Treasured son of Timor Leste – David Shanks on the heroic life of Max Stahl

I think it is probable that Timor Leste would not be independent today were it not for the heroic bravery of Max Stahl. In 1991 he risked his life filming the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of perhaps 100 young Timorese mourners by Indonesian troops.

I had the honour recently to be asked by the organisation he set up 20 years ago to write an anniversary tribute to Max; he died in 2021 and appropriately his ashes are buried at that pretty Portuguese-style Santa Cruz cemetery.

With Portugal’s Coimbra university, Max established in 2003 the Centro Audiovisual Max Stahl Timor Leste (CAMSTL), an archive not only of the crimes of the past that he intended for use in building a better future – “in short healing the wounds of the (brutal 24-year Indonesian) occupation”, as Arnold Kohen, a former American lobbyist and journalist, said.

His widow, paediatrician Dr Ingrid Bucens, says Max was “very passionate about sharing the stories of the past with the youth of today - a strong believer in history/culture being an avenue to democracy and peace.” People coming up afterwards forget, I think Max thought.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

---

In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

---

Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

---

Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

---

Would that we had such an audiovisual archive of our own Civil War!

CAMSTL was awarded Unesco “Memory of the World” status in 2014.

Max was a “treasured son” of his country – as José Ramos Horta, former foreign and prime minister, and president, described him.

Aged 36 at the time, Stahl was arrested and held for nine hours. He returned later to the graveyard, to retrieve the film he had buried.

Max’s smuggled-out film of the massacre – together with a later documentary “In Cold Blood: The Massacre of East Timor” – created solidarity movements in many world places; here a working-class Ballyfermot bus driver, Tom Hyland, was so shocked by seeing it on Channel 4 News that the very next day he set up the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign. He thought it imperative that the world know of this outrage.

Later Ireland sent troops and police to observe the 1999 UN referendum; it had already set up an Irish interests section in Dili. Our foreign minister and EU special representative for East Timor, David Andrews, brought a planeful of observers for the referendum and visited Xanana Gusmao, former guerrilla leader and later president, during his house arrest in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. It’s just one example of how Max had put East Timor “at the top of the international agenda”, as Ramos Horta put it. Trócaire, Concern, and Goal were there too.

Tom and I visited Timor for the first time in 1997 – he is still there – when Indonesia’s illegal occupation was 22 years old. Our every move was watched by military officers – often through binoculars.

I agree with Sean Steele, one of the bravest of Tom’s solidarity team: “Considering what he helped achieve in East Timor – and elsewhere – Max was one of the most modest, unassuming people I ever met. A genuinely nice guy.”

That reference to “elsewhere” reminds me that Max got me included in two 2004 press trips – “junkets” – to the autonomous Georgian province of Adjaria, on the Black Sea. (The story was about the resistance by the local leader, Aslan Abashidze, to the power of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. A military stand-off ended peacefully when mysteriously a deputy Russian foreign minister, as I recall, flew to Adjaria and took Abashidze to early retirement in Moscow.)

Mainly, I recall the strongly objective and perceptive guidance of Max to me during those visits.

Before taking Timorese citizenship, Max was a Briton – Jesuit-educated in Lancashire and an Oxford literature graduate. He was then Christopher Winner and only took the name Stahl for security reasons after Santa Cruz; it was his Swedish mother’s maiden name. (Some UK media highlighted his early celebrity as a BBC children’s Blue Peter presenter.)

His Swiss and French father Michael was a businessman, former British ambassador to El Salvador, and had been a wartime commando. Among several places Max himself reported and filmed from were Guatemala, Georgia, the Balkans, Beirut and Chechnya.

Max said Noam Chomsky set him on his “personal journey” with Timor. At the time of the 1991 Gulf War Chomsky asked why the West was so quick to justify the Kuwait invasion when it was ignoring the illegal and bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor?

I’d met Arnie Kohen often: He said CAMSTL “is making the point that the lives of people living and growing up in Timor Leste are as valuable as those growing up in the USA and Europe and should be seen against the same standards.” I wish the same dignity for Palestinians.

Award-winning Max, aged only 66 when he died, indeed deserves to be remembered as a “treasured son” not only of Timor Leste.