Finding Myself in Genocide
After years of confusion, I learned who I was — and met my wife — through activism for East Timor. It was a strange and terrible adventure, but it couldn’t have happened any other way.
On 7 December 1975, the Indonesian military invaded East Timor. Over the next 25 years, they slaughtered almost 200,000 people in that tiny island nation. US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Jakarta the day before, and — according to those in the meeting — “gave the green light” for the invasion.
After the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre, a group of activists created The East Timor Action Network (ETAN/US) to end US support for the occupation. As a high-school student in suburban Gainesville, Florida, I learned about the occupation through a tiny article in Utne Reader. I started researching (before the internet, mind you) and by 1996 I was volunteering with ETAN as layout editor for their national newsletter Estafeta.
The Early Years
It was a fortuitous discovery. I’d developed some political consciousness as a teenager, through hip-hop and tons of reading. When I turned vegetarian at 13, I joined People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and tried to get other people on board. I worried about the human cost of Operation Desert Storm in 1990. The more I learned about US history and global injustice, the angrier I got.
I had a right to be hostile, as Public Enemy said, but very few outlets for my rage. I made zines with old-fashioned cut ’n’ paste techniques, and ranted in the school newspaper about the latest outrage of the month: environmental destruction, the Rodney King verdict, and The Spur Posse.
I didn’t want to annoy the people around me, but I was on a mission. Everybody was zombified, as Chuck D said: “So many people are sleepin’ while standin’ up.” I tried to find a balance between ringing alarm bells and not alienating my friends.
Things took a turn in college. I attended New College of Florida, a small liberal-arts school with 500 students and no grades. It was perfect for me academically, but it caused a psycho-political crisis. Free to dive into Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Howard Zinn, Dee Brown, Valerie Solanas, and Edward Said, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s atrocities. I began to despair about the future of humanity, and my ability to do anything about it.
I got involved in small activities: The Clothesline Project, volunteering with kids at a nearby library. These things connected me to other activists, but they felt like small potatoes. Yeah yeah, let’s raise consciousness. Whatever. Meanwhile, lives are being lost, and millions are suffering needlessly. Bigger change needed to happen, fast.
Studying revolutions only made my problem worse. Most of those who tried to organize big changes was imprisoned, tortured, killed, and forgotten. When revolutions took place, they were attacked, crushed, and “reform-mongered”. The few success stories turned into dictatorships and tyrannies, using the same violence they once decried and excusing violations they used to assault.
I had decided back in high school that I wanted to become a teacher — someone who could enlighten the masses and make the world a better place — but by 1996 I wondered if there was any point. If I helped kids write essays and understand semicolons, so what? What kind of difference could that make?
Meeting Timorese, Meeting Hope
In September 1997 the ETAN Field Organizer, an indefatigable woman named Kristin Sundell, urged me to attend a conference in Madison, Wisconsin. She said it would be a great opportunity for me, and the organization could use all the help it could get.
I declined. I was a broke college student, not some jet-setting big-wig who could zoom off to some national conference. That was never part of my life. I was just a guy who drank gallons of Mountain Dew, played video games, and complained about everything.
But Kristin pressured me to reconsider. I could fundraise among friends and family. I could stay with people in Madison. I would be an important voice from a part of the country with no ETAN chapters. I said I would think about it.
Eventually I decided to go. I was moved by Kristin’s personal outreach and her conviction that I would somehow be useful to the people of East Timor. I begged funds from friends and family, and took my first solo plane ride ever. Apparently I was the type of person who zoomed off to attend a national conference.
It was, needless to say, an experience that transformed my life. I met Pamela Sexton, an amazing activist who traveled incognito into East Timor, so as to document the atrocities journalists couldn’t access. I met Constâncio Pinto, whose memoir East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance I had been devouring. I met Tom Foley, a laid-back fellow who graciously gave me a ride when I went to the wrong location for the first session. I met organizers like Charlie Scheiner and Karen Orenstein and Diane Farsetta and John Roosa. I met Kristin Sundell in person and thanked her for encouraging me to attend.
Meeting these people gave me a glimpse of what my life could look like. This was what it meant to be an activist: protesting, writing letters, raising funds, lobbying, public education, networks. Uniting for a common purpose. And all of it happened because these people took the initiative to make it real. I made a list of things I needed to do back in Florida, and which resources I could access to manifest them.
