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After the Carnage
After peacekeeping forces arrived in East Timor, an enormous task of reconstruction remained

After three weeks of unchecked violence, the people of East Timor caught their first glimpse of hope on September 20, when the vanguard of a UN peacekeeping force arrived in Dili.

The UN troops—drawn mostly from the armies of Australia and New Zealand—smoothly began the process of establishing security at the airport and seaport in Dili, the capital city of East Timor. They encountered no real opposition, although members of the militia groups which had wreaked havoc on the Timorese population watched the soldiers’ every move.

As reinforcements arrived to augment the peacekeeping force, and the UN soldiers gradually expanded their perimeter and pushed out across the territory to bring peace and order back to East Timor, the soldiers were reportedly stunned by the evidence of death and destruction that surrounded them. Thousands of people had been killed, and bodies were left rotting on roadsides. Hundreds of homes had been razed, churches destroyed, shops and factories burnt to the ground. At least 250,000 people—more than one-fourth of the entire population—had been driven from their homes, and were now living in exile or in refugee camps. Supplies of food, water, medicine, and electric power had been cut off, and infectious diseases were beginning to spread among the weakened survivors of the bloodbath. The UN peacekeepers faced a nearly impossible challenge: to create order out of this chaos.

Lingering violence

Even before they could begin making plans for refugees to return to their homes, the peacekeeping troops had to assert their own control over the territory, routing the militia groups which had overwhelmed local law-enforcement officials and established their own reign of terror since the August 30 referendum. Just two days after their arrival, the UN troops received a grim reminder of the difficulty of that job, as three people—including a Western journalist—were killed during a militia attack in a Dili suburb.

Sander Thoenes, a reporter for the Financial Times of London, was found dead by the side of a road along with two local residents. Australian Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, commander of the UN force, said the assailants were attempting a show of force in Dili, close to the base of peacekeeping operations, and that the attack was “obviously a reaction to our presence.” Militia spokesmen had vowed to kill Westerners, whom they accuse of helping East Timor in its efforts to break free of Indonesian rule.

In another incident one week later, nine Catholic Church workers were slain as they returned from a visit to a refugee camp near the city of Baucau. The victims—who included two deacons, two women religious, and a theology student—were also attacked by militia members. An eyewitness said that the militia members seemed to be acting “not so much out of hatred for the Church as out of desperation.” The arrival of the UN force, he explained, had left the militias “feeling humiliated and desperate.”

Protecting the mandate

As such episodes became less frequent, and peace returned to the region, Vatican diplomats urged the international community to recognize that the militia violence had been a deliberate effort to annul the results of the August 30 referendum, in which 80 percent of the voters had indicated their support for independence from Indonesia. Speaking on behalf of the Vatican at a Geneva meeting of the UN’s Human Rights Commission on September 23, Bishop Giuseppe Bertello observed that the massacres in East Timor were not an ordinary civil conflict, but an attempt “to wash out, in blood, the will of the overwhelming majority of the people.” Along with UN peacekeepers and humanitarian aid, the international community should launch an inquiry into the massacres, he said.

Speaking of the “heavy price” paid by the Catholic Church because of her advocacy for human rights in East Timor, Bishop Bertello expressed the dismay of the Holy See that “after the tragedies in Rwanda and Kosovo, mankind is still not capable of learning the lessons of history.” He cited the words of Pope John Paul II, who had said that the recent massacres have shown “a new defeat for the cause of humanity.”

Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s top foreign-affairs officer, made a similar point when he criticized the slow reaction of the international community to the wave of massacres in East Timor. In an interview with the Italian weekly Famiglia Cristiana, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States said: “One must deplore the fact that, in general, there is a certain slowness and incapacity to find the quick-response mechanisms to prevent and resolve tragedies of this magnitude.” While saying that the UN decision to intervene in East Timor was a “thoroughly positive” development, the archbishop underlined the urgent need for a rapid deployment of international peacekeeping forces. He argued that the UN must be better prepared to intervene in such cases immediately.

The argument that the massacre could imperil the results of the referendum was also voiced by UN officials working with Timorese refugees in Australia. Relief workers reported that many refugees were expressing fears that they would be forced to relocate to other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, rather than returning to their homes in East Timor. Especially because so many Timorese homes and villages had been destroyed, and because militia groups continued to carry out attacks within the refugee camps, the Timorese were under pressure to begin their lives anew on another island under Indonesian control. (The net effect of such relocations, of course, would be to undermine the majority favoring independence for East Timor.) The New York-based group Human Rights Watch predicted that the displaced refugees “will undoubtedly be asked to choose between staying in appallingly overcrowded camps controlled by militias or being moved to another island.”

Out of hiding

As the UN soldiers strengthened their grip on the territory, and the level of outright violence continued to subside, the survivors of the Timorese massacres began to enjoy their first pleasant surprises in several weeks, as relatives and friends emerged from the hiding places where they had sought refuge from the violence.

Thus, for example, the head of the Caritas relief agency and 20 of his workers returned safely to Dili on October 4, nearly three weeks after they had been reported missing and presumed dead. Father Francisco Barreto and the workers had been hiding in the mountains outside Dili since the carnage began. Caritas Australia had reported on August 9 that Father Barreto and the others had been killed by Indonesian soldiers in the town of Suai. “We were devastated when we thought they had been killed,” Caritas Australia’s national director Tom Story said. “In the reports these are just facts and figures, but to us they were real people. We are so grateful they have been spared.”

UN officials reported that hundreds of thousands of refugees were gradually returning to their villages—often enticed by the promise of food and medical supplies offered by humanitarian workers.

