This book is largely the story of his struggle against the Indonesian Army, ABRI (as it was then known), after its invasion of East Timor in 1975. This struggle implied the making of such choices as morality over opportunism and meaning over self-promotion. I suspect that both the author, Rowena Lennox, and Pluto Press have made similar, if less dangerous, choices.

Martinho da Costa Lopes was born in 1918 in East Timor, where he was educated in the traditional hierarchy of the Catholic system. In 1957 he was elected to represent East Timor in the Portuguese National Assembly. After the Indonesian invasion in 1975, he struggled hard to protect East Timorese whose lives were threatened by the military, frequently risking his life to represent them before hostile military commanders. In 1977, he was made the Vatican’s Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Dili, granted the title ‘Monsignor’ but, owing to the Vatican’s ambivalent attitude to the Indonesian government, never made a bishop. He was the first official to speak out publicly within East Timor about the abuses perpetrated by the occupation forces, attracting criticism from the Indonesians, the Australian press, and notable Australian politicians. In 1983 he was forced by the Vatican to resign from his position, settling in Portugal and travelling extensively to raise awareness of the crimes committed by the Indonesian Army in East Timor. He died in 1991.

For me, the central theme of this book is the way in which a relatively non-political individual with a conscience will be politicised by the oppressive brutality of a regime seeking to wipe out political opposition of all kinds. Certainly, Dom Martinho had been a member of the Portuguese National Assembly. Yet a reading of the speeches that he made before the Assembly reveals a quite conservative agenda: support for the ‘civilising’ mission of Portuguese colonialism, a florid eulogy of Henry the Navigator, arguments for better funding of education, infrastructure, health and local industries, a request that missionaries be granted pensions, and rebukes to ‘savages in the pay of Communism’ in Angola. These are hardly the harangues of a radical firebrand. Yet after the invasion he is holding secret meetings with the left-wing Fretilin, paying communists for photos of atrocities, protecting Falintil guerrillas under threat of death and smuggling out a tape of talks between the Indonesian Army and Xanana Gusmão, Fretelin’s leader.

Twenty years after his respectful schoolboy speeches praising Henry the Navigator and the Catholic Church, that Church relieved him of his post for his outspokenness, then had to watch as he continued publicly denouncing the invasion.

What brought about so radical a shift in his position? The simple answer is that it was caused by ABRI’s ruthless tactics in securing East Timor for the Indonesians. It is these twin processes – the invasion and the politicising of Dom Martinho – that Rowena Lennox describes most powerfully. The ‘tactical’ use of theft, rape, murder, terror, by the Indonesian Army, as well as Dom Martinho’s increasingly courageous efforts to shield individuals and families from the ever-spreading circle of atrocities, are chillingly recounted by the author. Cat-and-mouse interviews with military commanders, Dom Martinho’s efforts to bluff groups of soldiers with the dubious authority of his position, are described with all the tension of a thriller. There’s great pathos, too, in such accounts as the slow breakdown of the brave Maria Gorete. In these key sections of the book the writing is both detailed and compelling.

In fact it’s probably the case that there was little basic change in Dom Martinho. His first impulses as a priest – his efforts to improve the conditions of parishioners – were much the same as his later impulses. He was an inveterate humanitarian. Although this humanitarianism was closely allied to his Christian ideology, it provoked him to work also with atheists and Communists if his people required it. If such a thing is possible, it would seem to be a humanitarianism that transcended ideology. Not everybody saw it this way. Someone who did not, for instance, was Gough Whitlam. After briefings by the Indonesians, some flights around East Timor and an interview with Dom Martinho, Whitlam totally dismissed his claims of engineered famine, human rights abuses, torture, and atrocities – phenomena officially acknowledged by Australia only after the events of 1999. This is a powerful and troubling book. If I have a criticism, it is that the section dealing with his early life is overlong yet lacking concrete personal detail, a problem more than compensated for by later sections. Dom Martinho is no Chopper Read. This story is a coke-snorting/facelift/ greed-free zone and is, I think, no weaker for it.