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Finding Santana

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Finding Santana Wakefield Press Finding Santana Melbourne-born Jill Jolliffe began her career as a journalist in 1975 covering the Indonesian takeover of Portuguese Timor for Reuters newsagency. Between 1978 and 1998 she was based in Portugal, freelancing for a range of media companies, including the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Eastern Express, the BBC, the Age and The Christian Science Monitor. During this time she covered news, political and cultural events in Portugal, Spain, Angola, Mozambique, Western Sahara, Macau, China and south-east Asia. She returned to Australia in 1999 and travelled to East Timor to cover the withdrawal of Indonesian troops after a 24-year occupation. In 2004 Jill Jolliffe was granted the Eric Dark Fellowship by Varuna, the Writer’s House, to complete the manuscript of Finding Santana. With a group of Timorese former political prisoners, in 2005 she founded The Living Memory Project, a movement dedicated to creating a video archive based on testimony of freed prisoners and torture survivors. In 2006 she was named Journalist of the Year by Yale University’s Global magazine for her writing on justice and human rights issues. Jill Jolliffe continues to work as a journalist and is writing her auto- biography as a PhD with Flinders University. santana_pages_251010.indd 1 25/10/10 11:26 AM By the same author East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism Timor, Terra Sangrenta [Timor: The Killing Fields] Aviz: A Lisbon Story Depois das Lagrimas [After the Tears], ed. Cover-up Balibo santana_pages_251010.indd 2 25/10/10 11:26 AM Finding Santana Jill Jolliffe santana_pages_251010.indd 3 25/10/10 11:26 AM Wakefield Press 1 The Parade West Kent Town South Australia 5067 www.wakefieldpress.com.au First published 2010 Copyright © Jill Jolliffe 2010 All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher. Cover design by Mark Thomas Typeset by Wakefield Press Printed and bound by Hyde Park Press, Adelaide National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Jolliffe, Jill. Title: Finding Santana/Jill Jolliffe. ISBN: 978 1 86254 925 8 (pbk.). Subjects: Sanatana, Nino Konis – Interviews. Jolliffe, Jill – Diaries. Forbes, Anna. Guerrillas – Timor-Leste. Military intelligence – Indonesia – History. Timor-Leste – History – 20th century. Dewey Number: 355.0218095987 This book was written with the assistance of an Eric Dark Fellowship from Varuna, The Writers’ House Publication of this book was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. santana_pages_251010.indd 4 25/10/10 11:26 AM Contents Book I Contact Prologue 3 1 The Journey Begins 7 2 Inside Indonesia 17 3 The Long Wait 29 4 Cat and Mouse with INTEL 42 5 Near but Far 57 6 With the Guerrillas 70 7 Comandante Nino Konis Santana 77 8 Exit 92 Book II Capture 9 The Return 99 10 Doubts and Fears 113 11 Waiting for Death 119 12 Capture 127 13 Interrogation 135 14 The Holiday Inn Siege 145 15 Mending Broken Pieces 151 Epilogue 160 Notes 163 Acknowledgements 167 Index 171 santana_pages_251010.indd 5 25/10/10 11:26 AM santana_pages_251010.indd 6 25/10/10 11:26 AM Indonesian archipelago and East Timor, showing the route taken by the author on her first visit to Nino Konis Santana in mid-1994 Book I Contact on her first visit to Nino Konis Santana in mid-1994 Indonesian archipelago and East showing Timor, route the taken by author the santana_pages_251010.indd 1 25/10/10 11:26 AM santana_pages_251010.indd 2 25/10/10 11:26 AM Prologue So’e, 3 August 1994 By the noodle stall at the end of Jalan Kartini, F.F.’s face loomed up out of the dusk. He was in a rage, a condition I had never seen him in before. ‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you turn up? I’ve been waiting for days!’ he hissed. Despite his wrath, I was terribly glad to see him. It took some time to quieten him down by explaining what had happened. Tommy, my dear and faithful companion in misadventure, stood at my side, nodding agreement with my version. