Martinho da Costa Lopes

Martinho da Costa Lopes (1918 – 27 February 1991) was an East Timorese religious and political leader. Msgr da Costa Lopes, who was a Timorese priest of many years experience, was also a member of the National Assembly in Lisbon. By 1975, when the Indonesian troops landed in Timor, he had become the assistant to the Portuguese Bishop of Dili, Dom José Joaquim Ribeiro. When the latter, distraught by the killings, requested retirement in May 1977, his position was taken by Msgr da Costa Lopes, who at the age of 58 became the Apostolic Administrator of the Dili diocese, answerable directly to the Pope and responsible for the whole of East Timor.

For some years he privately took up issues of allegations of atrocities and starvation with the Indonesian military leaders, but came to realise that he was being ignored. So in 1981 he changed tactics. He now made his complaints public by writing letters overseas and then giving his permission for them to be published in newspapers and through the media, so that the world community, unaware of what was happening in the closed territory, would come to learn of the killings by the Indonesians. In particular he criticised the forced conscription of 50,000 men and boys to form a human chain to help crush the Fretilin resistance, and later denounced the Indonesian army for war crimes, in particular the massacre of 500 women and children at the Shrine of St Anthony at Lacluta in September 1981.

He was reprimanded by the military and infuriated President Suharto. Never before had an East Timorese so publicly exposed and humiliated the Indonesian Armed Forces. His response was: "I feel the irrepressible need to tell the whole world about the genocide being practised in Timor so that, when we die, at least the world will know we died standing."

Meanwhile, he continued to highlight the evidence of massive starvation in the resettlement camps and gave his support to his priests who sought to stand alongside the people. Desperately he wrote to the Pope requesting a special audience, to which the Vatican responded that it was neither timely nor necessary. For Msgr da Costa Lopes this was one of his hardest blows. He went on, in a letter to Australia, to accuse the Indonesian military of mass murder, and anticipated widepead famine unless large food supplies were urgently imported. His predictions were proved correct.

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