Rogue Element

‘At the time, I was working for a big metro daily newspaper. After the accident, when I came back to work, the editor asked me if I wanted a change, do something different to take my mind off things. He was talking about sending me to East Timor. He thought I could give the paper’s readers an interesting perspective — you know the sort of thing, an Asian-Australian torn between homeland and heartland… Sounds a bit trite now, but I jumped at it.

‘First day there, I met a New Zealand soldier — just a rifleman. We became friends. I went out on patrol with his section a couple of times. The guys showed me a few survival techniques…’

Joe smiled. ‘Oh, so it was a “he”.’ That explained a lot, he thought. Her apparent confidence in the jungle for one thing.

‘He was killed in an ambush,’ Suryei said abruptly. ‘Dead. Gone. Again, no goodbyes. Nothing.’

‘Jesus…’

‘Happened up on the border. They were in an area known for militia activity when his patrol was fired on.’ Suryei was mentally back in East Timor, staring into the middle distance. ‘Witnesses said it was a strange, weird moment. According to the other guys in the patrol, there were Indonesian soldiers in the area, and other militia too, who were watching the firefight and laughing and cheering. When it all started, and even during the shooting, militia soldiers would step in from the wings, start firing, then withdraw. Like a game of tag-team wrestling or something.

‘The rules of engagement meant the UN soldiers couldn’t fire unless the enemy aimed their weapons at them, so they couldn’t do anything about the enemy on the sidelines. It sounds like bullshit, but that’s modern warfare for you.

‘A couple of militiamen were killed. Nearly a thousand rounds were fired. Two UN soldiers, my friend and his buddy, were wounded. My friend died soon after of his wounds. The TNI soldiers watching from the West Timor border thought it was lots of fun. They were shouting and laughing through it all.

‘It was only after he’d gone that I realised how important he was to me. Anyway…’ she said, breathing deeply, realising that her eyes were moist.

‘What was it like, going into Dili at the beginning?’ asked Joe. He found the questions difficult to ask, because remembering seemed to affect Suryei profoundly. But somehow, he knew she wanted to talk, exorcise some of the demons.

‘Tragic,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The people were terrified and the place was a mess. Ransacked. Just about everything that wasn’t nailed down was carted off by the TNI. You couldn’t find a window that hadn’t been smashed, or a door that hadn’t been kicked off its hinges. The smell of human faeces was everywhere — it was disgusting and pathetic. The streets were filled with broken tiles and glass and rubbish. Any kind of infrastructure had been torched or torn down. But the worst part of it was the fear — that was as much a part of the smell of the place as anything.’

‘What about the Indonesian army?’

‘Everyone was tense. No one was really sure how the Indonesians would react after the vote. At first, they were pushy. There was a real swagger about them. I don’t think they realised that the battle had been fought at the ballot box.

‘Seventy-eight percent of East Timor voted for independence, rather than for autonomy within Indonesia, despite the intimidation and the killing going on before the ballot. Indonesia lost.’

‘The soldiers take it bad?’

‘Take it bad?’ she said, snorting. ‘When it looked likely that the poll wouldn’t go Indonesia’s way, the TNI and the militia just went bananas,’ Suryei said, the memories still so vivid.

‘The Indonesians had been stomping around East Timor since 1975, don’t forget. This territory had become their plaything. The army had money and time invested there and it didn’t want to lose that investment. And neither did a small but very determined band of East Timorese who were doing very nicely out of the TNI. Neither the militia nor the TNI were prepared to lose that without a fight. That’s what was so amazing about the people of East Timor. They bore the brunt of the TNI/militia rage. They endured the looting, the murder and the rape and quietly, resolutely, voted Indonesia off their soil.’

‘You think they’re heroes, the people of East Timor?’ said Joe, breaking into her trance.

‘Yes I do,’ she said, crouching to remove a small stone from her shoe.

‘From what you saw, do you think the media did a good job there?’

‘I guess, only Australians now find it impossible to draw any distinction between the people of Indonesia and its politics. Yet our democracy isn’t exactly perfect either. We have our share of crooks and scandals.’

‘Yeah, but we don’t shoot our own people, and we don’t blow passenger aircraft out of the sky.’