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of streets in Indonesia called after the feminist hero Kartini, and so there was a Jalan Kartini in Kupang, capital of West Timor, just as there was in So’e, the next town down the road in the direction of the East Timor border. When Tommy and I had been unable to meet in Kupang because of constant harassment by the secret police, we decided to hide out in So’e until F.F. arrived to organise the next phase of the journey and to bring me more of the money I had sent to his account from Australia. Under the system I used with the East Timorese resist- ance operatives, whenever I moved from one place to another Tommy or I would ring the youthful Zely in Jakarta, who acted as a sort of telephone anchorman. We would tell him where I was and he would then tell F.F. when he rang in. Zely had failed to absorb the fact that we were in Jalan Kartini, So’e, and not in Jalan Kartini, Kupang, which is where F.F. had been waiting for us. When Tommy discovered what had happened, he came as close to cursing at Zely on the 3 santana_pages_251010.indd 3 25/10/10 11:26 AM F INDING S ANTANA telephone as a good Timorese Catholic can. ‘The bonehead! I’m going to kill him, I’m going to kill him!’ he inveighed when he came back. This misunderstanding had caused us serious anguish. For the past week Tommy and I had been sharing a cockroach- infested room costing around 50c a night in the flophouse of Andre, a local eccentric. Its garden was studded with Roman- style plaster statues painted in garish colours and he had built a new guest wing in the shape of the Johannes, a frigate Britain’s Margaret Thatcher had sold to the Indonesian navy at cut-price after the Falklands war. (Because his middle name was Johannes, he felt a special affinity with the vessel and, indeed, had been invited on board for its inaugural voyage in this new theatre of war.) The aesthetic originality of our lodgings could not, however, compensate for the fact that we were living on little more than a plate of noodles a day and whatever bananas or mangoes we could get at the market. In the past few days we had trudged through the market several times trying to sell my watch. I was too proud to present the image of an Australian hippy begging in Asia, so I asked Tommy to pretend it was his. The stallholders stared know- ingly at the white strip on my arm, unmarked by the sun. That had failed, so Tommy had used some of our last rupiahs to travel back to Kupang and try to find F.F. He was gone for two days and I was almost desperate when he returned. Stranded and penniless, I was in danger of coming to police attention. If they picked me up and looked at the name on my passport I was doomed. In my diary I wrote bitter words against both him and F.F., which I regretted when he returned and told me he’d had to sleep in the street because he couldn’t afford even the cheapest room in the city. F.F.’s anger was a minor matter after the indignities we had suffered. The problem was that we had lost another one of the precious eight weeks allowed on my tourist visa. Renewing it within the borders of Indonesia was out of the 4 santana_pages_251010.indd 4 25/10/10 11:26 AM P R o L o GUE question because it would reveal my illegal status, and I now had only a fortnight to enter East Timor, cross Indonesian lines, interview guerrilla commander Nino Konis Santana in the mountains and return along the archipelago to Sumatra for a boat back to Singapore. I had waited weeks hidden in a room in the backpackers’ quarter of Jakarta for Santana’s authorisation to proceed. Then there had been a false start when F.F., Tommy and I had booked a 30-hour bus journey to Bali but had to get off the bus and separate after we were questioned by a passenger who had heard us speaking Portuguese. He turned out to be a military judge returning to his post in Dili, with two other officers. We waited till the bus stopped for a coffee break in Surabaya, grabbed our bags and fled. The new plan involved separating, with F.F. returning to Jakarta and Tommy travelling in the bus behind me until we all met up again in Kupang, but we had lost valuable time. The latest disaster had not helped. After he accepted our explanations, F.F. unveiled the next phase of the operation. Twilight had given way to night as we stood beside the highway leading to East Timor, so I was glad he couldn’t see the blood drain from my face as he asked, ‘Can you cross the border alone?’ I had taken comfort from the thought that after Jakarta I would have a resistance escort all the way, but now I had to face a different reality.
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