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East Timor's new
sheriff
By Jill Jolliffe
DILI
- Sandra Peisley, the United Nations' newly appointed
police chief in East Timor, is not the sort of person to
flinch from a problem. If she were, she might have
turned back to her native Australia soon after reaching
Dili in late June.
Days after she took over as
commissioner of UNPOL, the international force
commanding security operations, Amnesty International
issued a scathing report on its performance. It alleged
that after several years in East Timor, UNPOL had failed
to deliver on a "commitment to establish a credible,
professional and impartial" Timorese police service, and
equally failed to develop "a culture and ethos in which
human rights are fully entrenched in police behavior and
practice".
Peisley knew there was demoralization
among UNPOL officers and that the East Timorese police
service they had created was having serious problems.
The reputations of both had been seriously affected by
devastating riots in December during which the police
failed to act effectively.
She was thus prepared
for a black outlook, but not for such immediate
problems. Amnesty's verdict was followed within days by
new press allegations of police complicity in the
trafficking of prostitutes whose main clients are UN
staff.
But 47-year-old "Sandi" Peisley, as she
likes to be known, comes highly qualified for the task,
having worked her way up through the ranks of the
Australian Federal Police, which she joined as a
teenager, and gained experience with the UN during a
1994 stint in Cyprus.
In terms of women serving
in UN peacekeeping missions, Peisley is the UN's top cop
- the first-ever woman to head a United Nations police
force.
Speaking in the former Indonesian
barracks that is now the command center for both UNPOL
and the East Timorese National Police (PNTL), she said
she had only a slight hesitation in accepting the job.
"I had to remind myself that I'm a 'can do' sort of
person, then decided pretty quickly that I could do it,"
she recalled, adding: "I'm very conscious ... that it's
not going to be a walk in the park."
In East
Timor, all eyes will be on her as she tackles the task
of restoring the reputation of UNPOL and running a total
review of the demoralized East Timorese police headed by
her local counterpart, Commissioner Paulo Martins.
Policing crisis
Peisley took over from
Canadian commissioner Peter Miller, who led the police
before and after independence. UNPOL was so deeply
unpopular in the last period of his mission that he
spent it under heavy personal guard.
The
international force has two agreed functions in
independent East Timor: it holds final responsibility
for internal security (resented as an infringement of
sovereignty by some Timorese), and for the training of a
local police force to replace it after withdrawal, set
for next June.
Question marks over its
capabilities on both counts came to a head after
renegade UNPOL officer Nick Torre opened a tell-all
webpage before leaving East Timor last month.
Before his UN mission, Torre, a Filipino, had
worked as a counter-insurgency specialist in Mindanao,
and he warned that Dili was "a breeding ground for
insurgency".
In an interview with Asia Times
Online, he said UNPOL's failure to learn from the
December 4 rioting, which left two dead and millions of
dollars in damage from arson and looting, could lead to
new tragedy.
The violence was sparked by the
fatal shooting of two demonstrators by local police, and
he claimed that their shoddy training by the UN was
creating "a police like Kopassus", the feared Indonesian
special force, rather than one with popular support.
Allegations of East Timorese police beatings are
increasingly common.
Torre was deputy
intelligence chief on December 4, and revealed that as
the first buildings were burning early in the day, he
warned superiors that events were spinning out of
control and that the military should be called in, but
was ignored.
Although the UN mandate is to
ensure the security of the East Timorese population, he
said the only contingency plan it had that day was to
defend UN installations and, if that failed, to
evacuate.
Torre was later demoted by deputy
commissioner Denis McDermott, who has since completed
his mission. The Filipino officer alleged that McDermott
blamed UNPOL's failure on his poor intelligence
reporting, and on inexperienced Timorese police, rather
than the errors of its own commanders.
He
claimed he was made a scapegoat - but he undermined his
case by bad language and personal insults of McDermott
on his webpage.
Sukehiro Hasegawa, deputy UN
head in East Timor, denied the victimization charge. "He
was not made a scapegoat," he said. "The UN is
conducting its own investigation on the riots, which is
not yet complete."
A UN official in Dili who
asked not to be named backed Torre's assessment of the
police crisis, now reinforced by the Amnesty report. He
alleged that the UN has failed "to improve training or
to develop the police force as a viable entity. UN
headquarters continues to send street cops to East Timor
at immense cost, but will not send experts who can
actually do something about building the police force".
Rebuilding confidence
Commissioner
Peisley has been plunged into this debate. Torre's view
of police failure is generally shared by the East
Timorese public, which means Peisley has a residue of
resentment to overcome.
Asked to comment on
Peisley's appointment, Francisco Branco, parliamentary
leader of the governing Fretilin party, said he didn't
believe it would change much. "UNPOL was well regarded
before, but it has been discredited since the riots last
December," he said. "The population trusted it to
protect them, but it failed. Reform is needed."
Peisley has made it clear that she has a reform
agenda, and will meet criticism head-on.
With
PNTL commissioner Martins, she is reviewing the training
of East Timorese police agents and working to restoring
their respect in the brief period left before UNPOL's
pullout. She is not short of ideas.
Basic
training will increase from three to six months and
there will be a careful selection of the UN police who
conduct it. "I'm going to attend the induction of these
UN trainers and tell them exactly what I want," she
said, adding that a code of conduct will be enforced,
with new in-depth training in human-rights principles.
"Every community member in East Timor was
saddened by what happened in December," she mused. "We
must ensure that if such trouble happens again, both
UNPOL and PNTL will be prepared to deal with it."
On accusations that UNPOL has closed its eyes to
cases of human trafficking involving Thai and Indonesian
women brought to East Timor as prostitutes, she has
vowed to clean up the situation, while asserting that
the problem has been exaggerated by sensationalist
reporting.
Sandi Peisley has a clear advantage
on one aspect of the job. The East Timorese police have
a recruitment target of 20 percent women - in a country
that had never before seen female police - and a pledge
to fight discrimination, to ensure they stay in the
force. The Australian commissioner will undoubtedly
provide a role model. She joined the police force in
Canberra when female officers had their own battle for
equality, for which reason she is bound to keep an
encouraging eye on her young Timorese female
counterparts.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
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