Elaine Briere's East Timor Testimony By Jeet Heer National Post (June 17, 2004) In the early 1970s, a young Canadian named Elaine Briere went travelling through Asia in search of exotic adventures in lands untouched by modern life. Her journey on the so-called hippie trail took her in 1974 to East Timor, a small Portuguese colony situated between Indonesia and Australia. Entranced by both the physical beauty of the landscape and the cultural vitality of the people she met, Briere took photographs to record her visit. She couldn't have suspected at the time that her photos would become crucial political documents in the three decades to follow, serving to prick the conscience of the world to one of the major tragedies of our time. In a new book titled East Timor Testimony, beautifully produced in duotones by Between the Lines, we can revisit Briere's early photographs and see just how casual tourist snapshots became unexpectedly entangled in global politics. In retrospect, it's clear that Briere arrived in East Timor in the nick of time. In 1974, the Portuguese empire was collapsing and political movements committed to national independence were coalescing on the island. Unfortunately, Indonesia, ruled by the dictator Suharto, had no intention of allowing East Timor to be free. In 1975, after gaining covert approval for his plans from the United States government, Suharto ordered his army to invade East Timor. The Indonesian occupation of East Timor was unbelievably brutal, even by the bloody standards of the 20th century. Over the next 25 years, 200,000 Timorese (approximately a third of the population) were killed. The survivors lived in fear of being raped or beaten by the occupying army. For a variety of reasons, the world turned a blind eye to what was happening in East Timor. The United States and other Western nations (notably Australia and Canada) valued Indonesia as a trading partner. Suharto's crony capitalism wasn't limited to his native land. In fact, he was a relatively minor player in a network of corruption that linked Jakarta to Ottawa, Canberra and Washington. Indonesia effectively closed East Timor, making it difficult for news organizations to send in reporters (although the Timorese resistance did use short-wave radio broadcasts to get their message out). Despite this news blackout, an international solidarity movement emerged in the 1970s to champion East Timor's freedom. This movement was made up a diverse array of activists, ranging from such intellectuals as Noam Chomsky to Catholic priests and nuns responsible for pastoral work in East Timor. The rise of this human rights movement led to the re-surfacing of Briere's photographs. In 1985, Briere met Chomsky and mentioned to him that she had taken pictures of East Timor before the invasion. As it turned out, because of the draconian censorship of the Indonesian occupation, there was a dearth of photographs of contemporary East Timor. Suddenly, Briere was inundated by calls from groups all over the world that wanted to see the pictures she took just a year before the Indonesian invasion. When Briere first zoomed in on the East Timor landscape, she was far removed from the conventions of photojournalism or political art. Looking at her early pictures it is clear that she was strongly, although perhaps also unconsciously, influenced by ethnographic photography, the tradition of recording foreign locales made famous by National Geographic magazine. Many of Briere's early photos are focused on piquant little details that mark the local color and peculiarity of her subjects. One photo shows a man standing in a river using his clasped hands to throw water on a buffalo he wants to wash. In another shot, a row of women and children grin for the camera while continuing to balance on their heads large bundles, the tightly packed gatherings from an outing to the market. Ethnographic photography often suffers from a subtle impulse toward condescension, with a tendency to play up the oddness of other cultures. Even as a young woman, Briere never fell into this trap. While clearly attracted by the cultural vitality she found in East Timor, she was equally responsive to the humanity of the people. What is striking about her portraits is the eyes of her subjects, always alive with a mixture of emotions ranging from wonder to puzzlement to mirth. We don't just stare at Briere's people: They also stare back at us. A bridge across cultures is built by this process of being gazed at by those we examine. Because she captured the human essence of East Timor, Briere's photographs turned out to be enormously effective as a political art. After seeing her pictures, it was hard to dismiss East Timor as a faraway place of little consequence. In 1998, after making a shamble of his nation's economy, Suharto was forced to resign as president of Indonesia. While the subsequent government was more willing to grant independence to East Timor, the army proved recalcitrant. Militia groups organized by the Indonesian army went on a rampage in 1999 until the introduction of UN peacekeepers restored a measure of stability. Now the people of East Timor are faced with the task of rebuilding their nation from a quarter-century's wreckage. Briere returned to East Timor in 2000. Her photos from that trip are included in East Timor Testimony (which also contains many fine essays on politics as well as photos of the 1997 Vancouver protests against Suharto, then visiting Canada for an economic summit). Despite the fact that East Timor had recently won its independence, it was a bittersweet return. Some of the villages Briere recalled from her 1974 trip had simply been wiped off the face of the Earth. In her more recent work, Briere has moved away from the ethnographic tradition altogether. She is now more forthrightly a political photographer. Her recent photos are filled with mementoes of death(many of her subjects hold up little photos of lost loved ones). Yet amid these reminders of loss, evidence of resilience and hope can also be seen. As with her 1974 photos, Briere's newer images are best approached through the eyes of her subjects. Often these eyes look haunted or weary, but they also carry in them determination and vitality. As a young woman, Briere was fortunate enough to see East Timor before it was attacked. In showing what happened before and after the invasion, she has served as a uniquely powerful witness to a crime from which the world turned its eyes.