Book review: A Dirty Little War

"A Dirty Little War" by journalist John Martinkus was launched in Melbourne on Friday 20^th July. The book chronicles, through the first-hand experiences of Martinkus, the final stages in East Timor’s struggle for independence.

A few hours after the book launch in Melbourne, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by police. The incident occurred during G8 Summit protests, in Genoa, Italy. Images released on the world wide web show Giuliani holding a fire extinguisher moments before his death. Authorities claim they were acting in self-defence. However, it is reported that the 20-year-old police conscript who shot the activist could face manslaughter charges.

The G8 Summit is the annual gathering of leaders from USA, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia to discuss the state of the world economy. The Summit allegedly addresses issues such as poverty and the environment but protest groups describe this claim as nothing more than good public relations declaring that previous G8 meetings have made similar statements, but failed to deliver anything of substance.

Genoa was the conclusion of a summer of European protests that started with the European Union Summit in Göteborg, Sweden. Plans for the G8 Summit and the inevitable protests had been building for months, with predictions that over 100,000 people would converge on the Italian port city. Over 15,000 riot police were mobilised while hundreds of small and large protest groups planned various actions.

With the death of Giuliani many protestors are describing Genoa as a major turning point in the movement against corporate globalisation. Mainstream media are also highlighting the significance of what has happened. CNN reports the incident as "the first death during anti-globalisation protests, which have become a regular event at international gatherings since the 1999 clashes at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle."

But of course this is not entirely true. Many people have been killed in protests against corporate globalisation.

In late June, four students were shot dead by police during protests against IMF- and World Bank-driven economic reform in Papua New Guinea. And there have been hundreds more deaths like these during other acts of ‘civil disobedience’. Expressing opposition has long been a dangerous occupation in many regions of the world.

In "A Dirty Little War", John Martinkus gives his personal account of East Timor over three years from January 1997. In the first chapter he writes of being called out to a deserted beach, and goes on to describe what he saw - "a headless body, no hands, no feet, was lying in the water, moving with the tide…In another country this would have been a crime scene".

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 and during its 25-year brutal occupation, over 250,000 people (about one third of the territory’s population) died. The Indonesian regime clearly understood that the rest of the world was not interested in East Timor and continued to violently suppress any uprising against its rule.

Martinkus confirms our suspicions that the Indonesian authorities are the ones responsible for the headless body lying in the water on the deserted beach. "Their point was blunt: support independence and this is what will happen".

"A Dirty Little War", which I have yet to complete reading, documents the final stages of the territory’s independence struggle. As East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao stresses in his forward to the book "Far worse atrocities than those detailed here were carried out against the East Timorese people in the late seventies and eighties. Sadly for us, these were not well documented".

The lack of documentation was not a result of the East Timorese not wanting to express their situation. It was because the governments of the world did not want to hear about what the Indonesian regime was doing to the East Timorese.

During the Indonesian invasion in 1975, five Australian-based journalists were killed while attempting to provide coverage of the situation in East Timor. Despite substantial evidence indicating that the journalists were effectively executed, the Australian Government still maintains the five were accidentally killed in crossfire.

On Sunday 22nd July, as I conclude this article reports are coming in of more police violence in Genoa. ABC Online reports that Italian police have "conducted a raid on the press centre of the anti-globalisation movement, Genoa Social Forum". Italy Indymedia was one of the groups based at the press centre and its website reports that not only did the police destroy the place and take away computers and files, but also violence was inflicted by the police on those who were inside. BBC Online confirms what happened: "A BBC correspondent who entered the building immediately after the raid said he saw a number of badly injured people, and pools of blood in the rooms."

The Italian police say the raid on the press centre was the result of a tip-off and that iron bars, knives, blunt objects and black T-shirts had been seized. But Italy Indymedia suggests police were looking for an escape they wanted to justify their violence on the streets and their killing of a young man.

Revenge by authorities was a common occurrence in East Timor. John Martinkus describes the "regular routine" carried out by the Indonesian military intelligence unit when they sought revenge: "a family would suddenly find men armed with guns inside their house late at night. The masked men would take away the man of the house and often rape the mother or daughters. Young men, particularly those with an education, were almost always taken away. Often they were never heard of again; sometimes their mutilated remains were discovered weeks later, by the roadside or dumped on some vacant land or the beach."

Attempting to explain and understand what happened in Genoa and in places like East Timor is part of an ongoing discussion that will not necessarily have a tidy conclusion.

The East Timorese were determined not to be part of Indonesia their vision was to live in an independent country free of the Indonesian regime. Their struggle lasted 25 years and cost the lives of one third of their population. The protests that are occurring at events such as the G8 Summit in Genoa can also be seen as struggles for independence.

It’s often claimed that movements against corporate globalisation need to communicate a clearer vision of the future they are struggling for. But this argument fails to recognise that putting your body on the line is very often a last ditch tactic in an attempt to be listened to.

Perhaps it is the rest of us who need to listen more carefully to what’s being said – and time we began to facilitate a culture in which the messages of the less dominant, the less established, are respected and taken in to consideration, before situations escalate to such extremes.