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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