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  • The Guardian

    'This is my mum': after 40 years a stolen child finally returns home

    When Kauka was eight she was abducted by soldiers from her village in the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste. Now she has come back
    by Krithika Varagur in Aileu, Timor-Leste. Main image by Neo Pasopati Dec 20, 2017 5 minutes
    Kauka, who was abducted as a child by an Indonesian soldier, meets her mother for the first time in 39 years. Photograph: Krithika Varagur for the Guardian

    It was 39 years since Kauka had last walked up the steep dirt road to her house in the Timor-Leste highlands, a lifetime since she was taken by an Indonesian soldier on her way home from school.

    She was just eight on the day she was prised from her family of subsistence coffee farmers, her school friends, neighbours, village, and country. She remembers biting the soldier’s shoulder in protest, to little effect. Within days her parents had been forced to consent to her “adoption”. She was taken first to a nearby military tent and soon after to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where she has lived ever since.

    Kauka was abducted in 1978, early in Indonesia’s 24-year-long military occupation of the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste.

    But last month, aged

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