News and Letter published the following article by Molly Jackson on the women revolutionaries in FRETILIN, the movement for the liberation of East Timor, in their October 1976 issue. It is available from News and Letters, 1900 E. Jefferson, Detroit, Michigan 48207, USA.
It is not only women of the past that we must not allow to become hidden from history and from philosophy. It is women of today, magnificent revolutionaries like Rosa Muki Bonaparte of East Timor, who have much to say to all of us.
Rosa Muki Bonaparte was Secretary of the Popular Organization of Timorese Women (OPMT), which was founded Aug. 28, 1975 as a group within Fretilin at a time when the East Timorese people were struggling to transform the end of 446 years of Portuguese imperialist rule into a social revolution.
On Nov. 28, 1975, the Democratic Republic of East Timor was declared. Ten days later, on Dec. 7, Indonesian paratroopers invaded tiny East Timor (with a population of only 630.000) and, armed with the latest in sophisticated U.S. weaponry, killed tens of thousands of East Timorese people.
Rosa Bonaparte's voice was among those stilled by the Indonesian invaders. Yet so deeply was her vision of freedom imbued with internationalism and feminism - in a country where women were fighting against the sale of brides and the practice of polygamy - that it cannot be extinguished. Here is part of a statement she gave on Sept. 18, 1975:
"The exploited and oppressed position of women is not a phenomenon limited to East Timor... But in East Timor, as in other countries subject to colonial exploitation, tile exploitation and oppression of women is extreme because of the combination of two factors, firstly the traditional conceptions about the submission of women, and secondly the colonialist attitude to women...
"The ideology of a system in which women are considered as "inferior beings" submitted Timorese women to a double exploitation: A general form, which applies without distinction to both men and women, and which manifests itself by forced labor, starvation salaries, racism, etc.... Another form of a specific character, directed to women in particular".
The objectives of the OPMT, she continued, were "the total destruction of all forms of exploitation" and "to restore to women the position and rights due to them in the new society which we are building through revolution". Among the concrete tasks she discussed were combat, education of children, organization of women, and "classes in revolutionary theory and practice". She ends:
"Long live the Popular Organization of Timorese Women! Long live independent East Timor! Long live the world revolution".
A year after the founding of the OPMT - and the crushing of the East Timorese liberation struggle - how is it that the U.S. women's movement, the most sophisticated, and with the most resources, has not paid sufficient attention to the East Timorese women's movement, while they, in the midst of war, called out in solidarity with us?
A year after they were raising the most profound questions about women in a new society, and at the same time practicing new relationships within their own organization, can we afford not to grasp what was achieved by the women revolutionaries in "backward" East Timor, in working out our own philosophy of liberation?