A horse, a bag of rice and some money. That was the price an Indonesian soldier paid for a seven-year-old East Timorese girl called Biliki. Her parents were powerless as they watched Biliki being taken away kicking and screaming in an army helicopter. The family was being held in a military camp by the Indonesian occupying forces. The soldier, their guard, had been luring Biliki for weeks with sweets, compliments and pretty clothes.

 

Only recently stories of abducted children have started to emerge in East Timor, which, after a long period of colonisation by Japan, Portugal and Indonesia, celebrated ten years of independence this week.
 
New identity
The case of Biliki is by no means unique. In freshly published research, East Timor expert Helene van Klinken reveals that between 1975 and 1999 between four and five thousand children were taken from Catholic East-Timor to Islamic Indonesia.
 
"Indonesian soldiers often felt compassion for the abandoned and separated children that they found, so the soldiers took them in and raised them in their own families or gave them to other families. About one thousand of them were sent by Islamic institutions to Islamic boarding schools throughout Indonesia in small groups. The problem with this transfer of children to Indonesia was that they did not grow up learning their mother tongue, the language that their family spoke, they did not learn about their local culture, they were not helped in most cases to maintain contact with their families and many of them were given new names and a new identity. Especially: why take such young children, why take them so far away?"
 
Curls
After all this time, Radio Netherlands Worldwide has traced some of the deported children. One of them, Benvindo was abducted by an Indonesian officer in the East Timorese jungle at the age of one and taken to Java where he grew up as the youngest in a family of six:
 
 "I had no clue my parents were not my real parents. It was when I reached high school that I started to wonder why my skin was darker then that of my brothers and sisters, why I had so many curls and they didn't. When my parents told me the truth I was flabbergasted. Suddenly I realised I was ' replanted' like a tree"
 
In the year 2000 Benvindo's natural parents managed to trace their son. Benvindo's father was very emotional when they were reunited, but he speaks mildly of his son's new family, saying,  “I am grateful to that family, I have seen my son is in good hands".
 
Friendship
Now back in East Timor, the grown-up Benvindo speaks fondly about his 'adoption' family, "My fathers used to be each other's enemies and now they are connected through me in friendship."
 
Trophy
Indonesia claims it had good intentions when it started the mass deportation of young children. Jakarta says it wanted to help the East Timorese develop after the Portuguese colonisation by providing their children with a good education.
 
But during President Suharto's rule, it was hoped sending the children back to their country of birth after an Islamic education would help Islam gain ground in East Timor. And some Indonesian soldiers saw East Timorese children as a valuable war trophy.
 
Free will
Not all children were forced to move to Indonesia, says Christoff, a lawyer in the Eastern-Timor capital of Dili. At the end of the 1970s, at the age of eight he worked as a kitchen help for Indonesian soldiers in East Timor. When they returned to Indonesia, Christoff went with them voluntarily.
 
"When I worked as a boy in the kitchen for the Indonesian soldiers, they would predominantly speak negatively of my country and I developed the desire to leave. It was not until I went to live in Indonesia that I learned to see East-Timor in a more positive light. Then I decided to return."
 
Indonesian
Biliki found her family after 27 years of separation through a radio announcement. But she could no longer speak their language and returned to Jakarta where she has a family. Now, she says, she feels Indonesian.