The East Timor genocide refers to the campaign of systematic killings, repression and state terrorism against the East Timorese people by Indonesia's New Order regime between 1975 and 1999, during the invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor.
The Indonesian military framed their counter-insurgency operations as "pacification" and "anti-communist stabilisation" while operating with total impunity and engaging in a large-scale extermination of the East Timor's population, including mass killings, forced displacement, starvation, and the destruction of East Timor's social and political fabric. During the occupation period, the Indonesian government received diplomatic and military support from Australia and the United States.
A significant body of scholarship has concluded that Indonesia perpetrated genocide in East Timor. According to the Oxford Bibliographies, "the majority of sources consider the Indonesian killings in East Timor to constitute genocide". Many scholars, including Ben Kiernan, who has documented the atrocities in detail, define the campaign as genocide. Other scholars, such as Ben Saul and David Lisson, disagree with using the term to describe the campaign but do not deny the scale of atrocities committed.
Between 60,000 and 308,000 East Timorese died as a result of Indonesia's occupation, representing a substantial proportion of East Timor's population. Victims included civilians killed in massacres, from forced famine and disease in Indonesian-controlled camps, and from torture and political imprisonment. Timorese resistance fighters and civilians alike were targeted in a coordinated genocidal campaign. East Timor's eventual independence in 2002 came after years of sustained resistance and international exposure, but Indonesia has never been held accountable for the genocide it committed.
Initial invasion
On the pretext of protecting its citizens in Timorese territory, Indonesia invaded the eastern part of the East Timor island and declared it as its 27th province, renaming it Timor Timur. Indonesia was given the tacit support of the American Government, which saw FRETILIN as a Marxist organization.
Framed as a response to Fretilin's proclamation of sovereign rule, Indonesia's intervention was conceived from its perception of Fretilin-controlled East Timor as a threat to regional stability and an adversity to its own strategic interests, including control over the lucrative oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea. From the start of the invasion in August 1975, the TNI forces engaged in the wholesale massacre of Timorese civilians. At the start of the occupation, FRETILIN radio sent the following broadcast: "The Indonesian forces are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed ... This is an appeal for international help. Please do something to stop this invasion." One Timorese refugee told later of "rape [and] cold-blooded assassinations of women and children and Chinese shop owners".
Dili's bishop at the time, Martinho da Costa Lopes, said later: "The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets—all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing." In one incident, a group of fifty men, women, and children—including Australian freelance reporter Roger East—were lined up on a cliff outside of Dili and shot, their bodies falling into the sea. Many such massacres took place in Dili, where onlookers were ordered to observe and count aloud as each person was executed. It is estimated that at least 2,000 Timorese were massacred in the first two days of the invasion in Dili alone. In addition to FRETILIN supporters, Chinese migrants were also singled out for execution; five hundred were killed in the first day alone.
The mass killings continued unabated as Indonesian forces advanced on the Fretilin-held mountain regions of East Timor. A Timorese guide for a senior Indonesian officer told former Australian consul to Portuguese Timor James Dunn that during the early months of the fighting TNI troops "killed most Timorese they encountered." In February 1976 after capturing the village of Aileu - to the south of Dili - and driving out the remaining Fretilin forces, Indonesian troops machine gunned most of the town's population, allegedly shooting everyone over the age of three. The young children who were spared were taken back to Dili in trucks. At the time Aileu fell to Indonesian forces, the population was around 5,000; by the time Indonesian relief workers visited the village in September 1976 only 1,000 remained. In June 1976, TNI troops badly battered by a Fretilin attack exacted retribution against a large refugee camp housing 5–6,000 Timorese at Lamaknan near the West Timor border. After setting several houses on fire, Indonesian soldiers massacred as many as 4,000 men, women and children.
In March 1977 ex-Australian consul James Dunn published a report detailing charges that since December 1975 Indonesian forces had killed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians in East Timor. This is consistent with a statement made on 13 February 1976 by UDT leader Lopez da Cruz that 60,000 Timorese had been killed during the previous six months of civil war, suggesting a death toll of at least 55,000 in the first two months of the invasion. A delegation of Indonesian relief workers agreed with this statistic. A late 1976 report by the Catholic Church also estimated the death toll at between 60,000 and 100,000. These figures were also corroborated by those in the Indonesian government itself. In an interview on 5 April 1977 with the Sydney Morning Herald, Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik said the number of dead was "50,000 people or perhaps 80,000".
The Indonesian government presented its annexation of East Timor as a matter of anticolonial unity. A 1977 booklet from the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs, entitled Decolonization in East Timor, paid tribute to the "sacred right of self-determination" and recognised APODETI as the true representatives of the East Timorese majority. It claimed that FRETILIN's popularity was the result of a "policy of threats, blackmail and terror". Later, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas reiterated this position in his 2006 memoir The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor. The island's original division into east and west, Indonesia argued after the invasion, was "the result of colonial oppression" enforced by the Portuguese and Dutch imperial powers.
Thus, according to the Indonesian government, its annexation of the 27th province was merely another step in the unification of the archipelago which had begun in the 1940s. The United Nations (UN) would later come to condemn the violences performed by the Indonesian government.
