Journalist Allan Nairn Discusses East Timor.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: OCTOBER 13, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 101301np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Allan Nairn: A Look Inside East Timor
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, journalist Allan Nairn tells us what he witnessed when he was arrested and detained last month in East Timor. He was reporting on the militias that terrorized the capital after the people of East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia. Nairn was banned from East Timor in 1991 after he tried to stand in the way of Indonesian troops which massacred hundreds of civilians.

Also, we remember basketball great Wilt Chamberlain with an excerpt of a 1991 interview. He was found dead yesterday at the age of 63.

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First the news.

(NEWS BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Allan Nairn, is an American journalist who was arrested and detained for six days last month in East Timor. He was reporting for "The Nation" magazine and Pacifica Radio on the militia attacks on Dili, the capital of East Timor. The pro-Indonesian militias terrorized the population after the people of East Timor voted for its independence from Indonesia on an August 30th referendum. International peacekeepers have since moved in, and the U.N. is planning to run a transitional administration for the next couple of years.

Indonesia invaded and annexed East Timor in 1975 just days after it ceased being a Portuguese colony. Nairn was banned from East Timor in 1991 after he witnessed Indonesian troops massacring hundreds of East Timorese. Nairn's reports on the massacre won a Robert F. Kennedy journalism award and a DuPont broadcast journalism award.

When the violence erupted following the August referendum, most of the foreign press evacuated East Timor. I asked Allan Nairn why he stayed.

ALLAN NAIRN, JOURNALIST: Well, the Indonesian army, through its militias, was still attacking the Timorese, and the danger was increasing daily. And to the extent that there were witnesses, people from the outside who could see what was happening and tell the outside world, that, hopefully, would provide a little bit of protection for the Timorese. So I wanted to stay.

GROSS: What are some of the things that you witnessed after most of the media left? And about what date is this?

NAIRN: Well, it was the week leading up to September 14th, when I was -- that's the day I was arrested by the Indonesian military. A lot of the media had left about 10 days, two weeks before that, and there were some reporters still in the U.N. compound.

What was happening on the street at that time was that the militias were burning down Dili. They were going at the houses of independence activists and their families. They would ride up on their chopper motorcycles and in trucks, shooting their guns into the air, honking their horns. And then they would go into the houses that had been targeted by Indonesian military intelligence, and they'd loot them, set fire and move on to the next house. They burned down hundreds of houses.

The central business district of Dili was completely destroyed, just a cinder. There were no -- hardly any major public buildings left. You didn't see any normal traffic on the streets. All that remained of the traffic were refugees, militias and military vehicles. There was smoke everywhere, constant gunfire.

And by that time, many of the neighborhoods of Dili were empty. I went out early in the morning in the Via Vettathey (ph) and Montaduro (ph) neighborhoods of Dili near the national Cathedral, and most of the houses were open. I would hide from the militias by just ducking from one house into another, and it was easy because the doors were open. You could just walk into someone's living room, their bedroom. The place was abandoned. The residents had either fled up into the hills or had been taken away at gunpoint by the army, the police and the militias.

GROSS: Where did you sleep while you were hiding from the militia?

NAIRN: Well, in different places. Sometimes I was in private, empty houses. Sometimes it was in the U.N. compound. For the Timorese, though, they had no final refuge. I mean, any -- while the U.N. compound was open, that was a final hiding place for foreigners. But if you were a Timorese, except for the 2,000 or so who got into the U.N. compound -- and they were mainly U.N. staff and relatives -- you had nowhere to go because even the most inviolate places, the places that had been safest in the past -- the International Red Cross headquarters, the home of Bishop Belo (ph) -- they were also attacked and burned.

GROSS: What information were you able to find out about who was in the militias and who controlled the militias?

NAIRN: Well, the army controls the militias. When I was held at the Coram (ph) military headquarters after being arrested, the whole back portion of the base was full of uniformed Itaric (ph) militias with their black T-shirts, their red-and-white headbands. You would see them going out onto the streets on their chopper motorcycles and their trucks with their rifles to stage their attacks on Dili.

