Balide Prison, where thousands of East Timorese were tortured during the nearly twenty-five-year Indonesian occupation, was reopened last month. East Timor’s President Xanana Gusmao said that he hoped that Balide Prison, “so long steeped in tragedy, can be a living centre to document the history of East Timor.”

The prison will be the national office for The Commission for Reception,Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. The Commission was created inJanuary 2002 to document the causes and substance of human rights violationsunder the occupation that began on December 7,1975, when the Indonesian military forces invaded, and lasted until to October 1999.

The Commission has collected testimony on human rights violations from 2500 people. The first public hearings for former prisoners in Balide Prison were held last month. Many testified for the first time about their torture.

One focus of reconciliation will be women affected through systemic rape by Indonesian soldiers (and the resulting children). The Indonesian police and military are also alleged to have forcibly, or deceptively, inserted IUDs and Norplant contraceptives into East Timorese women without offering the women proper information about the contraceptives’ purpose, care or removal. Covert sterilisation and contraception led many East Timorese women to be fearful of public health clinics while under Indonesian occupation.

Violence against women and the position of women during this time of transition in East Timor are being discussed in programs on UN radio and the former pro-independence radio station, FALINTIL. The programs are run by Fokupers, an NGO that provides education, counselling, legal aid and public education on domestic violence.

In a country where seventy per cent of women are believed to have been raped, dealing with the trauma from violence against women is as high on the public agenda as issues like housing, health and education. As it should be. Women’s healing is a part of the country’s healing.

President Gusmao’s wife, Kirsty Sword-Gusmao, has urged East Timorese men to see the big picture and “to look at [women’s involvement in reconstruction] not as an obligation that satisfies the requirements of international donors to have a gender component” but as something from which “society stands to benefit.”