Time now to count the dead

By Greg Ansley

LIQUICA - The wailing begins as a low, sobbing moan as New Zealand military policeman Sergeant Brian Clark's trowel scrapes away the last of the dirt to expose a head wrapped in patterned red cotton.

British policeman Steve Minhinnett crouches beside the East Timorese villager, a hand on his shoulder in mute sympathy as the mourner rocks gently on his haunches, repeating between sobs, "Milisi, milisi."

Others in the small crowd watch in grim silence. A few wipe away tears.

The man in the grave is 49-year-old Faustino Joachim Galloxo, a local of Liquica, west of Dili, and someone with no known political affiliations.

He was killed early in September. No one knows why.

A militiaman called Pedro, whereabouts unknown but presumed to be in West Timor, is believed to be the murderer.

Mr Galloxo's 29-year-old son, Herminezelo Galloxo Dos Santos, stands nearby as the New Zealand military police and local gravediggers employed by the United Nations exhume the body from a shallow, tin and rock-covered grave.

Later, Brazilian Army pathologist Captain Luiz Parente will examine the remains, Australian padre Major Geoff Webb will perform brief rites, and the body will be handed to the family in a zippered blue plastic bag, designed to allow later forensic examination if Pedro is ever brought to trial.

The small tragedy played out in an overgrown field in Liquica has become an everyday part of life in East Timor.

Official Australian estimates suggest the toll from militia atrocities is between 500 and 1000, a figure supported by New Zealand investigators.

Only 160 deaths have been confirmed by the discovery of bodies, although investigators have found witnesses to be generally accurate and they have yet to begin work in depth in the enclave of Oecussi in West Timor.

New Zealand Staff Sergeant Peter Watson says they have been given the names of 175 victims in Oecussi: in the space of an hour eight bodies were uncovered.

"There was no pattern, no rhyme, no reason, no nothing - just random killings."

Bodies are being found throughout East Timor, usually in single graves and most killed with a single shot to the head, but sometimes in groups of two or four, and in a disturbing number of cases mutilated or dismembered.

One victim had been staked by the hands and feet and buried alive; another was a witch-doctor whose remains were found next to an altar on which the bodies of two young children had been placed.

Others have drifted in from the sea - some, investigators say, possibly from the reported dumping of truckloads of bodies in a ravine west of Liquica after a massacre in the Catholic church in which more than 40 people are thought to have died.

Liquica, still a ravaged and broken town, has already yielded horrors.

New Zealand Corporal Mark Anderson was part of the team called to investigate a report of 57 bodies in a village well 9km west of Liquica.

In the well, which was about 2m in diameter and 14m deep, they found 11 bodies, buried in tiers separated by layers of tin, palm leaves and dirt, most the victims of brutal machete slayings by the Besi Merah Putih militia that laid waste to Liquica.

Corporal Anderson says more bodies may have been in the well: at about 5m investigators hit the water table of nearby Maubara Lake, preventing further excavation.

New Zealand soldiers at Suai, on the southern border with West Timor, live with similar horrors: in addition to the regular discovery of bodies, they daily pass the ruins of the Church of Nossa Senhora de Fatima, and the bamboo scaffolding-clad shell of Suai's uncompleted cathedral.

Indonesian soldiers and local militiamen herded thousands of people into the church compound shortly after the August 30 independence referendum, most of them women, children and the elderly.

The massacre began on September 6.

Fathers Hillario, Francisco and Tianto were pulled from their presbytery and slaughtered. Others were hunted down and killed where they hid in recesses in the nave, or on the mezzanine galleries of the cathedral.

Zig-zagging bullet holes show where more were gunned down as they scrambled up scaffolding.

Women were hauled from the church classroom, raped and then killed. Others inside - including children and nuns - were butchered en masse before the militia set fire to the church.

In the courtyard outside, flowers still cover skeletal remains; a hank of long black hair falls out from beneath the petals.

At Liquica, Mr Minhinnett, a homicide detective for 16 years and a war crimes investigator for a year in Bosnia, watches Sergeant Clark at work - "very good, the New Zealanders, very professional" - and notes that even now, fear grips witnesses.

Corporal Anderson says investigators need to desensitise themselves rapidly, although nothing can ever erase the horror.

"The smell is the worst. It's something I'll never forget."