And I asked one of the officers there, who was questioning me, Lieutenant Colonel Willem (ph), "Are those militiamen there?" And he said, "Oh, yes. We have them here on the base. They live here. They work from here. It's so we can control them," he said.

At the Poldup (ph) police headquarters, where I was also interrogated, you would see the uniformed militiamen going into and out of the intelligence and operations centers. They were really an arm of Indonesian military intelligence. The -- some of the militia leaders were Timorese who had for years been on the militia payroll -- I'm sorry -- on the military intelligence payroll.

Many of the rank and file were street criminals or young unemployed men who had just been swept up by the military and told that they were now in the militias. Some were brought from Indonesia, from the eastern islands of Indonesia. And increasingly, especially in the final weeks of the operation, many Indonesian troops were simply dressed up in militia uniform and sent out to do the attacks themselves. And all of this was coordinated on a day-to-day level by Kopassus, the special forces troops.

GROSS: Let me ask you what might be an obvious question. What's the advantage to the Indonesian military of having militias under its control? What can a militia do that the military can't?

NAIRN: Well, I think they thought it gave them some deniability. It didn't get them very far, but I think that was the idea, that they could say "The militias are out of control. We can't restrain them." It did succeed in putting some distance between the top commander of the Indonesian military, General Wiranto, and the militia terror.

Even today, when the U.S. State Department finally, after all the terror, came to admit that the military was behind the militias, they only say it's elements of the military. They don't acknowledge what Western military people on the ground in Timor acknowledge, and that is that this is an operation run from the top by General Wiranto.

It's obvious when you're there because it's such a vast, tightly-coordinated operation. It involves both the army and the police, and the only person to whom both the army and police report in the Indonesian structure is General Wiranto.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Allan Nairn.

How were you arrested on September 14th in East Timor?

NAIRN: I was walking in the morning on the streets of Dili and was just picked up by the military and taken to the Coram military headquarters. That Coram is the -- or was the central command for the occupation of East Timor, headed by General Kiki Shinokri (ph). He was head of a body they called the Committee for the Restoration of Peace and Stability.

GROSS: So when you were picked up, did they know who you were? Were they out for you, or were you just another random person who was rounded up?

NAIRN: They didn't know who I was. I was just a foreigner on the streets of Dili, and they seemed pretty astonished to see me on the streets because at that point, you know, the buildings were just smoking. There were hardly any people left.

I had been told earlier that the militias had been looking for me as an individual. But when the army picked me up that morning, they didn't know who I was. That didn't come out until I was interrogated later in the day at Coram headquarters.

GROSS: You were interrogated. What were you asked about?

NAIRN: They wanted to know who I knew, what Indonesians, what Timorese I knew, who I had been speaking to, why I was there, where I had been, and also what my motivations were, what my political motivations were in being there.

GROSS: Did you answer any of those questions?

NAIRN: I didn't tell them anything about who I'd been speaking to, and I didn't give them any details that they could use to track people down, because that's what they were after. But when they asked the opinion questions, I answered, you know, very honestly. I told them, for example, that I was there reporting on the militia attacks, that it was clear that the regular army and General Wiranto was coordinating these attacks.

I said I was also reporting on the U.S. support for the Indonesian military, and that in my view, although Wiranto and the army were the principal culprits, the U.S. and President Clinton also bore some of the responsibility because they had been arming and training and financing this army. So I told them exactly what I thought.

GROSS: Well, I'm sure that really made you Mr. Popularity. I mean, that seems like a pretty risky thing to say.

NAIRN: If I had been Indonesian or Timorese, it would have been very risky because, I mean, I've interviewed Timorese who have been tortured in that very Coram headquarters. But because I'm a journalist, a foreigner, an American citizen and also politically notorious there, I really was safe. There was no chance that they were going to hurt me. They treated me with kid gloves.

