From the hands of our ancestors

In September 1999, just five days after the East Timorese voted for independence, Indonesian militia groups supervised by the army and police destroyed, looted and left hundreds of artefacts from the then Provincial Museum in Dili to rot in the monsoonal rains. The director and former resistance veteran Virgilio Simith, who had over the years of struggle made an inventory of the collection, could only watch in horror as hundred-year-old carvings, weavings, jewellery and other antiquities disappeared or nearly disintegrated in what appeared to be a ‘final solution’ on the part of the Soeharto regime. General Benny Moerdani, one of the regime’s architects of the 1975 invasion, had continually warned civil servants in Dili about claiming a national identity: ‘Don’t dream about having a state of Tim Tim. There is no such thing as a Tim Tim nation, only an Indonesian nation. If you try to make your own state it will be crushed’.