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The death tolls
The CAVR benefited from scientifically-defensible estimates of the number of East Timorese killed during the occupation. There had been numerous reports of mass killings and famine during the 24 years of Indonesian rule, but various apologists for the occupation had questioned estimates that up to 200,000 East Timorese may have perished.
Chega! settled the matter definitively, thanks to the assistance of Benetech, a California-based nonprofit organization devoted to using technology in the service of humanity. Its Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) worked with the CAVR to establish a firm foundation of fact, providing the most accurate and scientifically precise figures possible. It did so by building on a database of three independent sources: narrative statements, a retrospective mortality survey, and a census of public graveyards1.
The first source consisted of approximately 8,000 narrative testimonies in which patterns of abuses such as arbitrary detentions, torture, rape and massive property destruction were reported to the CAVR. In turn, the CAVR developed a Human Rights Violations Database.
The second source was a survey of 1,396 households that were randomly selected from East Timor's approximately 180,000 households. Each sampled household gave information about its residence pattern and household members and relatives who died during the occupation. While these mortality surveys are standard procedure in governmental statistics, no truth commission had previously conducted one.
The third source was the graveyard census database, developed by visiting all public cemeteries in East Timor and recording the name, date of birth and date of death for every grave for which the information was available. The researchers established that there were approximately 319,000 graves in the sample, of which about half had complete name and date information. Once again, although this is standard procedure in the field of historical demography, no truth commission had previously done it.
The CAVR concluded that the 'minimum-bound for the number of conflict-related deaths was 102,800 (± 12,000)'. It did not estimate an upper bound limit though it did speculate that the death-toll due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000.
Sarah Staveteig, a demographer at the University of California - Berkeley, applied standard demographic methods of indirect estimation and found that 'a reasonable upper bound on excess deaths during the period [was] 204,000 ± 51,000)'. Staveteig considered it 'likely that 204,000 is a conservative upper-bound estimate on excess mortality'2.
1 Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the CAVR, The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999, R. Silva and P. Ball, 9 February 2006.
2 Sarah Staveteig, 'How Many Persons in East Timor Went 'Missing' During the Indonesian Occupation?: Results from Indirect Estimates', Interim Report IR-07-003 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria.
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