They did threaten me with jail. They said I could get 10 years in prison. And at one point, I was formally told that I would be prosecuted and jailed the following week. But they never laid a hand on me. I had a lot of political protection around me just because I was not an Indonesian or a Timorese.

GROSS: How many days were you in prison?

NAIRN: Six days. I was held for six days in -- first in Dili and then in Kupang (ph), and then brought to Denpassar (ph) before I was deported.

GROSS: What were the conditions like in the prison? And is this a prison that you shared with people from East Timor?

NAIRN: No. When I was in Coram, I was held in a room in the military headquarters and was surrounded by soldiers. Then in Kupang, I was held in what they called "quarantine." And then in Bali likewise. In Bali, there were some Afghan and Iranian detainees who were also in the quarantine, but I was never together with any East Timorese.

It's interesting in the Indonesian prisons, the way they work. Kind of as a rule of thumb, if you're not being disappeared or if you're not being tortured, you sometimes have more leeway than you would in, say, an American prison. There are many stories of prisoners, especially political prisoners, who are able to maintain contact with the outside world, able to meet people, able to maneuver in a way that you would never be permitted in a U.S. state or federal prison.

For example, I was able to keep my cell phone, and I gave interviews. I made, you know, calls to the outside world. Never would that happen in -- you know, in any circumstances in an American lock-up.

GROSS: Were you able to recharge the battery?

NAIRN: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I was actually able to get to an outlet. But -- because, you know, I was getting very privileged treatment. They didn't quite know what to do with me. The decision was bucked up to Jakarta, where the generals were -- and Wiranto were basically deciding, and they got a lot of pressure, public pressure here on Congress and, in turn, on the State Department. So in the end, they decided to just deport me.

GROSS: My guest is journalist Allan Nairn. He was arrested and detained in East Timor last month. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is American journalist Allan Nairn, who was arrested and detained in East Timor last month while covering the militia attacks on the capital.

Now, you were deported to West Timor. Whose hands were you in in West Timor?

NAIRN: Well, they -- from Dili, they flew me on a military charter to Kupang, West Timor. The flight was very interesting because, well, first we were due to go on a C-130 transport plane, a Hercules, one of the planes that the U.S. has supplied to the Indonesian air force. But we couldn't get on that, myself and my military escorts, because it was packed with the booty that they had just looted from Dili.

They were carrying on motors that had been ripped from their casings. They were carrying on television sets, even an entire fuel truck they were rolling onto this massive transport plane. And it was just so packed that there was no room for us.

So we got on a later military charter, myself and the military escorts, two MPs, military policemen. And we were followed on the plane by about 50 or 60 men in militia get-up, with the black T-shirts, many of them still holding their long rifles and their swords and their automatic pistols.

I recognized some of these men from the streets of Dili as being street-level militia leaders, but it turns out they were all actually policemen. They were all members of police intelligence, as my escorts explained, working in plain clothes. They had completed their one-year rotation in East Timor with the militia operation, and now they were being shipped back to West Timor.

So we flew back to West Timor, and there I was -- you know, the detention continued, and I was questioned by immigration officials and police intelligence.

GROSS: Do you think that the authorities who were holding you realized that they were giving you more information by detaining you than you would have gotten on the streets if they had let you go free?

NAIRN: Well, that's a good point. I don't think they did. I actually had a very good vantage point that first morning in Coram because I just sat there for quite a few hours as, you know, one would question me, then another would question me, and they couldn't quite figure out what to do with me.

And sometimes I was near a window or several windows, so I could see what the militiamen were doing in the back. I could see that parked in front of the headquarters there were actual Itaric vehicles. Itaric is the name of the Dili-based militias. And they had these old blue Dili taxicabs that they had repainted with the Itaric name on it. And there it was, parked right in front of the military base, alongside the military intelligence vans with the blacked-out windows.

