Subject: 'austraLasia' #238

AMERICAN BROADCASTING CORP INTERVIEWS DILI SALESIAN SISTER

Julian Fox

This transcript comes from the ABC'S 'A.M. News hour' on 22nd inst. courtesy

Fr. Richard Gant SOLT. The Sister is not identified other than by the label

'main nun'! So I guess it's Sister Paola.

How five nuns survived in East Timor

22/09/99

ABC

AM News Hour

COMPERE: Well as some kind of order is imposed on the East Timorese capital,

Dili, some of those who

survived the weeks of anarchy and terror are now beginning to tell their

stories.

Five nuns and more than 100 refugees have survived a fortnight of violence

and intimidation at the Salesian

Sisters compound. Now with the arrival of the multinational force the

refugees have been able to leave the

house for the first time in two weeks.

Last night Rafael Epstein spoke to the main sister there, asking her how

they’d survived.

SALESIAN NUN: That’s a good question. Everybody says it’s a miracle and we

also say it’s a miracle. But we

did. We’d keep very quiet. Now you hear the noise in the background now, it’

s because we’re breathing a lot

more freely. What we would do is when the shooting would start we’d start to

pray. Morning and night, any

time the shooting would start, we’d start to pray. Any time they’d start

burning the houses around us, we’d

start to pray.

Twice we had to evacuate the house - because there was burning around us and

we thought that the fires

would catch on to our house - but after the fires would die down then we’d

go back into the house. We had

also militia come in and military come in. We’ve had quite a few close

calls, but somehow we just stuck

through it. You know, the militia even threatened us, they said that we

would have to leave, but we didn’t

leave.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Did the militia know there were 100 women and children with

you?

SALESIAN NUN: Oh yes, they themselves went into the house, they searched the

house. They were

searching for men and young boys, that’s what they wanted, and they

explicitly said, ‘Are you hiding any

men?’ And we said, ‘No, we have two men, but one is limp, he can’t walk and

the other one is an elderly man’.

But they themselves went inside the house and they searched.

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: What was the two weeks like?

SALESIAN NUN: It was like Hell. It something - It was an experience that I

don’t think I ever want to go

through again. It’s not so much the dying - It’s not so much the fear of

dying, but it’s the fear for these people

‘cause we had mostly children and women, and just the responsibility of

these people’s lives.

We had over 300, but then at a certain point last week we were getting

threatened left and right by the militia,

the military, and at a certain point we told them, ‘listen, we cannot

guarantee your safety any more. If you

want to stay, you’re free to stay. If you want to go, you’re free to go’. So

the majority of our refugees did

leave, they went for the hills. And 106 remained and these are mostly

mothers with very small children that

cannot run or cannot walk. So yeah, we had some pretty close calls.

It was scary, it was really scary. And the scariest thing was at a certain

point there was no communication, the

phone lines were cut. Then the UNAMET staff moved further away so we were

practically alone here with the

militia and the military around us. Total darkness. And every night you’d

see them burning and looting, and

then there’d be shooting, and you’d never know if they were shooting at your

or just shooting in the air or

shooting at what.

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