BBC BBC.

Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me, Marco Silva.

And today we go back to November 1991 and a massacre in East Timor in

Southeast Asia. Once a

once a Portuguese colony, the tiny country was then under the control of Indonesian forces who crushed any resistance from the locals.

It's November the 12th, 1991, and in the Easty-Morris capital,

overlooking the Bandas Sea, there's a sense of unease in the air.

The tension in the city and in the country was palpable. I have

been to many war zones and I've never come across a situation where there was that much tension and awareness.

Max Stahl is a British filmmaker who had gone to East Timor to document the country's

struggle for independence.

That November day, activists were planning a march in memory of Sebastian Gomez,

and an 18-year-old who had been shot dead by Indonesian soldiers two weeks earlier. First though in the deeply Catholic

Dilly there would be a mass. Walking from the church about two kilometers to the graveyard where Sebastian was buried, everybody

involved knew that it was almost inevitable that it would the young protesters were when or how. But the young

protesters were determined to make their point in a peaceful way.

They gathered in the very early hours and they put t-shirts which they had prepared with all the

old parties of the Timolesti and at the end of the mass they moved out of the church and they took off there covering shirts revealing the t-shirts with the banners and this meant that within

the space of a few minutes suddenly you have thousands of young demonstrators walking right past military

bases, police bases, government buildings and the army, the police, the

Indonesians looked aghast.

They had never seen anything like it.

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