And then sometimes they would drive me across town to the Poldup police headquarters for interrogation there by police intelligence. And just by being driven across Dili in that way, I could see the scope of the devastation. And it was just astonishing. I mean, to anybody who -- who knows Dili, when they go back, they'll be stunned because it's really the -- it's almost the destruction of civilization there. And I was able to see all that, as I was driven back and forth for the various interrogations.

And in fact, in the police headquarters, as they were interrogating me, right outside the door they were also building a bonfire of documents. Police intelligence was burning their own documents, their own surveillance and interrogation reports, because, as the interrogators explained to me, they were about to evacuate. They were about to get out of Timor.

And in the confusion and chaos there at police headquarters -- because it was pretty disorganized at that point -- at one point, I was actually able to see a police intelligence document which described the forced relocation of the Timorese in detail and made clear that this was a formal military operation.

The name of the operation was Operaci Hanoin Lorosidua (ph), and they actually broke down by army base and by police base how many East Timorese they each would be responsible for capturing and taking out of East Timor. And they gave an overall figure for the number of people they had taken to that point. This is now, oh, about three and a half weeks ago. And the figure was in excess of 323,000 people, which is an astonishing figure. It's almost 40 percent of the population.

When I first read it, I found it hard to believe, but a little later, Bishop Belo and then the U.N. came out with estimates that were similar or even higher. So this means, in essence, that they abducted about half of the Timorese population.

GROSS: How were you allowed to go home?

NAIRN: Well, the -- I was picked up on a -- I believe it was a Tuesday morning. On Friday, after quite a few days of interrogation, they told me formally that I would be charged starting the following Monday. And they actually said I would -- I would be charged and then sentenced to 10 years in prison. They assumed the outcome of the trial.

But then the next day, they said that that decision had been reversed and that they announced I would be deported instead. And that was as a result of the pressure from the public and Congress here, who weighed in with the Indonesian military and with the State Department to put pressure on Jakarta. And so at some point, I think, Wiranto decided it just wasn't worth the bad publicity, and they just decided to get rid of me.

GROSS: Allan Nairn is an American journalist who reports for "The Nation" magazine and Pacifica Radio. He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross, back with American journalist Allan Nairn. He was arrested and detained in East Timor last month while reporting on the militia attacks on the capital following the East Timorese vote for independence from Indonesia.

When he returned to the U.S. he testified at the House International Relations Subcommittee on Human Rights about the new material he found on U.S. support of the Indonesian military.

What did you learn about U.S. support of the Indonesian military?

NAIRN: Well, it's been extensive, much more than the Congress realizes. And it has also been intensified during the months of the militia terror in Timor.

The dimensions include training programs. Congress thought they had cut off the military training for Indonesia, but it turns out that there are a series of training programs being run by a host of federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA and the DEA, and also some local authorities, programs under which Indonesian police and military intelligence people are brought here to the U.S. and are receiving training, contrary to an understanding that exists between the Congress and the executive branch.

Also, it turns out that the U.S. has been shipping in spare parts and ammunition to the Indonesian military, and in fact a fair amount of that ammunition was used in the militia attacks in Timor.

There's -- I got photographs, for example, from an Indonesian infantry unit in Timor, Battalion 744, showing new boxes of U.S.-supplied ammunition. These were from Olin Winchester (ph) of East Dalton (ph), Illinois. And later, when the militia rampages were happening and I was walking the streets, you would see discharged shells, cartridges, everywhere, and a number of those came from this U.S. firm.

And then in addition, there's also a large series of contracts and joint ventures between big U.S. companies like General Electric and General Motors and Textron (ph), and the strategic industries of the Indonesian military. These are the industries that run the communications and the logistics and make the bombs, and so on, for the Indonesian army.

So there are many, many lines of support.

GROSS: Allan, you were reporting on East Timor for a long time. I think it's fair to say that East Timor really entered the American consciousness pretty recently. Why did you cover it long before it became a really big media story?

