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My involvement in the struggle for East Timor's Independence and some of the braveTimorese women I met along the way 
 Jude Conway
Jessie Street National Women’s Library Lunch Hour Talk
- Sydney16 August 2012
Oh Timor, a country close to my heart. A tiny nation of one million people who defeated themighty Indonesia - 220 million people and for many years a rapidly expanding economyunder President Suharto favoured by western nations with dollars in their eyes. How didtiny Timor-Leste manage to achieve their dream of independence? Many factors of coursebut the bedrock was the Timorese women and men of bravery and steelydetermination with the gift of telling their stories about the violations of theIndonesian occupation, and their belief in magic.In this talk I will be reading extracts from
Step by Step: Women of East Timor,Stories of Resistance and Survival 
.
Cesarina Rocha
:
“
My story starts in 1975 in PortugueseEast Timor. At this time East Timor in its innocence knewnothing of the ravages soon to be inflicted. It was a sleepy little colonialisland, with whitewashed buildings, and drinkable water from every tap,
that everyone back then took for granted.”
 
Dulce Vitor
- Baucau 1975:
“
When the Indonesians invaded, my fathermade a plan to run to the jungle, so carrying sleeping mats, clothes andcorn powder, we left Baucau. I was fourteen and my brothers weretwelve, ten and nine. We thought it was only our family and a fewothers, but the majority of the population fled to the mountains. Soon
we didn’t have anything to eat, we had to search for food everywhere.
We trekked up and down mountains and crossed rivers looking for wildbeans
… In 1978 we were still in the jungle. My father got sick but there was no medicine to
make him better. The situation did not permit getting any - there was fighting, the area was
not calm, we had to keep moving. As my father was dying he said to me ‘Many people willdie, it is not only me that will die. You mustn’t be sad. Keep resisting strongly, eat tre
e roots,eat wild taro. If you have to, go back to your village so you can live and get self-
determination.”
 For me it all started back in 1991. I had read what is still my favourite book,
Tracks
by RobynDavidson about her camel ride from Alice Springs to the WA coast.
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After years of being asole parent in my hometown of Newcastle, I had itchy feet and would get out a map anddream of escaping to Alice Springs. When my son was nearly 22 so old enough to beindependent, I took leave from my job, packed my Toyota Corolla station wagon and lefthim home alone. This was winter 1991. It was an auspicious time to be travelling north.Most nights on my three-week trip I saw the spectacle of Venus, Jupiter and Mars, and for a
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Jessie Street library has 2 copies.
 
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while the crescent moon, all setting brightly in the red glow of the sunset. Magic. I reachedDarwin, it was warm, casual and friendly. I liked it and stayed.
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 I was there on 12 November 1991 when news came through about the Dili Massacre or inTimor it is better known as the Santa Cruz massacre or just 12 November. I was working atthe NT
3
Environment Centre and had met a lot of activists and was invited to a protest rallyin the city. There were a few thousand Timorese living in Darwin most of whom hadmanaged to escape 1975 after the abrupt abandonment by the coloniser Portugal andbefore the invasion by Indonesia in December. Consequently the Darwin rally was verymoving as we knew hundreds of young people had been machine-gunned by the Indonesianmilitary but people could not get through to their relatives to find out who was safe. Therally MC asked for 120 people to lay on the road to represent the numbers we thought killedand I volunteered. While on my back staring up into the sky a Timorese woman sang aplaintive funeral dirge and her voice touched my heart. That day was my first experiencewith the emotional power of the Timorese people.Another reason that Darwin was an important city in the international fight for Timoreseself-determination was its proximity to Timor-Leste and the presence of a large Indonesianconsulate. On the day of that rally we marched to the consulate and the Timorese began a3-week 24-hour-a-day protest right in front. Supporters stopping by regularly, includingmyself, set up Australians For a Free East Timor, a rag-tag but highly motivated group.Cesarina Rocha was a fellow member of Australians for a Free East Timor in Darwin. She hadbeen taken to Darwin from East Timor with her mother in 1975 when she was three months
old during the ‘civil war’. Her father had been i
mprisoned for not being Fretilin, butpersuaded the guard, who he knew, to let him go home and have a shower, then tried toescape by swimming to Atauro island, 20 km away and with strong rips. Very luckily for himhe was rescued by a Darwin barge. Ces grew up in a determinedly non-political family but
after seeing John Pilger’s film
Death of a Nation
at NT University in 1995, she joined ourgroup and became a quietly determined activist as well as representing Timorese youth inAustralia, Korea and Portugal.Although Timor-Leste is only a one-hour flight from Darwin, closer than my hometown, I
didn’t go
on my first trip until November 1995. Why? Because I was afraid. A number of myfellow activists had been deported and I was hearing upsetting stories about the Indonesianmilitaries atrocities
 –
not unlike what is still going on in West Papua today. My friend and Iflew to Kupang but were told that foreigners were not allowed to enter
‘
Tim-Tim
’
4
for theirown safety. It seems there had been a demonstration in Dili on the anniversary of themassacre and Timorese youth had thrown stones at the soldiers.
I thought the military don’t
want anyone seeing them be violent to the Timorese. After ten days of waiting around (in atropical paradise on Semua island I might add) we decided to catch a bus and give it a go.My young good looking friend sweet-talked the soldiers at every checkpoint and wemanaged to get across the border and be the first foreigners let back in.
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I decided Alice Springs would be too cold for me.
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Northern Territory.
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The Indonesians called the country Timor Timur or Tim-Tim.
 
