Patterns of violence : narratives of occupied East Timor from invasion to independence, 1975-1999

In October 2005, the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) released Chega!, its massive report detailing the human rights violations committed on all sides during the 1975 to 1999 Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Chega! offers the most comprehensive description of this history of East Timor during this period. This thesis examines the CAVR's treatment of three major events of the occupation period. These events are the Indonesian invasion and conquest of East Timor (1975-1979), the Santa Cruz massacre (November 12, 1991), and the Popular Consultation (1999). For each of these events, the thesis analyzes four major narrative strands: the East Timorese narrative, the Indonesian narrative, the journalists' narrative, and the truth commission's narrative. The focus is on evaluating the current CAVR treatments of these events in light of previous work, as expressed in the other narratives. The East Timorese truth commission sought to find patterns to the violence of the occupation. In the case of the invasion, it offered an extensive discussion of human rights violations committed by the East Timorese resistance, showing how the population suffered from both Indonesian war crimes and suicidal resistance policies. The Commission's treatment of the Santa Cruz massacre focused on what the killings showed about the makeup of the second generation of the resistance, which was devoted to a diplomatic, rather than military, resolution to the East Timorese conflict. Finally, when discussing the Popular Consultation, the CAVR sought to reveal the planning behind the mass destruction of 1999 and to show that the militia violence was not anarchic, but rather conformed to quantifiable aims and strategie