NAIRN: Well, for many years I've tried to go to places where the worst atrocities are taking place, and also where the U.S. is directly involved, since I'm an American citizen, and try to expose what's going on in hopes of making an issue of it, in hopes of stopping some of the killing. So I had done that kind of work previously in Guatemala and El Salvador and Haiti and a number of other places.

And unfortunately, if you make that your mission, there's a long list of countries to choose from, and Timor is one of them, one of the worst cases. It's really inexcusable that the press, the big press, the corporate press in the United States did not put Timor on the front pages from the very start, because what happened there in the past few weeks and that, you know, really shocked and astonished the world, as it did get coverage, that's not new for Timor.

It started back in '75. From '75 to '78, the Indonesian invading force staged a mass killing that eliminated about a third of the original Timorese population. But it's only recently that the press discovered Timor.

An amazing -- some amazing figures I found from looking at the archives at Vanderbilt University of the broadcast media. The night after the invasion of December -- December 7, '75, was the invasion -- the night after the invasion, Walter Cronkite read a 40-second item on the CBS Evening News, announcing that the invasion had taken place.

That was the last mention on the CBS, NBC, or ABC evening news, the last mention of East Timor for the next decade and a half. It wasn't mentioned again until after the '91 massacre that I happened to survive, along with Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio.

So that's the decade and a half of the slaughter carried out by this army that had direct U.S. backing. And yet it was not deemed newsworthy. That's not a very objective application of, you know, the standards that the press professes to use.

GROSS: Let's go back to 1991. You witnessed a massacre in Dili and survived the massacre yourself. What was behind this massacre?

NAIRN: Well, it was a crucial moment for Timor. There was a U.N.- Portuguese delegation, Portuguese because Timor's a former Portuguese colony, and the U.N. recognizes Portugal as the administering power, even though they're not present on the ground in Timor.

There was a U.N.-Portuguese parliamentary delegation that was due to visit Timor, and the Timorese were very excited about this, because they hoped that this would finally lead to enforcement of those two U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on Indonesia to get out.

But the Indonesian army warned the Timorese that if they tried to meet the delegation or demonstrate in front of them that they would kill them all. They actually said publicly that they had already dug the mass graves.

Well, it turned out that at the last moment, that delegation was canceled under pressure from the governments of the U.S. and Australia, and that cancellation set off a train of events that culminated in a march, a procession from the Multial (ph) Catholic Church to the Santa Cruz Catholic cemetery, a procession by thousands of Timorese who were commemorating the death of a young man who had been killed by the army two weeks before.

And as the procession got to the cemetery, where they had been holding up signs and chanting against the army, the occupation, the army marched on the crowd. And at the time, I thought we could prevent an attack by just standing between the soldiers and the Timorese, myself and Amy Goodman, because the soldiers would see that we were obviously foreigners, we were obviously journalists, we had the cameras and tape recorders.

But that didn't work. We went and stood in the middle of the road as the soldiers marched up, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The crowd was defenseless. They were hemmed in by the cemetery walls. There were thousands of Timorese there.

But the soldiers just marched right up to us, enveloped us, and as they got a step or two past us, about a dozen yards from the Timorese, they just raised their rifles, their U.S. M-16s, all at once and just opened fire on the crowd. And they just slaughtered the people systematically.

It was indescribable, indescribable.

GROSS: How many people were killed?

NAIRN: Well, nobody knows exactly. But after the fact, the Timorese managed to piece together a list of -- their estimated list of the dead, that was 271. The bodies have not been recovered. They were either dumped at sea or dumped in mass graves. And many of the wounded were finished off in hospital beds with knives and iron bars.

And the next day, General Satrisno (ph), the national armed forces commander of Indonesia, gave a formal speech where he said, These people are disrupters, such people must be shot, and we will shoot them.

And then after that, the State Department announced, the U.S. State Department, that they were going to double military training aid to Indonesia to teach them democratic values.