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Timor-Leste is a mountainous country and the roads are narrow, winding with blind cornersand perched on the edge of steep cliffs. (The roads proved more lethal for Australiansoldiers than militia.) The bus window gave me a great view of the ocean lapping the rocksbelow. I was so relieved to make it to Dili at dusk. There we saw the ubiquitous Indonesianmilitary driving through the streets in open trucks holding up their rifles, and no locals outafter dark. On arrival at the
Vila Harmonia
losmen our details were taken for the IndonesianIntelligence. Unlike other provinces of Indonesia the local
people weren’t keen to talk to us
.One young man quickly asked where I was staying and later sent me a letter to take back toAustralia
 –
the youth calling for independence. At the back of our losmen (run by pro-independence people) I met with a resistance leader (David Ximenes) to give him moneyand medicines in a shed surrounded by guards and a guard dog as he was hiding from theIndonesian police at the time. I left visiting the Santa Cruz cemetery till my second last daybecause I knew it would cause trouble and before I got back to my losmen the Intelligencehad phoned them asking was I a journalist. There were spies everywhere. It was frightening.One of our activist group moved back to Sydney in 1996 and asked me to run his Darwinhouse as an AFFET headquarters. Meetings were held, actions planned, t-shirts screen-printed, freelance journalists and activists stayed on their way to and from Dili, and we hadsome great parties.In 1997 I was invited to be the office manager at the East Timor International SupportCenter, ETISC, set up with funds from Europe by Darwin Timorese Céu Lopes and her non-Timorese husband Juan Federer who provided admin support to José Ramos-Horta on someof his international lobbying trips. As the NT government strongly supported IndonesiaETISC did not advertise itself and our office was located above a pizza parlour in one of 
Darwin’s suburbs.
When ETISC tried to get a development NGO
‘
Timor Aid
’
incorporated,the NT government just ignored the paperwork. It had to be incorporated in Melbourne.Besides doing office work I was also project officer travelling to East and West Timor, Bali,Java and Thailand
 
In September 1997 I was meeting with a Timorese man (Avelino Coelho) in Bali tocollect information about guerrilla activity in Timor but he had to leave abruptly onhearing that a bomb had exploded
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at the secret headquarters of his group in Java.He sought asylum in the Austrian embassy in Jakarta and stayed there until after thereferendum in August 1999. (Avelino was Secretary of State for Energy Policy in thelast government.)
 
In 1998, alone, I nervously carried photos of military torture in Timor hidden in mypants from Bangkok to Jakarta so they could be distributed to activists groups toprove the human rights violations which Indonesian denied. (ETISC had smuggledthem photos out of Timor.) My companion had to enter Indonesia by boat fromSingapore to Sumatra because he was on the black list.
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The newly made bomb had been stored behind the refrigerator, overheated and exploded. No one was badlyinjured.
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My Jakarta contact could not meet me because the airport was too far from where he lived, but told me tocatch a Bluebird taxi into the city. I made it through Customs with no trouble but the only vehicle with aBluebird insignia was an un-taxi-like van with a man and boy sitting in the front. Still paranoid I got in. Every
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