Getting to Dili

Penny and I had inquired at Xanana Gusmao Reading Room about how to find Sebastian’s grave - the young man we spoke with there assured us it was not far from the shrine. When we got to Santa Cruz Cemetery we found that it is jam-packed with graves of all sizes and descriptions; some are quite elaborate, many have been constructed by family members with materials available to them, rather than by tradesmen. Some graves were unmarked and some were family plots. Some had flowers on top of them from recent visits and several Timorese families were tending graves.

We proceeded down past the shrine along the most easily accessible path, past workmen doing repairs to some of the graves and clearing up around them.

Down towards the back of the cemetery I looked over to my right to see a simple cross painted white with Sebastian Gomes' name in black and a record of the date of his death. In the early morning sunshine it was like a beacon. We made our way over to his grave, trying to walk along the borders of other graves. I was surprised how overwhelmed I felt. I recalled much of the film footage I’d seen of the massacre and thought about all the people who had died. I was thinking of the mayhem which would have occurred as people tried to flee the soldiers, and remembering the disappointment we felt on the Lusitania Expresso when Shirley Shackleton cast the wreath from the stern of our retreating peace ship which we’d intended to lay at Santa Cruz. I was thinking about the 300,000 East Timorese who died in the struggle for independence from Indonesia.

As I stood there staring at the grave I was thinking just how impotent repression is in the long run. The Indonesian navy might have been able to turn around an international peace mission at gun point, yet I was standing in Santa Cruz Cemetery some 13 years later, and East Timor was free. I thought of many of the others who had been on the Lusitania Expresso who had been here before me and some who will come later. I remembered others, and Jack Broadman, who was run over and killed as he left a Free East Timor rally, who wouldn’t make it back.