On August 30, 1999, the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) held a referendum on the territory's future. Voters were asked whether they wished their homeland to remain inside Indonesia. The government of President B.J. Habibie in Jakarta had tried to make continued integration more palatable locally by calling it "special autonomy"--a status elaborated in a fifty-nine article document that few East Timorese bothered to read.
They did bother to vote, however, despite widespread intimidation by Jakarta-backed militias. Out of a population of perhaps 850,000, more than 400,000 had registered to take part in the referendum, and of these, a stunning 98.6 percent went to the often considerable trouble of voting. Many walked miles from their homes to polling stations and back. Of the ballots cast, 78.5 percent--nearly four out of every five persons--rejected continued ties with Indonesia.
I was in East Timor to observe the balloting for the Carter Center. The night before the vote, my co-observer, Annette Clear, and I had camped on a bluff at the easternmost tip of the province. We had hoped to stay with a local notable in Los Palos, but two nights before, men with machetes had slashed him to death and torched his house. He had favored independence. From the evidence we saw or heard, he appeared to have been murdered by pro-integration militiamen, or by soldiers from the Indonesian army, or both, possibly at the behest of the Indonesian-appointed head of the district. At his funeral, his distraught younger sister voiced her misery in a stream of Portuguese (Lisbon ruled East Timor from the sixteenth century to the mid-1970s). Possibly mistaking me for a UNAMET official, she threw herself at my feet, as if I could relieve her grief.
