Interviews with Fernando "Lasama" de Araújo

In those times, one of the difficulties we experienced was precisely in the area of communication. However, I think, had technology became as advanced as it is today, perhaps it could have created more difficulties for our resistance struggle. In those times, what we often used was various forms of camouflages which they used in order to enter into the prison and visit us. Many times we had to pass letters outside of the prison and in the beginning, it was very difficult, we had to put the letters inside shampoo bottles in order for the letters to arrive to us inside the prison, we had to – those friends who came inside had to try to hide letters, information which they took in to us, using many various ways, and one other way in the communication was we took advantage, I don’t want to use the word “use”, our Indonesian friends. They go in and out of the prison freely.

And we also have the relays. Those who go into the prison to meet us, when he come out another one would take the information to Dili using another way and if the situation does not permit, he will take to a point and then from there this other person will take until its destination, just as when we communicate to the outside.

Mostly, we did in writing, and sometimes we did recordings in cassettes, and we send outside. With regards to smuggling the communications instruments into the prison, it was indeed difficult, but because we had assistance from our Indonesian friends and activists and even the security guards of the prison, whose names I will not mention as I do not want them to have any problems, it was due to all of their support that ensured for us…, Xanana Gusmão, and I, as a supporter, but more towards the student group, ensured that we managed to direct the work from inside the prison.

Later on, telephone – mobile phones managed to be smuggled into the prison but we had to hide it. When we are to use, then we give to Xanana and then we had to take quickly to hide in the chicken cage in places which we felt, if a raid was made, they will not discover. Later on, the road became more widely open after Soeharto’s fall, it begun to open up, and the Indonesian society also continued to think that – many began to say realize that those Timorese people indeed have a right to determine their own political future.

And many other things we did like this. We had to have our own secret codes. In RENETIL we used to communicate to each other by sending each other telegrams, we used to say, for example saying “quickly send me this book” or “we need such money” but what we meant was something else, such as “people are about to apprehend you, be careful” for that we said “your book is not very good, you have to quickly revise this book quickly. This shows that the situation of this friend of ours is not good, we communicated through telegrams, freely, as the Indonesians did not know what was going on as we change our codes. The military who reads our telegrams simply saw a normal communication between students, talking about the studies, about the lecture materials, about books, but they could not decipher our hidden communication in it.

We define all these things by ourselves, we managed to avoid detection. The same thing goes when we do through the telephones, sometimes we spoke about other ordinary things, but the significance was something else. These are some small manners, which we used during the time of Indonesian occupation.

Fernando de Araújo (1963 – 2015), also known as “Lasama,” was a politician from East Timor.

He was born in 1963 in a mountainous district of what was then Portuguese Timor. In 1975, East Timor was granted independence by Portugal, but Indonesia invaded the country and claimed it as an Indonesian province until 2002. During the 1975 Indonesian invasion, Araújo saw the Indonesian Army kill 18 members of his family.

As a university student, he became an activist for Timorese independence and was selected as the first secretary general of the East Timor Students’ National Resistance (RENETIL). As a result of his student activism, he was arrested in 1991 and taken to Jakarta where he was tried and sentenced to six years and four months of imprisonment.

After his release, Araújo remained in Jakarta and continued to work for self-determination and democracy in East Timor, working closely with Indonesian human rights defenders and democracy advocates. He returned to Timor and in 2001 and founded and led the Democratic Party.

He was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in the April 2007 elections. In the June 2007 legislative elections, he was elected to parliament.

Araújo was elected President of the National Parliament in 2007 and served in that role until 2012. In 2008, he briefly served as acting president after an attempt on the life of President José Ramos-Horta. From 2012 to 2015, he served as Deputy Prime Minister, and was named Minister for Social Affairs and Education in April 2015.

He died from a stroke on June 2, 2015.