Fence made of legs
The surgery fence of legs ( Indonesian Operasi Pagar Betis , English Operation fence of legs ; and Operation Kikis , German operation extinction or surgery Keamanan , "Security" ) was an action of the Indonesian army against the East Timorese resistance movement FALINTIL .
From May to September 1981, 60,000 East Timorese civilians were forced to roam across the island in a line in front of Indonesian soldiers in order to track down the insurgents. Among the conscripts who were on the front lines against the FALINTIL were children aged 10 and over. One source gives the age of the TBOs ( tenaga bantuan operasi , "surgical assistant") with 8 to 60 years.
From Tutuala , a human chain linking Com , Raça , Lospalos and Iliomar moved westwards, while another moved northeast from Venilale , Ossu and Viqueque . They met at Mount Matebian and fanned out towards the south coast and then further west towards Lacluta , where another chain met them. In Lacluta , hundreds of civilians, including women and children, were murdered by the Indonesians at the end of the march on September 7, presumably at the St. Anthony's Shrine on Mount Aitana . The priest Costa Lopes reports 500 victims, while Indonesian officials said 70 killed. Further details are in between. In another massacre, 20 people are said to have been murdered.
One FALINTIL fighter reported:
“I witnessed with my own eyes the Indonesian military , Battalion 744 , killing civilians right in front of me. They caught these unarmed people, handcuffed them and stabbed them to death. A pregnant woman was caught and killed just like that. I saw it up close, only a hundred meters away from where it happened. "
As a measure against FALINTIL, the action failed because the guerrillas kept slipping through the lines in groups of three to four at night. One conscript reported five people who were captured at Cacavei and immediately executed. Indonesia reported the capture of 450 FALINTIL fighters during this period, albeit unrelated to Operation Pagar Betis. Civilians were often found hiding from the Indonesians in the wilderness. According to Indonesian sources, 4,500 sympathizers of the FRETILIN independence movement were captured. 3,000 were deported to the island of Atauro and 1,500 to other places in East Timor. Most of the deportees were women, children and the elderly.
Many of the civilians who ran out of legs in the fence died from the harsh conditions. Farmers got into trouble because they missed the planting time for their fields. As a result, there was a famine in November.
Similar operations were carried out in Aceh in the early 1990s .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e "Part 3: The History of the Conflict" (PDF; 1.4 MB) from the "Chega!" Report of the CAVR (English)
- ↑ John G. Taylor: East Timor's Bloody Road to Independence ( Memento of April 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS): Companion to East Timor
- ^ Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson: Violence and the state in Suharto's Indonesia , 2001, p. 229