity, as a symbol of the struggle, than he had been as an outgunned guerrilla.
In 1997, the East Timorese got a break from an unexpected quarter: the Asian financial collapse. The economic crisis in Indonesia triggered street riots, bloodshed, and, within a year, the fall of Suharto. His successor, President B.J. Habibie, desperately needed multilateral loans to stanch the chaos. To court international support, he proposed a referendum in which the East Timorese would choose either autonomy within Indonesia or independence. But while Habibie made headlines by cooperating with the United Nations, Indonesian generals were secretly recruiting and arming thousands of East Timorese to form pro-Indonesia militias. Militia violence mounted throughout 1999 and climaxed after the August 30 vote. They raped women and murdered more than 1,000 people. They slaughtered villagers' livestock and burned their homes. In one incident, they opened fire and lobbed grenades into a church in Suai, killing three priests and a hundred women and children who had fled inside for safety. UN officials overseeing the referendum—with neither the means nor the mandate to restore order—watched helplessly before fleeing to save their own lives.
The generals hoped that the militia violence would incite full-scale civil war in East Timor, so that Indonesia could step in, cancel the referendum, and impose martial law. But Gusmao, who had been released to house arrest in Jakarta and was exercising his influence over the resistance fighters by phone and fax, urged his troops to stay quiet—to let the carnage go unchecked.
It was a costly gamble, but it stymied the generals' plan. Dozens of foreign journalists who had arrived for the referendum witnessed and reported on the Indonesia-backed atrocities. News programs around the world broadcast footage of the murders and arson. Finally, after hundreds of thousands of Timorese had fled to the mountains and 70 percent of the country’s buildings had been destroyed, Australian troops arrived under the UN banner to quell the mayhem. In late 1999, as the last cinders stopped smoldering, East Timor emerged with its freedom.
For the past few years, life has been relatively peaceful in East Timor. In the hills and along the beautiful coastline, villagers are rebuilding their communities. In the capital, the air is fresh, the pace of life relaxed.
On a street not far from Gusmao’s Palace of Ashes, skinny children gather near a cluster of cafes that serve the peacekeepers and the relief workers, who still perform many of the country’s basic services. The kids stand less than navel-high and wear only shorts, their flesh suntanned the color of a muddy river. When I see them, I can’t help but think of the starving children in the photos at the truth commission hearings. Life is better for these kids. They smile and often joke with the foreigners. They run barefoot along the street, offering to wipe dust from the Land Cruisers to earn some pocket change for their families, if they have them, or for their next meal. Late in the day, as the heat subsides, some head for the beach to play soccer.
But four in ten of East Timor’s citizens live below the poverty line, and many war orphans and children conceived by rape during the 1999 violence are cared for by the government or charities. Although the country has its independence, it has little else. Schools and hospitals have been burned. Many of the educated elite are dead. In the capital there is an acute shortage of skilled workers, yet half the population is unemployed. Poverty is rampant. Alcoholism is high. And there remains uneasiness about the future. Many former independence fighters are unemployed and disaffected; some are suspected of instigating a recent riot in which the prime minister’s house was burned. Across the border in Indonesia, thousands of militia members—perpetrators of the 1999 violence—remain in refugee camps, perhaps counting the days until mid-2004, when the UN peacekeepers depart.
With so many problems to address, with so much at stake for the young nation’s future, Gusmao spends all morning talking with Kiernan about the past. He wants help coming up with a precise death toll. He hopes to create a museum. He’s seeking assistance in gathering documents from around the world.
Why is Xanana Gusmao obsessed with history? He gives three reasons. “First, it is something that we owe to the people”—the “small people” of East Timor, who suffered terrible oppression and still prevailed. Another reason he illustrates with an anecdote: “Two days ago, an old man came to me and said, 'I am dying. How can I tell the experience of our resistance? I am dying!' The old people, above 50 years old, are only between 7 to 10 percent of the population. If we delay, many people will die.” And the deeds of the resistance will never be known.
Finally, Gusmao believes that history must record the brutalities his people en-dured. At one point during our meeting, in the midst of a technical discussion over whether the killing fits within the legal definition of genocide, his mind wanders. He stares into the distance, takes a drag from his cigarette, and suddenly exclaims in a hushed, forceful voice: “They crucified people.” The words and the tone take us by surprise. “They crucified people. They cut the ear off of the husband—alive—and gave it to the wife. They cut the penis off men. They crucified people! Horrible, horrible!”
It’s not every day that historians of genocide meet with heads of state. The heavy lifting for Kiernan usually involves interviewing witnesses, hunting for documents, and sorting through papers. In Canberra, he takes me to the National Library of Australia, where he leafs through an archive recently bequeathed by a member of the Australian group that received and tried to publicize the Radio Fretilin broadcasts. Most of the pages are filled with blocks of seemingly meaningless letters and numbers; they are in code, but the archive includes the encryption key.
