Casa dos Timores

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The Casa dos Timores (also Casa de Timores , German  house of the Timorese ) was in the early 1970s a shared apartment and meeting place for East Timorese who studied in motherland Portugal . It was located in Lisbon on Rua de Antero de Figueiredo 2, on the 5th floor, near the Vox cinema . It was not until a cultural center known as the Casa de Timor ( German  Timor House ) that it was occupied and renamed by the students after the Carnation Revolution .

Members

Deceased persons without a date of death died during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999) at an unknown time.

Bonaparte and Rodrigues were only guests at Casa dos Timores, not residents.

background

From 1948, the Portuguese government established several cultural centers for students from the colonies in Portugal. There was a Casa de Angola , de Guiné-Bissau , de Macau , de Mozambique and a Casa de São Tomé e Príncipe . From 1952, African students began to publish a regular student newspaper, the Boletim Estudante do Império . The content consisted of organizational information and even literary information. The authors included later independence leaders such as Amílcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto . In the first few decades, Portuguese Timor was not mentioned in this newspaper, solely because very few Timorese studied in Portugal.

From 1971 the government of Portugal also initiated a scholarship program for Timorese who wanted to study in Lisbon. Governor Fernando Alves Aldeia (1972–1974) expanded the program and sent around a hundred young Timorese to Portugal, both men and women. The scholarship was increased to 15,000-20,000 Escudos for ten months. For the two months when the university was closed during vacation time, there were 1,800 escudos per month. The fields of study included agriculture, engineering, philosophy, and law. Some of the grants came from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation . In the academic year 1972/73 37 scholarships were awarded and 26 students were admitted to the course. For the 1974 Carnation Revolution, there were 39 Timorese students in Lisbon. Most of them were active at Casa dos Timores , even if not all of them later became supporters of FRETILIN .

history

In Lisbon

Abílio Araújo (1975)

The Casa de Timor was originally founded by Portuguese people who had previously been to Timor . It served as a meeting point for those with a connection to the colony. On January 26, 1974, the Portuguese government officially inaugurated the Timorese cultural center. Abílio Araújo, Vincente dos Reis, Hamis Bassarewan, António Carvarino and Justino Yap rejected it. They lived together in a rented house and saw the casa as the place of the rich, mestiços and bufos (a Portuguese term for police spies ). They regularly visited the home of Aires de Almeida, a Timorese of Indian descent who was already under surveillance by the secret police . As a result, Carvarino and Araújo were also summoned for interrogation by the PIDE and accused of subversion .

On April 25, 1974 there was the Carnation Revolution, left-wing army group Movimento das Forças Armadas and the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship . The Timorese group took the opportunity to occupy the Casa de Timor , just as African student groups occupied their casas . The center was renamed Casa dos Timores as it would better suit the socialist enthusiasm of the students. Araújo became student president, Carvarino director of the Casa .

Araújo was already a member of the Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado (MRPP), a Portuguese Maoist party that was founded as a counterpart to the Moscow-based Partido Comunista Português (PCP). Rosa Bonaparte, Cavarino and Bassarewan also became MRPP members. Within the MRPP there was a branch, the Movimento Popular Anti-Colonial (MPAC), with which the students at Casa dos Timores were secretly connected. Connections were made with African independence movements and independence was also demanded for Portuguese Timor. Part of the MRPP was the Resistência Popular Anti-Colonial , which was created within the Portuguese army. Through the MRPP, the students at Casa dos Timores came into contact with Amílcar Cabral and learned about the theories of the Brazilian Paulo Freire on literacy , which they would later apply to Timor. Samora Machel was one of the visitors . Politics and anti-colonialism were discussed and revolutionary and nationalist texts were studied. All of this influenced the left-wing extremist orientation of the group. In one photo, Carvarino and his wife María do Céu Pereira are referred to by an Indonesian publisher as the "Maoists from Lisbon".

