I’d never heard of East Timor before early 1992, when, Cold Blood – the massacre of East Timor, came on the television (documentary by Gordon 1992). I watched it with a few neighbours and it was truly horrific. And what I wondered was: if what was being said in the film, that so many people had died, why had we never heard of this place? I mean to say, we live in a world where the so-called free press exists. So obviously something had gone wrong.
I remember that night particularly, because I couldn’t sleep. It was a very dramatic moment in my life. And I’d seen, in-passing, other situations in Central America, in Vietnam, where I’d never wished to do anything or to become involved. And I must say at this stage, very honestly, that was in 1992 when I saw Cold Blood.
Recently, I had the very same experience with the horror of not being able to sleep, following the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian journalist, and the horrific scenes of the Israeli attacks in the funeral. I thought I would never see these things in my life, again, but I saw them, and I was shocked.
Myself and my neighbours, following the showing of Cold Blood, the massacre of East Timor, set up a campaign called East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign. We changed one of my bedrooms into an office. We had nothing, we didn’t even have a telephone line, we had no office furniture. We were all so moved by what we saw in East Timor, in Max’s film, that we had to do something.
So, we were very much, a grassroots campaign. And we went into the centre of Dublin, knocked on offices, struck luck in a union office where they gave us a typewriter. We went back to the bus stop, got on the bus, brought the typewriter home, and started using it (slowly, because none of us knew how to type). One of the first letters we wrote was to the paper of record in Ireland, The Irish Times, informing them that we had the campaign up and running for East Timor. And we were delighted to see that it was published. The joy we experienced in seeing “East Timor” in print for the very first time was so heartening and terrific.
We had a modest response to the letter, just a few people wrote. But those few people who wrote became so active in the campaign. One of them, the great Joe Fernandes, was from Goa. And that pushed him to become involved. We contacted Amnesty International and they had limited knowledge for us. But they did give us the telephone number and the name of a person who became my mentor.
I telephoned London and I spoke to this woman. And I have to tell you honestly, when she spoke to me, I was so intimidated by her Oxford middle-class accent, that I was going to hang up the phone. Because I blurted out all the emotional feelings I had about East Timor. And she said to me, “can you repeat it, I didn’t understand a word you said?” So, I repeated it slowly. And that woman said to me, – I remember so many things that people said to me – “oh, Ireland”, she said, “we’ve been waiting for you.” Her name was Carmel Budiardjo. She sent us books. She sent us reading material, the Tapol Bulletin, which informed us and brought us up to date. And most, like Max, like Professor Barbedo, Carmel was a magnificent woman.
We decided then to have a formal launch of the campaign and gathered people around us. We did it on a Good Friday, 1992, with a protest walk. Irish people are great at protesting, we protest everything. And we walked from the British to the American to the Australian embassy. The theme of our walk was East Timor. We got very good radio and television coverage of the walk, and so the campaign was launched. One letter was handed to us, while we were walking, by a man in a car. He stopped and he handed us an envelope. So, we read the small words inside. Some words will always be with you. He said, “I was listening to the Gay Byrne show” (The Late, Late Show), which was the most popular radio program in Dublin. And he said, “I was very much taken by the story of East Timor.” We had done the radio interview, and we had Estevão Cabral over for the launch of the campaig, and Estevão told his story. But the letter went on to say, “as a Jew, I want to be associated with your campaign. Of all human crimes, genocide is the most horrific.” And that’s what was said to us that day.
So from there, we went to every corner, to every small town, to every village in Ireland. And we spoke to anybody who would listen to us. Because we weren’t seasoned campaigners. But we knew that without a mass movement or a movement of people behind us, nobody would listen to us. So we based our campaign on two things. One was not to be offensive to people. Timor needed friends. We could not push people away. And the second thing was to set up a campaign wherever we spoke.
Wherever we went, we got radio interviews, media interviews, and built up this mass movement in Ireland, which we then got to pressure Irish politicians about East Timor. We know all politics is local. And these people in the constituencies wrote to their local and national representatives and made representations for East Timor.
As an aside here, I just want to mention one thing that I didn’t know. Australian campaigner Pat Walsh informed me that when himself and his wife Annie went to County Kilkenny, they saw a memorial about famine, which resonates so much with the Irish. And I didn’t know at the time that East Timor was one of the nations mentioned. I never knew that until Pat told me.
We moved our offices into the center of Dublin, into Dame Street. And from there, we recruited more volunteers to come and share with us. We got patrons, and I’m delighted to say that the current president of Ireland, President Michael D. Higgins, was one of our foremost patrons. As a member of parliament and a senator, he spoke loudly about what happened in Timor.
We heard that Paul Keating, the Australian Prime Minister was going to visit Ireland. And we decided that we had to challenge him and successive Australian governments on East Timor. I remember the night before he arrived in Ireland, I lay in my bed and I said to myself: “My God, Tom, what have you got yourself involved in? There’s a visiting Prime Minister coming, and you are leading the demonstrations against his visit.” And I shook in bed that night, because I wasn’t sure what I’d got involved in, but I knew I had to be involved.
The man I mentioned previously, Joe Fernandes from Goa, said to me: “Tom, what do you need?” He was a businessman. I said, “I need to bring Shirley Shackleton from Australia to Dublin to make the presentation and make the case for East Timor. I need you to pay a lot of money for two full-page advertisements in The Irish Times, giving a particular Irish welcome to Paul Keating.” And he said, “you’ve got it.”
One of our campaign members came up with the headline. We remembered Paul Keating’s ancestor had left Ireland because of British imperialism. On page three of The Irish Times, the headline was: “Welcome home, Mr Keating. Do you remember why your family left Ireland?”