Kiernan holds up one document, written in Portuguese. It contains the text of an intercepted telegram. “This was written by Fretilin’s information minister, obviously passed on by an opponent of his, who labels him a traitor,” he says. Halfway down the page, there’s a list of senior Fretilin leadership. Kiernan looks at the date on the telegram. “Five or six of the names I recognize on this list were killed in the following year,” he says.
This is one of only two occasions when I will see Kiernan visibly stirred. The other is when he tells me about visiting the infamous Khmer Rouge killing fields of Choeng Ek in 1980, just as the bodies were being exhumed. The site is now a morbid tourist attraction, with a glass-walled memorial stupa containing skulls of the murdered. Kiernan has visited Cambodia many times since 1979, but has never returned to Choeng Ek. “I understand it’s a moving memorial. I haven’t seen it. I can’t really do it very easily,” he says, and hesitates, grimacing. “I don’t want to go back there.”
But most of the time, Kiernan is matter-of-fact, discussing brutalities with the historian’s enthusiasm for dry, precise detail. Over the days we spend together, I find myself perplexed by his bottomless capacity to contemplate atrocity. He seems neither obsessed nor traumatized, and it’s hard to figure out how he copes. He hasn’t cultivated the morbid sense of humor associated with members of other terminally grim professions—cancer surgeons, say, or undertakers. Instead, the historian of carnage is a well-balanced family man, fun to be around. He seems happy. I try to probe him about how a quarter century spent investigating barbarity has affected him. Does it depress him? Does he ever want out? He says only, “I think it’s important work worth doing, and I’m glad I’ve done it.”
I’m not the first person to be struck by Kiernan’s serenity. A reviewer for the newspaper The Scotsman, critiquing The Pol Pot Regime, wrote, “Professor Kiernan has acquired superhuman qualities of detachment.” Gregory Stanton '82JD, a close friend of Kiernan’s and president of Genocide Watch, offers another explanation. “There’s no way you can avoid becoming angry doing this type of work,” he says. “Many people get depressed. They go under. Ben has reacted by channeling this into an extraordinary outpouring of extremely useful scholarship.” Kiernan’s wife, Glenda Gilmore, the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale, agrees. “He researches and writes on tragedies,” she e-mails me, “but it would be much more tragic to him if genocide happened and no one knew about it or took action. So, in a difficult way, his work uplifts him because he knows that he is making those lost lives count for more.”
Youk Chhang, the director of the Cambodian Documentation Center (which Kiernan has turned over to its Cambodian staff), is one of the most immediate beneficiaries of his work. “I was a child who grew up during war, lived during genocide, and was suppressed by the communist ideology,” he tells me. “So what’s most important to me is freedom and independence. Ben Kiernan gave me the freedom and independence to combat genocide. The UN tribunal will not bring back 1.7 million lives. But it will serve as a very important resource to help Cambodians leave their past behind and move on with their lives, and it can be a source where our kids can learn from what happened. That to me is the meaning of justice.”
For Kiernan, the East Timor trip has a personal meaning. He visited here as a student in 1972, when the island was still a Portuguese colony, and that first foray into Asia cemented his professional interest in the continent. This time around, he wants to show the countryside to his son Derry. The two have traveled through Europe and Asia together and last year backpacked a section of the Appalachian Trail.
We rent a jeep and drive out into the mountains. Just ten minutes out of town, the road is sinuous and steep, a constant series of hairpin turns that snake up through tawny dry-season grasses. We pass thatched shacks and the carcasses of dwellings destroyed in 1999. But the country is clearly rebounding. Barefoot children play in the street. Workers with shovels and pickaxes are repairing the tarmac.
Kiernan reminisces about the decades he spent campaigning for justice for Cambodia. He remembers well the cool reception to his message when he arrived in the United States in 1990, when the Khmer Rouge flag was still flying at the United Nations. “Imagine the swastika flying in New York in the 1950s, with the Nazis still maintaining an army on the border of Europe and threatening to return to power,” says Kiernan. He swerves to avoid a large pig crossing the road.
He’s pleased with the trip. In meetings here he has finally traced the owner of a garage in Sydney he’s been hearing rumors about, which holds a major archive of materials from Radio Fretilin. When he returns to Australia, he’ll make arrangements to have it photocopied. Then the documents will have to be catalogued and analyzed. The archive probably doesn’t hold anything comparable to the Santebal records; it won’t likely implicate Indonesian generals. But it could make a significant contribution to the academic understanding of genocide, or it could tell a story that will finally capture the world’s imagination and bring East Timor into international public consciousness. Or it could simply help the East Timorese remember their history. “True documented history is our reminder of human cruelty,” Xanana Gusmao once said. “It is the lighthouse that forever flashes a warning to our succeeding generations.”  |
|