Resettlement and enforced starvation
As a result of the destruction of food crops, many civilians were forced to leave the hills and surrender to the TNI. Often, when surviving villagers came down to lower-lying regions to surrender, the military would execute them. Those who were not killed outright by TNI troops were sent to receiving centers which were prepared in advance. These camps were located in close proximity to local military bases where Indonesian forces "screened" the population in order to single out members of the resistance, often with the aid of Timorese collaborators. In these transit camps, the surrendered civilians were registered and interrogated. Those who were suspected of being members of the resistance were detained and killed.
These centers were often constructed of thatch huts with no toilets. Additionally, the Indonesian military barred the Red Cross from distributing humanitarian aid and no medical care was provided to the detainees. As a result, many of the Timorese - weakened by starvation and surviving on small rations given by their captors - died of malnutrition, cholera, diarrhea and tuberculosis. By late 1979, between 300,000 and 370,000 Timorese had passed through these camps. After a period of three months, the detainees were resettled in "strategic hamlets" where they were imprisoned and subjected to enforced starvation. Those in the camps were prevented from traveling and cultivating farmland and were subjected to a curfew. The UN truth commission report confirmed the Indonesian military's use of enforced starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese civilian population, and that large numbers of people were "positively denied access to food and its sources". The report cited testimony from individuals who were denied food, and detailed destruction of crops and livestock by Indonesian soldiers. It concluded that this policy of deliberate starvation resulted in the deaths of 84,200 to 183,000 Timorese. One church worker reported five hundred East Timorese dying of starvation every month in one district.
World Vision Indonesia visited East Timor in October 1978 and claimed that 70,000 East Timorese were at risk of starvation. An envoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 1979 that 80 percent of one camp's population was malnourished, in a situation that was "as bad as Biafra". The ICRC warned that "tens of thousands" were at risk of starvation. Indonesia announced that it was working through the government-run Indonesian Red Cross Society to alleviate the crisis, but the NGO Action for World Development charged that organisation with selling donated aid supplies.
Indonesian pacification operations
Operasi Keamanan: 1981–82
In 1981, the Indonesian military launched Operasi Keamanan (Operation Security), which some have named the "fence of legs" program. During this operation, Indonesian forces conscripted 50,000 to 80,000 Timorese men and boys to march through the mountains ahead of advancing TNI troops as human shields to foreclose a FRETILIN counterattack. The objective was to sweep the guerillas into the central part of the region where they could be eradicated. Many of those conscripted into the "fence of legs" died of starvation, exhaustion or were shot by Indonesian forces for allowing guerillas to slip through. As the "fence" converged on villages, Indonesian forces massacred an unknown number of civilians. At least 400 villagers were massacred in Lacluta by Battalion 744 of the Indonesian Army in September 1981. An eyewitness who testified before the Australian Senate stated that soldiers deliberately killed small children by smashing their heads against a rock. The operation failed to crush the resistance, and popular resentment toward the occupation grew stronger than ever. As FRETILIN troops in the mountains continued their sporadic attacks, Indonesian forces carried out numerous operations to destroy them over the next ten years. In the cities and villages, meanwhile, a non-violent resistance movement began to take shape.
'Operation Clean-Sweep': 1983
The failure of successive Indonesian counterinsurgency campaigns led the commander of the Dili-based Sub regional Military Resort Command, Colonel Purwanto to initiate peace talks with FRETILIN commander Xanana Gusmão in a FRETILIN-controlled area in March 1983. When Xanana sought to invoke Portugal and the UN in the negotiations, ABRI Commander Benny Moerdani broke the ceasefire by announcing a new counterinsurgency offensive called "Operational Clean-Sweep" in August 1983, declaring, "This time no fooling around. This time we are going to hit them without mercy."
The breakdown of the ceasefire agreement was followed by a renewed wave of massacres, summary executions and "disappearances" at the hands of Indonesian forces. In August 1983, 200 people were burned alive in the village of Creras, with 500 others killed at a nearby river. Between August and December 1983, Amnesty International documented the arrests and "disappearances" of over 600 people in the capital city alone. Relatives were told by Indonesian forces that the "disappeared" were sent to Bali.
Those suspected of opposing integration were often arrested and tortured. In 1983 Amnesty International published an Indonesian manual it had received from East Timor instructing military personnel on how to inflict physical and mental anguish, and cautioning troops to "Avoid taking photographs showing torture (of someone being given electric shocks, stripped naked and so on)". In his 1997 memoir East Timor's Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance, Constâncio Pinto describes being tortured by Indonesian soldiers: "With each question, I would get two or three punches in the face.
When someone punches you so much and so hard, it feels as if your face is broken. People hit me on my back and on my sides with their hands and then kicked me.... [In another location] they psychologically tortured me; they didn't hit me, but they made strong threats to kill me.
They even put a gun on the table." In Michele Turner's book Telling East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942–1992, a woman named Fátima describes watching torture take place in a Dili prison: "They make people sit on a chair with the front of the chair on their own toes. It is mad, yes. The soldiers urinate in the food then mix it up for the person to eat. They use electric shock and they use an electric machine...."