Back Home, Feeling Alone
Once I got back to campus, I felt recharged but isolated. No one around me knew about East Timor, so my number one priority was consciousness-raising. I held screenings of John Pilger’s 1994 documentary Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. I trained myself to tell the story in one-minute, ten-minute, and hour-long versions. I bugged my friends and classmates endlessly with barely-relevant connections in class and weekend conversations. I became known as “the East Timor guy”.
But knowing wasn’t enough. I needed to get people to take action. On Saturday mornings I went down to the cafeteria with my card table. As everybody stumbled in to treat hangovers with coffee, I barked at them: “Hey! Stop the genocide! Sign a postcard! Make a phone call!”
“Dammit, Piotrowski,” they muttered, rubbing their temples. “It’s too early. Come back at noon.” When I did convince people to talk, they usually said the same thing: “This is pointless. Horrible violence is how the world works. You’re not going to accomplish anything.” Many folks resigned themselves to the philosophy of realpolitik: Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Do a great right, do a little wrong. Collateral damage. Could be worse. The Man is too powerful. What can you do?
I understood the difficulties of the struggle, and the last thing I wanted to be was naive or simplistic in my worldview. I knew how unlikely a free East Timor was, but what choice did we have? This was a clear-cut case of good vs. evil, and our government was supporting the bad guys. Here was a situation where we could actually do something instead of just complaining.
In a way, though, having concrete steps to take only made the disappointment of slow progress — what felt like no progress — more painful. In 1996 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta “for their work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor.” This put our struggle on the map, and we seized the opportunity to push for action. (I don’t use the possessive pronoun “our” lightly. More on this later.) When I attended a conference on nonviolence shortly afterward, I was invited onstage to meet Mr. Ramos-Horta and discuss the struggle to free East Timor.
Toward the end of my undergrad years, I organized a speaking event featuring a woman from East Timor named Nina Maria da Costa. The hall was packed with 400 people— more than I had ever seen at a political event on our tiny campus — listening enthralled as this tiny woman told her story of suffering and hope. It was probably the most important thing I did during those four years, and it made a huge impact on everybody involved.
Back in Gainesville for grad school, I tried to launch a Florida chapter of ETAN. I dragged some friends to meetings, but their interest never went beyond a polite audience for the first telling of the story. Letter-writing campaigns, phone calls, protests — I couldn’t get anyone to commit. There was one exception, when a fellow student joined me one summer to lobby Congress. For all intents and purposes, I was the Florida ETAN chapter.
Still, though, what good was it doing? We got reports every day of torture, murder, and suffering. We got stonewalled in the halls of the US Congress. We got bored looks from people in the streets when trying to collect signatures on petitions. Even when Suharto was forced out of office in 1998, the conflict seemed intractable. We kept fighting, because we no longer knew how not to. But it was hard to see a positive future for East Timor.
The Vote and the Aftermath
And then one day we woke up to the news that the UN would hold a vote so the people of East Timor could decide their future. A group was formed called the International Federation for East Timor Observer Project (IFET-OP). I should have gone to Timor as an observer, but for various reasons I chose not to. Instead I went to California and served as Assistant US Coordinator for IFET-OP. I made a website, handled press communications, and dealt with the mountains of paperwork — physical and digital — coming through the office every day.
Nothing prepared us for the reality of the vote. One news report said the door was literally coming off its hinges. It was a day of unbridled excitement and joy. There was a pall of anxiety hanging over everything, but this was it: this was the result of everything for which we had worked so hard. It was finally happening.
And then the worst got worse. Another wave of violence rolled through the land, and 200,000 people were forced into refugee camps across the border in West Timor. We kept working to stop the violence and give East Timor the peace it had fought for. Once things stabilized (kinda), I went back to Florida and finished my teaching degree.
I taught for a year in Florida, then decided to join some friends who hadmoved en masse to Wisconsin. I was returning to the place I’d gotten my first activism education, this time to stay.
Diane
Before moving, I thought about Diane Farsetta, one of the amazing people I’d met on my first visit. I’d called on her a few times while visiting friends from college, and I was hopeful that perhaps she’d agree to go on a date. But I never wanted to be That Guy who pollutes the activist atmosphere with creepy desperation. I played it cool and forced myself not to rush anything.
