Statistics from the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) show that 4000 children were forcibly separated from their families by the Indonesian military during the Indonesian occupation.
Jose Luis de Oliveira, an advocate for human rights in Timor-Leste, said these children were separated from their parents because they ran away from an attack, or they became assistants for Indonesian soldiers (TBO) when their parents were detained.
“At that time Indonesian soldiers forcibly took children to help them do operations and then they did not return, some of them went to Indonesia and for some, we do not know their whereabouts,” Oliveira said in a presentation during a public discussion on human rights in Farol, Dili.
He added the state has an obligation to find out the whereabouts of these children, because many children are still living in Indonesia but they don’t know where they are from.
He gave the example of Vitor da Costa, a child who was taken by the Indonesian military to Indonesia, who has now grown up, worked in Indonesia and doesn’t know how to speak Tetun.
He said they successfully identified the child and helped him to find his family in Timor-Leste and they did find his family but the situation was not good because the family considered he was dead and had already made grave for him.
Apart from this, he said there were also many children that in 1999 lived in hostel run by foreigners, and when the crisis occurred they took the children to Indonesia and until this day, the state doesn’t know of their whereabouts.
Meanwhile the International Committee of the Red Cross Representative in Timor-Leste, Jean Jacques Putallaz, said they were still committed to cooperating with the Timor-Leste government on the issue of missing people; therefore it was very important to ratify national legislation on missing people.
“In 2011 we identified one case in Indonesia but we could not do anything, we just notified the family that the children were alive, getting them back is the responsibility of the state,” he said.
The ICRC Representative added that several years ago they handed over documents about 42 children to the Ministry of Foreign Affair to look into and take action on, but there had been no results.
