Remembering a Malaysian hero

Sadly, his name won’t ring a bell because he died fighting for another country’s freedom.

DO you remember Kamal Ahmed Bamadhaj? That’s a question I wished someone had asked Timor-Leste leaders President Jose Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao at the 47th Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur last month.

The two men were present to see the formal accession of their tiny nation as a full member of the regional grouping. Gusmao gave a short but emotional speech on how joining Asean was a dream realised for his people as well as a “powerful affirmation of our journey – one marked by resilience, determination and hope. Our accession is a testament to the spirit of our people, a young democracy, born from our struggle.”

Gusmao’s delicate choice of the word “struggle” was a ­euphemistic reference to Timor-Leste’s long and tragic fight for independence against its far superior neighbour, Indonesia, that lasted for 24 years from 1975 to 1999.

During that time, the people of East Timor – as it was called then – were subjected to routine and systematic torture, sexual slavery, imprisonment, forced disappearances, executions, massacres and deliberate starvation. In other words, a genocide.

Among the 200,000 people who died, one death that should have stood out for Malaysians was that of Kamal Ahmed Bamadhaj, a young student activist.

Kamal was only 20 when he was killed by the Indonesian ­military on Nov 12, 1991, and is the only known Malaysian casualty in the Timorese cause.

But at a time with no Internet, mobile phones, and social media, governments could black out news, so most Malaysians remained blissfully ignorant of the genocide taking place within our very neighbourhood.

Kamal was the rare Malaysian who knew and cared enough to stand with the Timorese and paid the ultimate sacrifice. He was known to both Gusmao and Ramos-Horta.

In May 2000, The Star published a two-part story tracing Kamal’s life and death in its features pullout called Section 2. I was the editor.

It was reporter Ong Ju Lynn who proposed the story and I greenlit it because it was such a compelling tale to tell. Ong worked hard to gather information from Kamal’s family members, friends, politicians, and diplomats.

But just as Ong began writing the stories, she met with a severe road accident and was hospitalised. She had to finish them from her hospital bed. But there was still much ground to cover and I had to take over.

In the process of researching and editing the stories, I discovered a remarkable, thoughtful human being who, despite his young age, had enormous compassion and empathy for people desperately fighting for their lives. Kamal could not turn his back on them and instead showed tremendous courage and determination to help them.

For me, and I am sure for Ong too, it was an honour and privilege to tell his story back in 2000, and I am so grateful we managed to do so despite the challenges. 

That’s because even though the conflict finally ended after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 and it was nine years after Kamal’s death, publishing the stories got me in hot water because what happened in East Timor was still a very sensitive subject. This was largely due to Asean’s principle of non-interference and as such, the Timorese struggle was dismissed as an internal affair of Indonesia, even though it had invaded the fledgling state after it was decolonised by the Portuguese.

It was such a big taboo that when a local Malay newspaper reported Kamal’s death, it made no mention of where he was killed and instead said it happened “in a territory in a region in the world”.

Kamal first became interested in East Timor in 1989 due to his involvement in student activism at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He joined the Network of Overseas Student Collectives, which comprised mainly Malaysians campaigning on domestic and international issues. Among his colleagues were human rights activist and former Selangor state assemblyman Elizabeth Wong and former MP and PKR vice-president Tian Chua.

Kamal’s determination to help the Timorese was sealed when he first visited East Timor in 1990. What he witnessed shocked him profoundly. As a prolific writer, he recorded his observations, thoughts and feelings in letters and his diary.

In a letter to his parents, he wrote: The Timorese are surrounded by fear. Fear like I have never felt before. I met victims of torture and people who had lost most of their families in the massacres of the 1970s...”

Kamal would die after being injured at a massacre that took place in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in 1991. Timorese protesters had walked from a church and were gathered in the cemetery when Indonesian soldiers arrived and started shooting them. Many were killed not just by bullets but by beatings and stabbings by the soldiers. A total of 271 people died that day.

Kamal survived the murderous hail, but sustained a gunshot wound to his arm. As he walked out of the cemetery, a military truck stopped him and he was shot in the chest by a military intelligence officer. Kamal managed to flag down a passing Red Cross ambulance but it was stopped twice by road blocks. By the time it reached the hospital, Kamal had lost too much blood and he died 20 minutes later.

Many, including Ramos-Horta, believed he was targeted for murder. That was what Ramos-Horta told me in a phone interview in 2000.

He had met Kamal at UNSW in Sydney a year before his death and remembered him as deeply involved in championing the Timorese cause. "He was very popular with the Timorese students and he was seen at demonstrations, waving his fist.”

And that was how Kamal caught the attention of the Indonesian army and "they were out to get him”, said Ramos-Horta. He added that he was in Sydney when he asked Kamal to act as a courier to bring some documents to Gusmao in Dili.

 Ramos-Horta went on to say Kamal was totally innocent and his death was an absolutely unforgivable murder.

I asked him if the Indonesians knew he was Malaysian and he replied: "Yes, I believe they knew even though he could pass as a Timorese, but they didn’t care whether he was Malaysian or Thai or any other Asean national.”

The Santa Cruz massacre, which was witnessed by foreign media, led to international outrage. In 1994, Kamal’s mother, Helen Todd, originally from New Zealand, sued the Indonesian army’s regional commander, General Sintong Panjaitan, for her son’s death; she initiated the suit in the United States using a US law that allows human right violators to be tried wherever they are found.

Although Todd was awarded US$22mil in compensatory and punitive damages, Panjaitan refused to acknowledge the decision, calling the suit a joke.

Kamal’s life story and Todd’s landmark suit were made into a 77-minute documentary called Punitive Damage and contained real footage of the cemetery massacre. That helped to raise international awareness of the Timorese plight.

Twenty-five years after we published the stories, Timor-Leste has moved on, understandably so even though one-third of its population died in the 24-year conflict. Against all odds, the Timor-Leste had prevailed and in 2025, it joined hands with its closest neighbour and former murderous enemy because its future depends on it.

Perhaps that's why even though Ramos-Horta had declared in the phone interview that he would not rest until justice was done for those killed, no high-ranking Indonesian military officers have ever been prosecuted and punished for the massacres and widespread human rights violations committed during Indonesia's occupation.

In Punitive Damage,Timorese activist Abel Guterras paid Kamal a moving tribute: "He was a friend; a foreigner who came and showed his solidarity with us. It is sad that he came to our land and died for our freedom.”

As Kamal's father, Ahmed, said, “He loved people and their suffering tormented him. He did what he could for a forgotten people.”

So dear excellencies Gusmao and Ramos-Horta, have you forgotten or do you still remember Kamal Bamadhaj?

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.