Tuesday, September 29, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
EAST TIMOR: Direct Democracy a Big Step for Small Nation – Gusmao
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- Xanana Gusmao, the president of the world’s youngest nation, made a strong case Friday for the type of political culture that would be pivotal for East Timor – direct public participation at all levels of decision making.
The two pillars that the newly independent country hopes to build are a participatory democratic system and consensus building in solving national problems, Gusmao said at the opening of a conference here to review Thailand’s performance as a democracy under its 1997 constitution.
”I consider these pillars (key) elements of political stability; in turn, political stability is a sine qua non condition for the future social, political and economic development of our nation,” he explained.
Direct public participation will create ”a sense of belonging” among the East Timorese, said Gusmao, who as president does not have much executive power. Most of the running of the country’s day-to-day affairs lies with the 88-member National Assembly and Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri.
Even then, his office as president should ”assume an open role and direct contact with the population,” Gusmao added.
”We believe that only through such a process, where there is participation, where there is dialogue and where consensus is reached, can we gradually strengthen the feeling of belonging and the feeling of contributing that are essential (for) political stability,” the bearded former rebel leader said.
Gusmao has identified two features of East Timor’s nascent democracy that will help give shape to his vision. One is the push for greater decentralisation of power and the emergence of local governments, while the other takes the form of a ‘National Dialogue’.
”We have not yet initiated the process of decentralising power, of the establishment of local governments and its direct proximity to the population,” he said. What East Timor needs are local bodies for the people to manage as ”conscientious well-informed, critical and technically self-sustained” citizens, he added.
The ‘National Dialogue,’ for its part, is still in its infancy. This, according to Gusmao, can cover in an informal fashion ”problems that are directly raised by citizens, or even organised civil society groups, who have no other forum for debate”.
These features – which are closer to the direct democracy ideas advocated by the pre-Christian Greek philosopher Plato than the representative form of democracy that prevails across the world today – come in addition to East Timor’s legislature.
But East Timor watchers are hardly surprised by the idealism being pursued by Gusmao for his barely six-month-old country. The days leading up to its independence from Indonesia on May 20 were replete with signs of such idealism, they say.
”The political leaders have always engaged the people in their decisions,” says Withaya Sucharithanrugse of the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University here. ”There has been very little distance between the leaders and the East Timorese people.”
These bonds were also evident during the bloody separatist war East Timorese rebels waged with the Indonesian army, he added. Indonesia occupied this half-island nation in South-east Asia for 24 years until it voted for independence in a 1999 referendum. Some 200,000 East Timorese died during Indonesian rule.
According to Sunai Phasuk, the ‘National Dialogue’ that Gusmao alludes to grew out of a conscious effort by East Timor’s leaders to keep their people informed during the year leading up to independence, when the country was under U.N. administration.
”There were regular attempts to keep the people informed of the political events taking shape and to seek their views,” says Sunai, an analyst at Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog. ”This is one of the key foundations of the East Timorese democratisation process.”
On Aug. 30 last year, East Timor held its first free and democratic elections which resulted in 12 of the 17 political parties that contested seats on the Constituent Assembly winning a seat. Presidential polls in April saw Gusmao win 82.69 percent of the votes.
East Timor’s small population of 800,000 people helps the government to pursue the vision of a direct democracy, says Robert England, head of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) in Thailand.
However, England says there are hurdles ahead in Gusmao’s vision. ”Literacy, education is an important issues that needs to be addressed,” he says. ”East Timor needs a fully educated people to participate in Gusmao’s political model.”
In East Timor, Asia’s poorest country, only 41 percent of the population are literate. Many of its teachers and doctors were not East Timorese but Indonesians, who left after the violence that followed the 1999 vote and independence that followed.
These have a direct impact on the institutions that East Timor relies on to turn Gusmao’s vision into reality, says Sunai. ”There is a lack of capable, trained people to handle the (government) institutions. It is a human resources problem.”
There are other burdens that weigh this young country down – infant mortality is estimated at around 85 per 1,000 live births and life expectancy is 57 years, much lower than the average of 69 across East Asia and the Pacific.
Over 40 percent of the people live below the poverty line and earn less than 55 U.S. cents a day. ”We live the eternal nightmare of poor countries to reduce poverty, to eradicate illiteracy, to eradicate malaria, tuberculosis and infant mortality,” Gusmao told the packed gathering at the U.N. conference centre.
Still, he added: ”Our daily lives follow the motto ‘no development without democracy’.”
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EAST TIMOR: Direct Democracy a Big Step for Small Nation – Gusmao
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- Xanana Gusmao, the president of the world’s youngest nation, made a strong case Friday for the type of political culture that would be pivotal for East Timor — direct public participation at all levels of decision making.
(more…)
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