Working towards healing

On 17 March, the people of East Timor took another step towards rebuilding their nation. By an enormous margin, they chose ‘Xanana’ Gusmão to be their first president. As the rebuilding of the country continues, one most critical task is that of reconciliation. Rosie Hoban spoke to Isabel Amaral-Guterres about her role in this.
War has many victims. When a country fights for freedom, all its men and women suffer, even those scattered around the world. Isabel Amaral-Guterres was in Australia during the final bloody years of East Timor’s battle for independence. Her war wound is invisible and slow to heal. Isabel’s wound is guilt.

‘I felt guilty that I was in Australia and not there. I didn’t stay. My family stayed, everyone stayed, but I left and I was safe’, Isabel says. She sees her appointment to the newly established East Timor Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation as a chance to give something back to her country. Others who have worked beside her in Australia and alongside her as she helps refugees in East Timor, see her appointment as a wise move that will help old enemies reconcile in an independent East Timor.
Along with six other national commissioners, she will hear claims of human rights abuses and will help facilitate reconciliation within the region. The commissioners were sworn in on 21 January this year and started work formally in February with a two year mandate which can be extended for a further six months. The Commission’s role is to:
o Seek the truth regarding human rights violations that occurred in East Timor between April 1974 and October 1999.
o Undertake special investigations and historical research, as well as a nationwide statement taking process. It is based on the principal that genuine reconciliation requires first knowing the truth; justice can then follow as individuals accept responsibility for their actions.
o Produce a report, which will be an historical record of the extent, causes and accounting of the human rights violations.
o Make recommendations to the government about further legal and institutional reforms to bring people to justice, to support the victims and survivors, as well as ensuring human rights are safeguarded in the future.
o Promote reconciliation efforts to assist the East Timorese who fled to West Timor to be received back in an orderly and peaceful way.

Isabel, now an Australian citizen, was studying medicine at the Catholic University in Jakarta in the 1980s when her boyfriend became a target of police harassment because of his political involvement in the burgeoning East Timorese freedom movement. The pair fled Indonesia following a tip from a member of the Indonesian intelligence that police were about to make a move on East Timorese resistance workers.

Already familiar with the Jesuits in East Timor, Isabel and her friend travelled through Thailand supported by Jesuit communities. It was in Thailand that Isabel, a refugee searching for a new home, met Fr Mark Raper, then head of Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS) in the Asian Pacific region. He helped provide the pair with safe accommodation and gave her the determination to pursue a new life in Australia. Isabel gained entry into Australia through a special humanitarian program in 1986. She lived with the Jesuits, working in a community in Melbourne

‘Mark had written to his friends in Australia and asked them to look after us. To this day these people are still my great friends’, Isabel says, while staying with some of her long-time friends in Melbourne during a recent visit to Australia for medical treatment.

Isabel, a diminutive and humble woman, arrived in Australia from Thailand speaking some English and determined to build a new life. She studied nursing and worked at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital for five years. Life was good, but never complete. During the 1990s Isabel returned to East Timor to visit her family. She recognised the tension and anger of the East Timorese people. She had felt it two decades earlier.

The turning point came in March 1999 when she agreed to act as translator for Queensland barrister Leo White, who was providing voluntary training in negotiation skills to people in Dili. A week after they arrived, the killings began.

Isabel returned to Australia, but her heart remained in East Timor with the people fleeing to the mountains and those resisting Indonesia’s injustices. Her life back in Australia was never the same and she travelled back several times to East Timor, eventually going in November 1999 to work in Maliana, with her friends from the Jesuit Refugee Service, led by Fr Peter Hosking, from Melbourne. She arrived in Maliana just after the town had been destroyed.

‘My job was to help refugees who wanted to return to their homes’, she says. ‘I wanted to go back and help rebuild the country. Maybe it was my guilt. My family was there and I had been here without any threat to my safety.’

Her family, like most others returned from the mountains, to the burnt shell of their home in the small town of Viqueque. They now live mostly in Dili, 20 of her family in a small house. Not everyone was welcomed back to their hometowns and Isabel, as part of JRS, has helped reconcile many enemies.

‘We followed up on many of the people who have had trouble resettling. If there are problems we have tried to use the community’s skills to work out a solution.’

Peter Hosking applauds Isabel’s appointment to the Commission. ‘Isabel works really well with people from all sides because of her integrity and compassion. She is a bridge builder’, he says.
‘Reconciliation does require working with the community. Isabel has that great capacity to feel compassion for the survivors and she has worked a lot with the widows’ groups.’

‘Isabel also wants to honour the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate price for their country’s freedom. She knows that reconciliation requires justice and truth. If it is just promulgated as a strategy by the political elites then it is an amnesty and that can bring moral amnesia.

‘On the other hand Isabel has a commitment to working with the people in West Timor who want to return to East Timor. She knows the ambiguity that arises because of living in a country like Timor. She also feels for those forced to flee, or who were forced to do terrible things. She knows that receiving people back is about reception and healing. If people do not feel welcomed, then they become isolated and alienated and feel they cannot participate in the building up of the newest country of the millennium.’

Living conditions for many in East Timor, including Isabel and other volunteers and aid agency workers, have been difficult. She has felt afraid and vulnerable like all the other refugees returning home. ‘Prayer became very important to me during the past few years. I don’t think I had ever really thought much about the words of the Our Father. But when you spend time to reflect on that prayer, it can give you strength and hope’, she says.

Isabel, 43, is learning just how much East Timor has changed and how to find her place in this ‘new’ country. During her last few years working as a volunteer with the JRS Isabel has returned to Melbourne often to do a couple of weeks nursing to help raise some money and to maintain skills which have been important in her work with JRS. She is lucky, she says, to call two countries home.

‘My life in the last few years is so different to what I had known as a young woman. There was not much food and for a long time we camped in a sports stadium at Maliana with no doors and no toilet.’ But things are changing and by mid-2000 the rebuilding of Maliana was under way. Last year Isabel strolled around the market, which was full of locally grown fruit and vegetables. Some children are no longer sitting on floors in makeshift schools. Sadly, the shortage of teachers and other professionals is still a great problem.

The years ahead as a member of the Commission will be difficult. But Isabel believes she is where God wants her to be. She doesn’t spend time pondering life after the Commission’s two-year term ends and she has come to believe in taking one day at a time. She isn’t daunted by the traumatic stories of sorrow and cruelty she will hear as a commissioner. Her job, she says, is to serve the people of East Timor.

‘Jesus served people so well. And I have worked with so many good people who have served others with compassion and justice. I will think of all these great teachers when it seems too hard.’

Isabel has moved from Maliana to Dili to take up her position on the Commission.

Donations to support the Jesuit Refugee Service can be sent to PO Box 522, Kings Cross NSW 2011.