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East Timor one year
on
By Jill Jolliffe
DILI - On
May 20 last year the Democratic Republic of East Timor
became the first new nation of the second millennium. In
the presence of United Nations Secretary General Kofi
Annan, then US president Bill Clinton and various heads
of state, the crowd roared as President Xanana Gusmao
and Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri raised
their hands in friendship, signifying that the bitter
memory of Jakarta's 24-year military occupation was
behind them.
The glamour faded quickly. The
media departed, foreign personnel left in droves, and
East Timor faced the hard task of surviving alone. At
its head as president stood Gusmao, a former guerrilla
commander, while lawyer Mari Alkatiri was prime
minister. His nationalist Fretilin party had won 58
percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2001.
The territory was administered before
independence by the United Nations Transitional
Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), after
peacekeeping troops secured the territory from marauding
Indonesian-backed militiamen in 1999. Post-independence,
the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor
(UNMISET), has a mainly advisory role, although it
retains control over police and defense forces.
The past 12 months have seemed the longest in
the life of any new nation. East Timor came to
independence as one of the poorest countries in Asia.
According to the National Planning Commission, two out
of five people did not have sufficient means to cover
their basic needs, three out of every five adults were
illiterate, and around 8-9 percent of children died
before the age of one.
Mariano dos Anjos
grimaces with pain as he adjusts the bamboo pole laden
with fruit that bears down on his shoulders. He is one
of a band of child coolies in the streets of Dili.
Mariano is 10 years old, but his frame is that of a
seven or eight-year-old. He has a worn, adult face. He
carries 20 strings of five tangerines, weighing about 10
kilograms in all, which he sells to foreigners.
The child laborers are the belated casualties of
East Timor's traumatic succession to independence.
Mariano sells an uncomplicated product, although the
weight he carries endangers his bone development. Other
boys sell movies on CD-Rom, which UN peacekeepers devour
in bulk (including pornographic productions, known as
"jiggy-jiggy"), and sometimes the children themselves
are the product. Like street kids everywhere, they are
vulnerable to the human predators whose presence follows
wars as surely as night follows day.
Johanna
Eriksson Takyo of the United Nations' Children Fund
estimates that there are about 120 street kids between
seven and 18 years working and sleeping on the streets
of the capital, and another 200-300 who work but return
home to sleep. "It can't compare with Calcutta or
Bombay," she said, "but it's a significant number for a
small city like Dili."
Poverty is most felt in
the countryside, and the year was marked by discontent
from the rural unemployed, especially ex-guerrillas, who
expected independence to deliver instant rewards. There
has been an upsurge of animist cults, such as The Sacred
Family in Baucau, and Colimau 2000 near the West Timor
border. Mixing Christian liturgies with voodoo-like
invocations, they conduct animal sacrifices and preach
that guerrilla heroes killed during the war with
Indonesia will emerge from the jungle. In the village of
Fohoream, one sect toured a Timorese couple as Jesus
Christ and the Virgin Mary. Illiterate villagers paid $2
for the privilege of kissing the hands of the thronged
figures.
But in the past year it was the urban
discontent expressed in violent rioting in Dili on
December 4 that most shocked, sending some foreign
investors scurrying. Its true authors are unknown - a
promised government report has not materialized. It was
possibly an aborted coup against the Alkatiri
government, whose critics see it as dogmatic and
undemocratic and oppose its decision to make Portuguese
an official language.
Many wondered then whether
the new nation was going to get through its first year.
Would it lapse into the severe infighting and violence
that had marked its sad and traumatic history since
Portugal announced it would decolonize in April 1974, or
was this a mere blip on the radar screen?
It did
survive because the East Timorese are a pragmatic people
with a strong cultural identity, factors that overruled
the temptation to extremism and intolerance. They were
deeply shocked at the depth and extent of the violence.
Shops were burnt down, along with the prime minister's
residence, and the parliament building and a mosque were
attacked in a day in which the mob ran out of control in
the streets. UN peacekeepers and police failed to
intervene, leading to growing criticism of UNMISET.
In the following period, politicians moderated
their rhetoric and went out of their way to work
together. "It was a wake-up call," one diplomat
commented, "East Timor was in danger of becoming a
one-party state."
In January new alarm bells
rang as militia groups from West Timor raided border
villages, after almost two years of peace at the
frontier. Seven people were killed at Atsabe, on the
central border, and in February there was a further
attack, at Atabae in the north. A bus was fired on,
killing two. UN peacekeepers tracking the militia unit
clashed with it days later, killing one and capturing
four.
Under a UN Security Council resolution,
prosecutors from the Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) have the
task of bringing to justice those responsible for the
murders, arson attacks and deportations which
accompanied the 1999 referendum and the Indonesian
army's subsequent scorched earth withdrawal.
Since beginning work the SCU has indicted 247
people accused of crimes against humanity. Of these, 169
(over 65 percent) are at large in Indonesia, and despite
Megawati's newfound friendship with the East Timorese,
her government has consistently refused to hand them
over. They include former defense chief General Wiranto,
who was indicted on February 24.
The failure of
justice to be seen to be done means that the trauma many
East Timorese suffered in 1999 remains raw, affecting
the credibility of the local justice system. The work of
the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation
has alleviated the situation, but is seen as
insufficient. Modelled on South Africa's truth and
reconciliation commission, it has held village hearings
nationwide during the past year to reconcile those who
fought on different sides during the conflict with
Indonesia. Its work is applauded, but the cry of
"justice before reconciliation" - meaning Indonesian
officers who ordered the violence should be tried -
remains in force among the common people.
The
year was not all doom and gloom, however. In April,
Australia and East Timor signed a $25 billion deal to
jointly exploit offshore hydrocarbon resources. The
first substantial income, which will underwrite future
budgets, should register around 2006.
Elizabeth
Huybens of the World Bank sees two lean years ahead for
East Timor. "The winding down of the UNTAET mission and
the slowing down of reconstruction means growth has
declined sharply," she stated.
Yet she sees the
government as having taken "major strides" towards
delivering services to isolated areas, and lists recent
achievements: soaring child vaccination rates, increased
medical attendance at births (child and maternal
mortality rates being a major problem), and more
children attending school nationwide than ever attended
under the Indonesian occupation.
"I don't want
to underestimate the challenges," she concludes, "but I
think the East Timorese are focused and can make things
work, so long as nobody expects miracles."
After
years of war and terror, the East Timorese no longer
believe in miracles. They're just crossing their fingers
that next year will be better.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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(Mar 12,
'03)
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