And then the rest of the pages were taken up by information about East Timor, what had happened there. The second advertisement which he paid for in the Sunday Tribune was an image of the woman who was shot in the face at Santa Cruz. It just said: “Massacre in Timor.”
We got some information about Timor, then we asked a load of Irish personalities like U2, actors like Maureen O’Hara, like Pierce Brosnan, to sign their names to the petition. So Paul Keating came and many Irish politicians wore a little flower in support of East Timor when he addressed the parliament. We subsequently heard that he wasn’t too happy about what the campaign had set up, but we felt challenged to do it.
Shirley Shackleton was absolutely magnificent. In Dublin Castle, where the official dinner was held for Paul Keating, Shirley led the demonstration. A lone bagpiper played the lament for East Timor. His motorcade swept into Dublin Castle, having to slow to take the corner. Not one word was raised in anger.
When the foreign minister of Australia, Alexander Downer, came to Ireland to hand over millions of dollars for the Ireland Fund, we gave him the same welcome. As a matter of fact, it got so hot for him that he asked to see us, he said, “come and see me, can we meet?” All we said to him is “nothing we’re going to say to you or nothing I’m going to say to you is going to change Australian policy. We want you to know that the issue of East Timor is still going on. And we’ll never go away until they are free.” And he gave me a typical Alexander Downer look.
In 1994, Gus Miclat organized the APCET conference in Manila (see chapter by Miclat). I asked the Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mairead Maguire, would you go with me to Manila? Now, anybody who knows me knows I hate flying. I was terrified. But I was glad we went. When we arrived in Manila, we got stopped by the immigration and the police and told we would be deported on the next flight out. I said one thing to the immigration. I said, our argument is not with the Philippines, it’s with Indonesia. If you allow us to have a press conference, we will not say one word of criticism against the Philippines, but we will feel free to talk about Indonesia and East Timor. So the immigration authorities went away and they came back and they said, “you will have a press conference for 20 minutes.” So I said to this wonderful, wonderful woman, Mairead Maguire, “Mairead, you’re on, this is your press conference.” And I just sat there. It’s all about storytelling.
A couple of weeks later, I got a letter from the USA with a little clip from the New York Times. It was from the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, Arun Gandhi, who I’d asked many months earlier, “how can we do this?” Because he was a Gandhi. He said to me, “Tom, I don’t know, you’ll have to find out”. And in the letter from Memphis, where he had a non-violence centre, he showed us the clip about us from the New York Times, with a little, just a little note with it saying, “Tom, this is how you do it.”
José Ramos-Horta visited Ireland many times. A magnificent campaigner, a magnificent Nobel laureate, he never gave up on his people. That’s why I admired him so much. He was received as a foreign minister by our foreign minister. Ireland then joined with Portugal, which was pretty much isolated at European level about East Timor. Ireland came in and rode behind the great work that was being done by Portugal. Many times Ireland raised the issue so that Portugal could not be criticized for raising the issue. In 1996, the Irish Foreign Minister declared that as President of the European Union, East Timor was the number one priority.
We had to make some difficult decisions. When a boy band, the great boy band of the time in the mid-90s, Boyzone, visited Indonesia, we approached them and asked them would they speak out about East Timor. The manager told us to get lost. In two words: “Get lost.” So we then had to – an icon in Ireland, a worldwide phenomenon, Boyzone, the band – in a respectful way, challenge them. I asked advice from my wonderful friend, the director of Amnesty International, Mary Lawler: “Mary Lawler, how do we go about this? We can end up being attacked.” And she said, “just remember, art is freedom. They are artists, and that’s what you have to say to them.”
Another thing on that theme, we sent a letter to Bono, through a friend, saying, “Bono, can you do something about East Timor?” Two Irish politicians, Senator David Norris and Patricia McKenna, were traveling for Ahi Naklakan (1995 vigil to commemorate the Santa Cruz massacre) and the day before they left – it was faxes in those days – the fax came in, handwritten, and signed by Bono. It was the words for Love from a short distance, a wonderful, beautiful song written in support of East Timor (cited in Leach’s chapter). Senator Norris and Patricia McKenna were taken off the plane in Bali, and deported to Singapore, where they made known what Bono had done.
In 1996, we received the great boost for the campaign when four young Timorese came to Ireland. Dino, Luciano, Boaventura, and José. They came to Ireland because I had gone to Lisbon. I saw so many Timorese, many of them who had occupied the embassies in Jakarta. And I said, “you must spread yourself across Europe. You must tell your story.” So they came to Ireland, and we said, “we will try to find educational opportunities for you. But I want you to go out to the communities and tell your story.” And they did. They brought wonders to the campaign.
Peter Carey phoned me in 1996, and said to me, “Tom, I think Timor is going to get the Nobel Prize this year.” And I said, “Peter, you said that last year in 1995.” But he was right. And when the news came on the radio, I jumped around the office with delight. I went down, and I got on the bus, and I went to where the Timorese were living and I told them. And I knew then, this was it. The legitimacy of the Nobel Peace Prize shared between the religious and the political leader was the credibility. There was no going back from here.
We knew, then, that Timor was going to get its independence. We were proud to be part of the movement, part of the struggle. Very honored indeed.
I’m very honored to have met such courageous people who would never allow the unthinkable to happen. I once asked Max Stahl, “why do you think the Timorese never accepted integration?” And Max said to me, “you know, Tom, Indonesia never treated them with respect. They never showed the Timorese any respect. And that’s why the Timorese, a proud people, didn’t accept it.”
And so, Timor is free.
