"[14] In one incident, a group of fifty men, women, and children—including Australian freelance reporter Roger East—were lined up on a cliff outside of Dili and shot, their bodies falling into the sea.

"[18] In February 1976 after capturing the village of Aileu - to the south of Dili - and driving out the remaining Fretilin forces, Indonesian troops machine gunned most of the town's population, allegedly shooting everyone over the age of three.

[19] In June 1976, TNI troops badly battered by a Fretilin attack exacted retribution against a large refugee camp housing 5–6,000 Timorese at Lamaknan near the West Timor border.

[20] In March 1977 ex-Australian consul James Dunn published a report detailing charges that since December 1975 Indonesian forces had killed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians in East Timor.

In an interview on 5 April 1977 with the Sydney Morning Herald, Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik said the number of dead was "50,000 people or perhaps 80,000".

[26] Later, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas reiterated this position in his 2006 memoir The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor.

[27][full citation needed] The island's original division into east and west, Indonesia argued after the invasion, was "the result of colonial oppression" enforced by the Portuguese and Dutch imperial powers.

These camps were located in close proximity to local military bases where Indonesian forces "screened" the population in order to single out members of the resistance, often with the aid of Timorese collaborators.

Additionally, the Indonesian military barred the Red Cross from distributing humanitarian aid and no medical care was provided to the detainees.

As a result, many of the Timorese - weakened by starvation and surviving on small rations given by their captors - died of malnutrition, cholera, diarrhea and tuberculosis.

[32] The UN truth commission report confirmed the Indonesian military's use of enforced starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese civilian population, and that large numbers of people were "positively denied access to food and its sources".

[36] An envoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 1979 that 80 percent of one camp's population was malnourished, in a situation that was "as bad as Biafra".

[38] Indonesia announced that it was working through the government-run Indonesian Red Cross Society to alleviate the crisis, but the NGO Action for World Development charged that organisation with selling donated aid supplies.

During this operation, Indonesian forces conscripted 50,000 to 80,000 Timorese men and boys to march through the mountains ahead of advancing TNI troops as human shields to foreclose a FRETILIN counterattack.

An eyewitness who testified before the Australian Senate stated that soldiers deliberately killed small children by smashing their heads against a rock.

[41] As FRETILIN troops in the mountains continued their sporadic attacks, Indonesian forces carried out numerous operations to destroy them over the next ten years.

When Xanana sought to invoke Portugal and the UN in the negotiations, ABRI Commander Benny Moerdani broke the ceasefire by announcing a new counterinsurgency offensive called "Operational Clean-Sweep" in August 1983, declaring, "This time no fooling around.

[45] In 1983 Amnesty International published an Indonesian manual it had received from East Timor instructing military personnel on how to inflict physical and mental anguish, and cautioning troops to "Avoid taking photographs showing torture (of someone being given electric shocks, stripped naked and so on)".

[46] In his 1997 memoir East Timor's Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance, Constâncio Pinto describes being tortured by Indonesian soldiers: "With each question, I would get two or three punches in the face.

[49] In addition to suffering arbitrary detainment, torture, and extrajudicial execution, women faced rape and sexual abuse—sometimes for the crime of being related to an independence activist.

The scope of the problem is difficult to ascertain, owing to the intense military control imposed during the occupation, compounded by the shame felt by victims.

[52] In 1999 researcher Rebecca Winters released the book Buibere: Voice of East Timorese Women, which chronicles many personal stories of violence and abuse dating to the earliest days of the occupation.

[54] A woman who had prepared food for FRETILIN guerrillas was arrested, burned with cigarettes, tortured with electricity, and forced to walk naked past a row of soldiers into a tank filled with urine and feces.

[63] A number of pro-democracy student groups and their magazines began to openly and critically discuss not just East Timor, but also the "New Order" and the broader history and future of Indonesia.

[66] Major General Prabowo's, Kopassus Group 3 trained militias gangs dressed in black hoods to crush the remaining resistance.

The report did not provide an upper bound, however, CAVR speculated that the total number of deaths due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000.

Noting the relative lack of personal accounts of atrocities or of traumatised Indonesian soldiers, he further adds that East Timor "does not appear—on the basis of news reports and academic accounts—to be a society traumatized by mass death...the circumstance leading up to the Dili massacre of 1991...indicate a society which retained its vigor and indignation in a way which would probably not have been possible if it had been treated as Cambodia was treated under Pol Pot."

Even Indonesian military strategy was based on winning the "hearts and minds" of the population, a fact that does not support charges of mass killing.

[3] Considering all this data, Cribb argues for a much lower toll of 100,000 or less, with an absolute minimum of 60,000, and a mere tenth of the civilian population dying unnaturally, for the years 1975–1980.

The complete names of around 2,300 Indonesian soldiers and members of pro-Indonesian militias who died in action as well as from illness and accidents during the entire occupation is engraved into the Seroja Monument, located in the TNI's Headquarters in Cilangkap, East Jakarta.