Also Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo , who later became Bishop of Dili , as a young priest at that time Évora studied was in contact with the students of Casa dos Timores . some of them had studied together with Belo at the Nossa Senhora da Fatima seminary in the colonial capital of Dili .

In October 1974 the student group split up. The controversial issue was whether to support the Associação Social Democrática Timorense (ASDT), founded in Portuguese Timor in May, unconditionally or only with reservations. The cautious faction was of the opinion that one could not necessarily rely on the ASDT members in the colony because one did not know what they were supporting there. This group included Aires de Almeida and Vicente Guterres. The other group trusted that there would be more information about the situation in their home country and that they could better decide in which direction the country should develop. She called for full support for the ASDT.

Working in Timor

When the ASDT was founded in Dili, according to a list, María do Céu Pereira from the Casa dos Timores was one of the members of the organizing committee , which shows that the students had contact with the East Timorese party from the very beginning. But they represented a far more socialist-Marxist path than the party members in the colony.

Around 20 students returned to Portuguese Timor in late 1974 / early 1975 to prepare for independence during this time. The group made the ASDT more radical. On the day the main members returned, on September 11, 1974, the party was renamed FRETILIN , based on the Marxist FRELIMO in Mozambique .

Many of the group became members of the Central Committee of FRETILIN (CCF). Also the União Nacional dos Estudantes Timores (UNETIM), founded in October 1974 , which addresses students of the Escola Tecnica and the Liceu Dr. Francisco Machado in Dili was under the guidance of the people from the Casa dos Timores. The revolutionary theories, which one had got to know in Lisbon, began to be put into practice and, based on practical experience, they created their own Timorese path of the “Revolution of the Maetze ”. With their actions, they fueled fears that East Timor could become communist after independence and provided a reason for Indonesia to occupy the country from 1975 ( Operation Seroja ).

Whereabouts of the members

Of the 18 members of the Casa dos Timores who remained in East Timor , all except Francisco Benevides died in the war against Indonesia. Abílio Araújo and his wife Guilhermina spent the time of occupation in Europe. They broke with FRETILIN in 1993. Araújo founded the Partido Nasionalista Timorense (PNT) in liberated East Timor and played a minor political role in the independent country. Roque Rodrigues became the representative of FRETILIN in Mozambique and later in Angola . In the independent East Timor he became Minister of Defense. Manuel Tilman lived in Portugal and Macau and only returned to East Timor after the occupation, where he worked as a KOTA politician and lawyer. Aires de Almeida lived in Portugal and moved to Australia in 1978 . He has lived in Dili since independence. Vicente da Silva Guterres worked for the Diplomatic Front of the Timorese Resistance in Portugal. In independent East Timor, he became a politician and President of Parliament (2012-2016). Estanislau da Silva and his wife Filomena de Almeida initially stayed in Portugal, then spent the occupation period as activists in Australia and Mozambique. Estanisslau da Silva was among other things briefly Prime Minister of East Timor in 2007. Almeida works in the department for propaganda and information (DEPIM) of FRETILIN.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Logo of the Casa dos Timores
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q David Hicks: Rhetoric and the Decolonization and Recolonization of East Timor. Routledge, 2015, limited preview in Google Book Search.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an Antero Bendito da Silva, Robert Boughton , Rebecca Spence: FRETILIN Popular Education 1973–1978 and its Relevance to Timor-Leste Today , University of New England, 2012, accessed June 5, 2019.
  4. ↑ a b c David Hutt: East Timor's “Red Rosa” , In: New Matilda, October 1, 2017 , accessed November 5, 2017.
  5. ^ A b Antero Benedito da Silva: Popular Socialist Democracy of the RDTL 1 1975–1978 , May 15, 2012 , accessed April 15, 2019.
  6. ↑ Jornal da República : Edition of December 20, 2006 , accessed on March 22, 2018.
  7. ↑ Timor Post: New PJR are Jose, Zelia or Tilman? , 12th March 2013