Date: November 12, 1991
Location: Dili, Timor-Leste
Death Count: More than 271
Perpetrator: Indonesian Army

"They shot at us straightaway,” he says. “I was in the front row and fell to the ground to avoid the bullets. I saw two of my friends bleeding profusely, dying. I thought, ‘I'm going to die too.’ A bullet had entered my back, and I lost consciousness.” - Levi Corte-Real Bucar  

On November 12, 1991, Indonesian troops shot and stabbed hundreds of peaceful protesters in Dili, Timor-Leste. The troops opened fire on a peaceful memorial procession that had turned into a pro-independence demonstration calling for self-determination and protesting atrocities committed by the Indonesian military. East Timorese. According to Chega!, the report of Timor-Leste's Truth, Reception and Reconciliation Commission, “Independent estimates put the number killed as high as 271, with 250 listed as missing. Hundreds were arrested and detained in the aftermath.” 

In October 1991, a UN-sponsored Portuguese delegation was scheduled to visit Timor-Leste. The delegation was cancelled after the Indonesian government objected to one of the journalists proposed to accompany the group. Despite this cancellation, the Timorese decided to continue with their planned protests. The Indonesian military threatened those preparing to protest, stating that whomever spoke out against Indonesia would be killed.

Some students sought refuge in churches, where they continued their protest preparations. On October 28, Indonesian soldiers attacked people inside Dili’s Motael Church and shot and killed Sebastiao Gomes and arrested 25 others. Two weeks later, thousands of mostly young Timorese formed a memorial procession from the church to the Santa Cruz cemetery where Sebastiao had been buried.

Soldiers marched straight up to us, they never broke their stride.... they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once and opened fire.

The procession-turned-demonstration was peaceful and orderly. Timorese held signs supporting their church and independence for Timor-Leste. When they reached the cemetery, there were about 3,000-5,000 protesters in what journalist Amy Goodman called, “the boldest act of public protest occupied Timor had ever seen.” At the cemetery, troops boxed the marchers in, raised their weapons, and fired on the protesters. 

U.S. journalists Goodman and Allan Nairn witnessed the massacre, as did British photojournalist Steven Cox and filmmaker Max Stahl. Goodman and Nairn hoped that since they were foreign journalists, they could act as a shield between the military and the East Timorese. They stood in the middle of the road as the military approached, standing between them and the protesters. Some Timorese tried to escape, but were held in by cemetery walls.

Nairn told the U.S. Senate what happened: “Soldiers marched straight up to us, they never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops and when they got a few yards past us within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once and opened fire.”

Many Timorese were instantly killed. Goodman and Nairn were badly beaten by a group of soldiers; Nairn’s skull was fractured. The two believe that the soldiers decided not to kill them after seeing they were American journalists. They managed to flee Timor-Leste a few hours after the massacre.[4] Later that night, Stahl recovered footage that he had hidden in a recently-dug grave and smuggled it out of the country.

Nairn described the bloodbath to the Senators: “People fell, stunned and shivering, bleeding in the road, and the Indonesian soldiers kept on shooting. I saw the soldiers aiming and shooting people in the back, leaping bodies to hunt down those who were still standing. They executed schoolgirls, young men, old Timorese, the street was wet with blood and the bodies were everywhere.”

After the massacre, the military sealed off the area. Aid workers and religious people who came to help were turned away. Many Timorese were left to die on the road.

Photo by Steve Cox, Generations of Resistance: East Timor

Other witnesses reported that some injured Timorese were executed by Indonesian troops after being brought to the hospital. Many bodies were allegedly buried in a mass grave near Tibar, about thirty minutes from Dili. However, the remains were never found. The Indonesian government did not even attempt to identify the dead or inform the families of those killed.

Nairn believes the massacre was the result of a deliberate policy to kill defenseless people: “The soldiers simply marched up in a disciplined, controlled way and began to fire massively on the crowd…It was quite evident from the way the soldiers behaved that they had marched up with orders to commit a massacre. They never issued a warning, they did not even pause or break their stride: they marched up and opened fire in unison. This action was not the result of their interaction with the crowd: the Timorese were just standing there or trying to get away.”

"The army cannot be underestimated. Finally, we had to shoot them. Delinquents like these agitators must be shot, and they will be.”

Senior Indonesian officials justified the killing. Try Sutrisno, the ABRI commander at the time and later Vice-President, stated two days after the massacre, “The army cannot be underestimated. Finally, we had to shoot them. Delinquents like these agitators must be shot, and they will be.” Gen. Herman Mantiri, who became commander of the region that included Timor-Leste, said that the massacre was “quite proper” because “they were opposing us, demonstrating, even yelling things against the government.”

Twenty-one-year-old New Zealander Kamal Ahmed Bamadhaj was the only person killed on November 12 who was not Timorese. In 1994, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued Major-General Sintong Panjaitan, the regional commander at the time of the massacre, who was studying in the United States, on behalf of Bamadhaj’s mother Helen Todd.  After a hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris ruled that the general should pay $4 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages to Todd for his role as regional commander at the time of the massacre.