East Timor faces new rebel
threat By Simon Roughneen
An apparent coup attempt has left East
Timor president Jose Ramos-Horta in critical
condition and underlines the shakiness of the
country's transition from occupation through UN
fief to fragile state.
He has undergone
emergency surgery in an Australian hospital after
being shot during an assassination attempt at his
residence on Monday in the Timorese capital, Dili.
The leader of the plot, former military
police chief-turned-renegade-soldier Alfredo
Reinado, was killed during the dawn shootout at
Ramos-Horta's residence, a few hundred meters from
Dili's beach road, just after the president took
his usual morning seaside
stroll.
The attempt on
the Nobel laureate happened as more of Reinado's
men launched a similar attack on Ramos-Horta's
ally, Prime Minster Xanana Gusmao. The prime
minister escaped unharmed and later announced a
state of emergency in response to what he
described as a "failed coup attempt".
Whether or not this means further
destabilization remains to be seen. In Asia's
poorest country, promise has quickly given way to
disillusionment and apathy with growing
allegations of high level official corruption,
according to watchdog non-governmental
organizations Transparency International and
Global Integrity. Now a new generation of rebels
threatens the viability of the newly formed state.
On one level, it is surprising that
Reinado tried to assassinate Ramos-Horta, who
called off the mission to apprehend the rebel
soldier and his followers, known locally as The
Petitioners. The group took to the thickly
jungle-covered hills after a 2006 security crisis
left the army split and the police force
shattered.
However, tensions had been
ratcheting up recently between Reinado - a highly
strung media-seeking showman - and East Timor's
current government. The renegade soldier blamed
Gusmao - president before the 2007 elections
resulted in him swapping roles with Ramos-Horta -
for fueling the fires of the 2006 violence. Then,
western region soldiers led by Reinado were
dismissed from the army after citing
discrimination in favor of easterners.
The
inability or unwillingness to resolve the
Petitioner issue and apprehend Reinado meant that
East Timor's difficult military reform and police
rebuilding programs remained compromised. Gusmao
issued Reinado a "one last chance to surrender"
ultimatum, to which the rebel responded by
threatening to "lead his soldiers down to Dili."
It sounded like characteristic bombast from the
rebel at the time, but he lived up to his words.
While the United Nations - through
successive missions since 1999 - has bet its chips
on East Timor becoming a nation-building success
story, this week's dawn shootout highlights the
challenges still facing a country ranked alongside
Sudan, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe in the Foreign
Policy/Fund for Peace failing states list.
With offshore oil and gas coming on stream
and revenues to be placed in a Norwegian-style
escrow accounted trust fund, East Timor has a
US$100 million a month resource potential that
could lay the bedrock for a viable state. But as
the record shows, "the resource curse" has left
oil-rich countries elsewhere mired in corruption,
ethnic conflict and widespread poverty.
Indeed, ample international assistance,
through successive UN missions and on-off
deployments of international troops, may now be
part of the problem, as Reinado cited the
overweening international presence as one
motivation for his transformation from
rebel-with-a-single-issue-cause into something
approaching a new nationalist struggle.
The Australian military presence in East
Timor has been jeopardized by clumsy and often
arrogant behavior by troops on the one hand, and
questions about competence on the other. East
Timor's Brigadier General Taur Matan Ruak had said
he was "staggered" at the "lack of capacity" of
international forces to prevent armed men entering
Dili to try to kill the two leaders. Ramos-Horta's
brother branded UN police as "bloody cowards", who
hid rather than protect the president from the
assailants.
Reinado's swaggering and often
farcical defiance of the rule of law won him
significant support among East Timor's
youth-bulged population, governed since
independence by figures that fought or organized
resistance to 25 years of brutal Indonesian rule,
and whose internecine squabbling throughout that
time remains extant.
But dissatisfaction
with the same omnipresent cohort - either the
FRETILIN socialists that governed from
independence in 2002 until last year's elections,
or the incumbent multiparty coalition under Gusmao
as prime minister means that East Timor's slow
post-independence economic growth, rampant
unemployment and with 10% of the population listed
as internally displaced persons widens the
potential audience for mavericks and dissenters.
Reinado, flawed cult hero that he may have
been, will likely become a martyr in death.
Graffiti around Dili attests to his popularity in
life, and when Australian peacekeepers tried and
failed to arrest him in the southern town of
Manufahi in March 2007, Dili went into lockdown as
gangs set up roadblocks and torched government
buildings.
While the renegade soldiers
have lost their self-styled enigmatic leader, how
like-minded soldiers or opportunists - citing the
perceived poor performance of East Timor's
political elite and the various international
actors who have propped and secured their
administration - will view the coup attempt
precedent remains to be seen.
Government
officials in Dili are alarmed that the attack on
Gusmao was led by Gastao Salsinha, the commander
of soldiers who were sacked in 2006 and prompted
violent upheaval. Salsinha and two carloads of his
men escaped and are believed to have fled into the
mountains.
He is believed to still command
dozens, possibly hundreds, of heavily armed former
soldiers. Other rumors are circulating that
Reinado and Salsinha were not acting alone, after
meeting with a number of members of parliament
days before the assassination attempt. Sympathetic
elements among East Timor's tens-of-thousands of
martial arts gang-members, many of which have
clandestine political and security force links,
may well take to the streets in protest of
Reinado's death.
However the former
military police chief may just as easily have
overshot the mark. If independence heroes have
seen their once-untouchable reputations decline of
late, much of that can be attributed to the hard
realities of partisan politics and the mundane
technicalities of state-building in a prohibitive
context.
And while Reinado might remain a
mystical figure in death, it will not quell the
confusion among his legions of devotees from
western provinces, who are struggling to
understand why he attacked the men who he urged
them to vote for in 2007 elections. Then
Ramos-Horta was elected president with a
resounding 70% of the vote, and most Reinado
sympathizers likely voted for the president and
later for the parties comprising Gusmao's
coalition in the ensuing parliamentary polls.
However, that this once loyal soldier felt
compelled to attempt a coup in this relatively
homogenous, tiny half-island nation not only shows
the protagonist's vainglory, but also points to a
continuation of East Timor's shaky
post-independence state, leaving political and
security knotholes for the multiple stakeholders
to contend with.
Simon Roughneen
is a senior ISN Security Watch correspondent and
occasional Asia Times Online contributor formerly
based in East Timor.
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