But that never happened, because public grassroots activism mobilized here in the U.S. That was the beginning of the East Timor Action Network. And Congress voted to eliminate the military training aid for Indonesia. And that was actually the first of a series of congressional moves that started to change U.S. policy in the direction of pulling away from the Indonesian military, this very much against the will of first the Bush and later the Clinton administrations.

GROSS: Were you injured in this massacre?

NAIRN: Yes, they fractured my skull with the rifle butts. But at one point, had Amy and myself down on the ground, and they put their rifles to our heads, and they were screaming at us, they were screaming, "Politique (ph), politique," politics, a crime in Timor. We had committed politics by being there.

And it seemed they were deciding whether or not to execute us. But when we convinced them that we were from the U.S., as opposed to, say, Australia, that really seemed to turn the tide, and they took the rifles away from our heads. I think they realized that there would be a price, or there could be a price to pay if they killed Americans. You know, we were from the same country their weapons were from, the country of their sponsors. And I think they didn't want to get into -- risk that trouble.

Earlier, in the earlier years of the invasion and occupation, they had executed an entire Australian TV crew as well as the Australian wire service reporter, Roger East (ph). But I think being American made us a different case.

GROSS: Looking back, do you think it was a little naive to think that you and Amy Goodman could have stopped the military from opening fire on civilians?

NAIRN: Well, it turned out to be wrong. I think if there had been a few more of us, a few more foreigners out in the open, present up front, I think that probably would have stopped it. I think just with two, we -- there wasn't enough of a critical mass.

One thing I'm convinced that could have stopped it was, there was a U.N. official there at the time, Mr. Kuymans (ph), the special raporteur (ph) for torture. He elected not to be at the scene. I think if he had been there with all his U.N. authority, I think that might well have stopped the massacre.

But it happened. They slaughtered the Timorese. It really looked as if at that moment -- I think the Indonesian military thought that the Timorese movement was crushed, but they turned out to be wrong, because the Timorese didn't give up, organizing got going here in the United States and in other countries. And a number of years later, that resulted in some substantial cutbacks in U.S. support for the Indonesian military.

And that, I think it's pretty clear, was one of the main factors that motivated Habibi, the Indonesian president, to finally agree earlier this year to allow the vote in Timor, to allow the U.N.-supervised vote that resulted in the overwhelming mandate for independence.

GROSS: I'm wondering if you ever think it's possible that you've gotten too close to this story, that you're too emotionally involved in it, in part because you've been the victim of the regime that you've been covering.

NAIRN: Well, I'm -- like all reporters, I'm part of the story. It's a myth of American journalism that reporters are not political actors. Every reporter is a political actor. The only question is whether they recognize that and whether they are honest about it. If a reporter basically reports day to day what the State Department is saying, what the White House is saying, they're serving as a political actor and echoing their agenda.

My -- the role I choose to play in this is, I'm trying to stop the killing. I'm trying to bring to light so the American public can see what role the U.S. is playing in this, and let the public decide whether it's right or not. I think it's wrong. I think we should not be arming, training, and financing this murderous army, and I'm very clear about that.

And when I do the reporting about what's happening, I'm very careful to make sure that all the facts are accurate. And I better be, because, you know, if I get anything wrong, I'll hear about it immediately from the Indonesian military and the State Department and the Pentagon and so on. So I'm very careful to be completely accurate.

And I want to stop the killing. That's clear.

GROSS: Allan Nairn is an American journalist who reports for "The Nation" magazine and Pacifica Radio.

Coming up, we remember Wilt Chamberlain.

This is FRESH AIR.

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TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Allan Nairn
High: A discussion with journalist Allan Nairn, who in September, after most journalists, U.N. officials and independent observers were forced out of East Timor, stayed to report on events there, and who witnessed the destruction and violence in Dili by the militia following the vote for independence by East Timorese before being arrested, detained and deported.
Spec: East Timor; World Affairs; Media

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Allan Nairn: A Look Inside East Timor
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