For most Timorese, the single most welcome sign of hope was the return of one man: Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of Dili, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most respected symbol of the Timorese independence movement. Bishop Belo, too, had once been reported as a victim of guerilla violence, but he had escaped to Australia and then to Europe, where he met with Pope John Paul II to brief him on the latest developments in East Timor. On October 5 he made his return to Dili, telling waiting reporters: “My priority is to be here with the people, to say Mass and to pray with them, to visit them.”

Later Bishop Belo elaborated on that message, allowing that he hoped his own return—to a home severely damaged by a militia assault—would encourage other Timorese refugees to come home and begin the process of restoration. “Why do they continue to live in the forest? This is not our life,” Bishop Belo said. “As human beings we must return to our villages, to our towns, to begin to rebuild.”

Still unresolved
German bishops still split on abortion counseling

Three German cardinals and the president of the country’s episcopal conference arrived in Rome on September 15 for a day of discussions with Vatican officials on the involvement of Church-related agencies in abortion counseling.

Cardinals Joachim Meisner of Cologne, Georg Maximilian Sterzinsky of Berlin, and Friedrich Wetter of Munich, came to Rome with Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, the head of the German bishops’ conference. They were scheduled to meet with representatives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) and the Secretariat of State. They were also scheduled to have lunch with Pope John Paul II—presumably discussing the same issues with the Pontiff —before continuing their meetings in the afternoon.

The topic for the meetings is the involvement of Church agencies in counseling for women who are contemplating abortion. Under a German law passed in 1995, women who are planning an abortion must first receive counseling at a government-approved agency, and receive a certificate of proof that the counseling took place. Some 250 Church-related agencies operate approved counseling centers, and the German Church has been caught up in a debate over whether or not it is morally acceptable for those Catholic agencies to furnish the certificate which fulfills a legal requirement for abortion.

In June, responding to a request for guidance by the German bishops, Pope John Paul wrote that the Church-related agencies should continue to provide counseling services, but should not issue any certificate which could be used to fulfill the legal requirement for abortion. But that suggestion has not closed the discussion in Germany. Some members of the hierarchy—including Bishop Lehmann—have suggested that, even if a certificate explicitly stated that it could not be used for the purpose of obtaining an abortion, it might remain legally valid for that purpose.

The Vatican did not comment on the results of the discussions, but a German media report suggested that the Vatican would soon issue new, more explicit instructions to the German hierarchy. And a week later, as the German bishops prepared to gather for the annual meeting of their episcopal conference, a new report claimed that Pope John Paul had directed the bishops to withdraw completely from the abortion counseling process.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine printed what it said was the text of a letter from the Holy Father to Bishop Lehmann, in which the Pope said that the compromise proposed by the German bishops was not morally tenable.

As the German bishops ended their meeting, there was still no official word —from the German hierarchy or from the Vatican—on how, or when, the controversy would be resolved.

Behind closed doors
American bishops shun public dispute on Ex Corde Ecclesiae

How worried are the American bishops about their impending debate on the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities? They are worried enough, it appears, to have quietly adopted an unusual procedure to ensure that what is really happening on this issue at their general meeting in Washington in November remains largely out of sight.

Sources close to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops say that in September the organization’s 55-member administrative committee approved a way of handling the matter that looks like this:

The substantive debate on the bishops’ long-awaited document on Catholic higher education will be held in an executive session, closed to press and observers, on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16. That will be the second day of a meeting scheduled to end November 18.

If it appears during that closed-door debate that the document does not have the votes of two-thirds of the bishops—that is, about 180 votes—required for passage, a member of the committee that drafted the document will take the floor at an open session later in the meeting and say the document is being withdrawn.

The main reason for this diffident approach is the bishops’ laudable desire not to be seen rejecting—if it comes to that—a document the Pope wants them to adopt. But the procedure has the de facto effect of shielding them, as far as possible in the circumstances, from taking responsibility for what they do.

Even if the higher education document does pass, sources say, a great deal will be made of the notion that it is not the bishops’ “final word” on the Catholic identity of the colleges and universities. Instead, it will be said, “dialogue” with the schools’ presidents must continue.

Painful progress
It has taken the bishops nine years to get to this markedly ambivalent point.

In 1990, Pope John Paul II published his document on Catholic higher education. Called Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), it expressed appreciation for the colleges and universities while calling for steps to make sure they are unmistakably Catholic in academic program and campus life. The bishops of countries with such schools —the United States, with 263, has the most—were asked to publish documents of their own.

The strong liberal element in US Catholic higher education opposed this project from the start. Among the objections they raised were the claims that faculty members would be offended, government money would be put at risk, and academic freedom compromised. But the fundamental problem is that the liberal establishment declines to accept a juridically defined and enforceable obligation to the larger Catholic community. These schools are answerable to accrediting agencies, legislatures and courts, professional organizations, and other secular groups beyond the campus, but they draw the line at being answerable to the Church.

In 1996 the bishops adopted an implementing document and sent it to Rome. The response from the Vatican indicated that the effort was too weak. A new version last year took predictable flak from the liberals.

The revision that the bishops will have before them in November says that Catholic theologians at Catholic colleges should have a bishop’s “mandate” certifying that they are in communion with the Church and that, as much as possible, presidents, trustees, and teachers should be committed Catholics.

Groups like the Cardinal Newman Society, which back a strong Catholic identity, support the draft; the liberal establishment remains opposed. An observer close to the action says the bishops would like to make everybody happy. So what will they do? As the delicate procedure that will guide their discussion next month makes clear, right now, they just don’t know.

—Russell Shaw*

[* This report is reproduced, with permission, from the Arlington (Virginia) Catholic Herald.]

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