Jakarta Post
Book Review
April 30, 2000
EAST TIMOR'S WOUNDED PSYCHE TOLD
* See other East Timor media updates on Cafe Pacific: http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/
Guns and ballot boxes; East Timor's vote for independence; edited by Damien Kingsbury; Monash Asia Institute 2000;
Paperback 201 pages.
MELBOURNE (JP): For an Indonesian, even one who is conscious of the nation's faults and shortcomings, Damien Kingsbury's
Guns and Ballot Boxes is not an easy book to read. It is emotionally wearing, to say the least.
You keep hoping that what you are reading is not true, and that if you turn another page it will tell you just that, but
you know very well there will be no such let up. So you keep reading until the disbelief, frustration and
anger are so all-consuming that you have to stop and throw the book down. And throw it down hard. And the next day you
pick it up again, still hoping for a glimmer of relief.
Not surprisingly, the chapters that stand out as courageously hopeful are those written by Xanana Gusmao and Bishop
Carlos Belo, two East Timorese
leaders with the unenviable task of cleaning up the awful mess and rebuilding the nation from scratch.
The book focuses on the events and issues surrounding the East Timor poll of Aug. 30, last year, the subsequent results
of which were that 78.5 percent of East Timorese voters chose independence from Indonesia.
Six chapters of the book are first-hand accounts of people who were in East Timor during voter registration, the poll
itself, vote counting, and the
violence and atrocities that devastated the territory afterwards. These are given a wider context by other contributors,
who place the East Timor tragedy in a global picture.
Reading the accounts of Anthony Smith, Helene van Klinken, Peter Bartu, Hidajat Djajamihardja, Annemarie Devereux and
Damien Kingsbury, even with an eye ever vigilant to detect any bias on the part of the writers, it is difficult to avoid
accepting the facts.
Individually and collectively, the accounts reveal that Indonesia did not fulfill its obligations as specified in the
tripartite agreement signed on May 5, 1999, in New York. In the agreement, the Indonesian police guarantee security for
both the pro-integrationists as well as the pro-independence groups. Yet various eye-witnesses told the increasingly and
alarmingly familiar story of the police standing by while the pro-integrationist militia bullied, terrorized even
murdered those suspected or known to be pro-independence.
It would be easy to dismiss the writers' reports as anti-Indonesian bias. However, doing so leads to one of the baser
moral crimes of denying other people's sufferings to avoid one's own responsibility for those sufferings. It is not only
an insult to those who suffer, but also a blow to one's own integrity.
One of the best and most sobering chapters was written by Hidajat Djajamihardja, a senior Radio Australia journalist,
who went to East Timor to cover events surrounding the poll. Hidajat not only relates his experiences, on more than one
occasion being heavily persuaded by military authorities not to put them in a bad light, even physically assaulted, but
also provides a comprehensive overview of the media in Indonesia during the New Order era.
In doing so, Hidajat modestly conveys the message that he was not carrying out a particularly heroic act in the context
of what Indonesian journalists have for decades had to go through in their day-to-day work.
For that reason the fact that nothing has been written about the Indonesian journalists who were terrorized, even shot
at, while covering the same events, is a yawning and to a certain extent hurtful gap.
If, in this era of germinating democracy, there is also a reawakening of
nationalism, it is only natural. However, to achieve mature nationalism, the fervor does not necessarily have to be
accompanied by a denial of the more unflattering parts of history.
Guns and ballot boxes after all, tells of only one corner of Indonesia's
wounded psyche. Now for the healing.
-- Dewi Anggraeni
+++niuswire
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