The gruesome footage Stahl made shows the crowds tumbling over each other through the cemetery gate to escape the gunfire. People take cover behind tombstones, hopscotch injured by statue or lie dying on the ground. Later, Stahl secretly filmed the soldiers combing the cemetery.
He noticed that those present came to see him: “They showed me their wounds. They wanted the world to see. The dying thought their own death was less important than the fact that their death would have meaning.” An estimated 200 people died in the massacre.
Smuggled out of the country
Before Stahl himself was arrested, he hid his footage in a grave. Dutch journalist Saskia Kouwenberg would later smuggle it out of the country in her underwear. “It took me four days to get from Dili to Amsterdam”, she once told in the NOS Radio 1 News. “I literally had to fight my way into the plane because the Indonesian military pulled me down the stairs.”
The horrific images made a deep impression in the West: for the first time the Indonesian repression was shown on the island. Kouwenberg: “Before that it had always been denied by the Indonesian government: it was not that bad, everyone was exaggerating. But the images of young people walking to a chapel bleeding, praying in Portuguese, made an incredible impression.”
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