João
Vaz
João Vaz profile's picture
Timor-Leste

We remember João Vaz

Joao Vaz was born on 23 September 1961 in the city of Lospalos, East Timor. He was Portuguese by birth, as the region was under Portuguese rule at the time, but later became Indonesian. After primary school, Joao engaged in technical studies for a year, completing his formal education in 1975.

 

Over the next two decades, Joao held several jobs in Dili, the capital of East Timor. From 1981 to 1989 he was a driver at the city’s port; he then spent three years working for a wholesaler; and from 1992 to 1994 he served as a driver and mechanic at a local workshop. He spoke Tetun, Fataluku and Makasae – three languages of East Timor – along with Portuguese and Bahasa Indonesia.

 

In 1994, the ICRC hired Joao as a driver at its delegation in Dili. His primary task was to ferry local and international staff around, including to and from the airport. But the scope of his duties was not limited to sitting behind the wheel: he assessed staff members’ travel requests and kept the office apprised of them; helped manage the delegation’s fleet of cars and keep them in a good state of repair; and prepared the cars that delegates would take into the field. His day-to-day work brought him into close contact with staff members of both the ICRC and the Indonesian Red Cross Society.

 

Joao was committed to his work and the ICRC. He was flexible, adaptable, able to work independently and showed a great sense of initiative – including a knack for finding solutions and providing useful advice. To top things off, he had a positive attitude and good sense of humour. As the years went by, Joao assumed more and more administrative responsibilities at the delegation.

 

In 1999, the unrest in East Timor intensified and, in early September, Dili was hit by a wave of violence that targeted both people and property. The ICRC evacuated expatriate staff from the country, while local personnel sought refuge in the western part of the island, including in Atambua. That was where a local militia abducted Joao. Years later, Joao’s remains were identified and transferred to his hometown of Luro. He is believed to have been killed on 10 September 1999, at the age of 38.

 

In Joao’s application to join the ICRC, he lauded the organization for making no distinction among the people it serves. Of course, that approach is only possible thanks to people like Joao: with his humanitarian mindset, work ethic and language skills, he was instrumental in building bridges between the ICRC and all communities of East Timor.

The ICRC in
Timor-Leste, 1999

The island of Timor came under Dutch and Portuguese influence in the 17th century. The Netherlands controlled the western side of the island, which it handed over to Indonesia upon that country’s independence in 1945. Portugal held onto the eastern side – East Timor – until 1975 when it decided unilaterally to withdraw. That move led to an internal power struggle and the outbreak of civil war in Portugal’s former colony. In December, the Indonesian army invaded East Timor, which was subsequently declared to be an Indonesian province. Over the following 24 years, Indonesia’s presence in East Timor coincided with a period of violence and unrest; the ICRC began working there in 1979. In August 1999, a UN-sponsored referendum took place in which the people of East Timor voted largely in favour of independence from Indonesia. This sparked a violent response from pro-Indonesian militias, including brutal attacks in the capital Dili in the first week of September. The ICRC was forced to abandon the city for several days, as our local staff members – including Joao – along with Indonesian Red Cross Society employees, sought refuge in West Timor. Over the following weeks, the post-referendum violence drove more than 250,000 people from the eastern to the western side of the island, where they gathered in camps for displaced people, or to other islands or to neighbouring countries. We returned to Dili in mid-September to a difficult humanitarian situation. We sharply increased the relief supplies that we had been delivering to the people of East Timor, and we repaired water supply systems in various towns in the region. Our medical teams provided crucial services throughout this period and kept Dili General Hospital functioning under extremely challenging conditions. As the communications networks in East Timor had been destroyed, we helped some 2,000 families that had been separated by the hostilities to reconnect. We also identified and registered over 400 unaccompanied children and sought to reunite them with their parents. Our teams were involved in the effort to deliver some 40,000 Red Cross messages between detainees in East Timor and their relatives, most of whom had fled to the western part of the island. Lastly, ICRC staff members spoke on numerous occasions with local military and police forces involved in maintaining law and order. This was to ensure they were aware of their obligations under international humanitarian law.

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