Fortunately, she agreed. We formed a rapid bond because of our dedication to East Timor — as well as feminism, anti-racist consciousness, environmental action, and a love of The Simpsons. I wasn’t into Twin Peaks like her, and she didn’t obsess over video games the way I did. But it’s good to have some differing interests too.
Once Timor was no longer occupied by the Indonesian military, we transformed Madison ETAN into the Madison-Ainaro Sister City Alliance (MASA). We held an annual “Tour de Timor” bike ride to raise funds for scholarships, medical aid, and other programs. After the 2006 ride, I dropped to one knee and presented Diane with a fair-trade ring. She said yes. We were married on 07/07/07, ten years after we first met. We recently celebrated our ten-year anniversary.
Who I Am
I’ve been teaching now for 20 years. In every class, I take a day — on or around 7 December (the anniversary of the invasion) or 20 May (East Timor Independence Day) — to tell my students the story. Despite all the violence, suffering, torture, and death, many students tell me it’s their favorite day of the year. I emphasize the courage of the Timorese people, the power of nonviolent action, and the reality of hope.
I explain how my friends preaching realpolitik were wrong, and I tell my students to do the right thing, even when it’s tough. These are some of the lessons I’ve learned from East Timor, but there are lots of others. Allan Nairn, the journalist who (with Amy Goodman) was beaten in the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre, once told me that a single letter can save the life of a Timorese prisoner. This was not milquetoast encouragement based on a hunch— these were words he’d heard from a general in the Indonesian military.
I got lucky by joining the fight to free East Timor. Friends of mine who focused their solidarity efforts on Palestine, Tibet, and indigenous communities haven’t experienced the same kinds of success, but not for lack of effort. Sometimes history just unfolds in a certain way. But my time with ETAN and IFET-OP and MASA taught me indestructible things about the power of organized action. This struggle made me into a big-picture nonviolent warrior for popular education and human rights activism.
It is a struggle I joined in solidarity; my own life was never in jeopardy. I never saw family members mistreated by the Indonesian military, and I never lost any wealth or income from the occupation. And yet I call it “our struggle” because I came to understand that my freedom is tied to the freedom of other people. As the rapper Capital D put it in his 2004 song “Blowback”: “My father taught me: kid, be a man — protect your family / but what if my family is all of humanity?”
This taught me the value of being an ally to a struggle that is not about your own personal uplift. It helped me understand how to be a white person fighting white supremacy. It helped me evolve my awareness as a male feminist. It helped me develop my cis-het solidarity with the struggle for LGBTQ+ freedom. It helped me contextualize my middle-class position in the war on poverty.
When I finally visited East Timor in 2005, I was filled with conflicting emotions. (I’ve written about that trip elsewhere.) It’s a magnificent, beautiful island covered on all levels with suffering and pain. The people I met and the places I visited, however, reminded me of the infinite human capacity for progress, hope, and survival.
East Timor’s struggle isn’t over, of course. The people are poor and the forces of global capitalism push violently inward. This new phase of the movement doesn’t have a simple goal or a clear target. The fight against global poverty isn’t localized to one place or group of people. Meanwhile, as a tiny island, Timor is especially vulnerable to catastrophes related to climate change.
My identity continues to evolve as well. I wrote a lot for East Timor, and I continue to write letters for Amnesty International. I no longer suffer from the same existential despair or confusion that plagued me as a teenager, because I know what kind of change we can make at our best — and I understand what part I can play in making that change happen. (I’ve written about these concepts at length elsewhere.)
I am a professional educator now, and my students (most of them, anyway) are genuinely interested in what I have to say. That’s an odd phenomenon, because I spent years as a young activist trying to get the attention of disinterested passers-by.
One time around 2000, I was arguing in a courtyard at the University of Florida with someone hostile to the idea of hope. Things, he said, were too messed up for us to make a difference. I lashed out with lessons from East Timor, until eventually he muttered “whatever” and walked away. Suddenly I realized a dozen people were standing around me, nodding. Go on, they said with their eyes. It was a Miyagi-like moment for me. I had all the tools I needed.
We’re all ready to be ignored. But what do you do when people actually listen?
