Australia Knew, Kept Quiet On 1991 East Timor Atrocities

by Sonny Inbaraj

There is new, reliable evidence that the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), under a then Labor government, was in the know of a second round of killings by Indonesian soldiers and intelligence agents immediately after the massacre at Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1991.

With Labor now in opposition, the revelations have caused the party to be drawn in a bitter wrangle over its East Timor policy.

Also the former governor of East Timor, Mario Carrascalao, broke his silence on the 1991 massacre days after its seventh anniversary, claiming dozens more people were executed and secretly buried after the initial bloodshed.

"Of the bodies, some had been burnt and some dynamited. Given the physical effort involved in loading bodies onto trucks and destroying them, many officers knew about this," Prabowo, then a Special Forces officer in East Timor, told Flood privately, on the assurance that it would not be reported back to Canberra.

Carrascalao told The Age on November 18 he had evidence that soldiers executed a truckload of East Timorese in December 1991, weeks after the cemetery massacre, and buried them near a rubbish dump 13 kilometers west of the town.

The former Jakarta-appointed governor of the territory also dismissed as a lie Indonesia's official version that only 54 demonstrators had been killed in the massacre and called for an immediate reopening of the case.

He said he broke his silence because he did not want to derail United-Nations sponsored peace talks between the territory's former ruler, Portugal and Indonesia.

There was no immediate reaction from Jakarta to these new allegations.

Back in the Australian embassy in early May, 1994, Flood's successor, Alan Taylor, came across a written account of the conversation with Prabowo from embassy files and with the predecessor's concurrence, according to the Herald, passed extracts on to DFAT on May 10. Ten days later, the department sent the information to then foreign minister Gareth Evans.

Taylor is now the head of Australia's Security and Intelligence Organization, the national spy body. Prabowo, recently was removed from his command of Jakarta's Strategic Forces after he was implicated in the May 12 shooting of six students at Trisakti University and the kidnapping of pro-democracy activists.

It was around this time, that British Australian journalist John Pilger released his TV documentary 'Death of a Nation' in which he interviewed witnesses, including Dili bishop and Nobel Peace Laureate Carlos Ximenes Belo, claiming a second massacre had occurred at the military hospital in Dili, where the wounded were brought for medical treatment.

Labor, now in the federal opposition, seems to be in a disarray over its East Timor policy after announcing with great fanfare in the runup to the Oct 3 general election that it will be making a major policy shift on the territory, with East Timorese being given the sole voice in determining their future.

Shadow Foreign Minister Laurie Brereton appeared to strongly distance himself from Evans over the revelations, saying they reinforced his call for greater openness on Australia's past and present policies on East Timor.

Evans, who after the elections resigned as Shadow Treasurer and deputy party leader, is under considerable pressure to answer to the claims.

In a brief statement today, after returning to Australia from Kuala Lumpur, where he attended meetings hosted by the APEC Business Council, Evans said: "I did not at any time as foreign minister conceal from the Australian public any knowledge I had about the nature of the scale of killings that occurred in or around Dili in November 1991."

However, Evans confirmed that he was informed of the conversation between Flood and Prabowo. This conversation, he said in the statement, supports claims of additional killings but not of a second massacre of people wounded in the original massacre.

In the meantime, the debate continues on whether Australia conspired with Indonesia to mislead the world on the Dili massacre.