Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights

EAST TIMOR: Elusive Peace

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Aug 13 2007 (IPS) - Five years of independence have done little to improve the lives of the long-suffering population of East Timor. In the latest wave of violence, young girls were raped at a convent by unidentified men, 142 homes have been set on fire and United Nations vehicles have been the targets of stone-throwing over the last five days.

The rioting broke out on Aug. 8, after former president and resistance hero José Alexandre “Xanana” Gusmão was sworn in as prime minister.

The tense calm that prevailed Monday in the capital, Dili, and in Baucau, the country’s second-largest city, is guarded over by some 3,000 foreign soldiers and police making up the U.N. peacekeeping forces, largely from Australia, Malaysia and Portugal.

The supporters of former prime minister Mari Alkatiri’s (2002-2006) Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) do not appear to be ready to accept President José Ramos-Horta’s decision to name his predecessor as head of government.

Fretilin argues that Ramos-Horta’s appointment of Gusmão as prime minister was unconstitutional. The party, which has been dominant since the country became an independent nation in 2002, won the largest number of votes in the June elections (nearly 30 percent), but failed to garner the majority needed to form a government.

The National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) took only 23.4 percent of the vote, a blow for its head, Gusmão, who was once East Timor’s most popular and respected leader.

Gusmão led the resistance against the brutal Indonesian occupation of the former Portuguese colony, when Indonesia invaded after East Timor declared itself independent from Portugal in December 1975.

He became an almost mythical icon of revolutionary struggles around the world, waging war against 22,000 Indonesian occupation troops with a band of less than 200 guerrilla fighters for two decades in the dense jungles of this Pacific island.

But what weighed more heavily on Ramos-Horta’s decision was the strong “anti-Alkatiri” sentiment in the country.

As a result, he based his decision on the combined total of votes taken by a coalition of parties that support Gusmão, who thus can count on the backing of 37 of the single-chamber parliament’s 65 members.

When asked by IPS in a telephone interview about his decision, Ramos-Horta said “the majorities and minorities are in parliament, not on the streets, because the people delegated power to the lawmakers to represent them.”

The president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 along with Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, justified his decision by saying that the coalition “at this moment represents the political views of the majority of the population.”

With respect to the continuing violence and unrest, he said “the wounds are deep and fresh, and have been reopened in this latest conflict and by past conflicts.”

The Indonesian occupation cost the lives of one-third of the population of East Timor, which shares the island with Indonesian West Timor.

Violence then erupted last year, when Alkatiri was forced to step down as prime minister after clashes between factions of the security forces claimed the lives of several dozen people, prompting the deployment of the Australian-led peacekeeping forces.

The most serious incidents over the last few days were described to the Portuguese press in East Timor by Reverend Basílio Maria Ximenes, the head of the convent where the girls were raped. He told reporters that dozens of attackers raided and vandalised the institution before sexually abusing the students, one of whom was just 12 years old.

Although he did not refer to the fact that Alkatiri, the leader of Fretilin, is a practising Muslim, the priest said “these people, who were mainly young men, see nuns and the Catholic Church as enemies, and not only raped my students, but also destroyed the school.”

The Catholic bishop of Díli, Alberto Ricardo da Silva, who was an outspoken critic of Alkatiri when the Fretilin leader was prime minister, told the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) agency that he welcomed Gusmão’s invitation to the Catholic Church to help the new government work for peace and development.

There are no precise figures on how many people have been displaced from their homes by the latest wave of violence, or the number of public buildings that have been damaged. But Portuguese correspondents on the island and UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, reported that several schools were vandalised, leading to 50 arrests and several injuries.

International observers predict that things could gradually begin to return to normal.

Alkatiri said Sunday that he believed Fretilin supporters were not taking part in the violence, and urged his followers to remain calm.

“We suspect that it was not Fretilin who did this but people using the name of Fretilin to conduct violence and sully the party’s name, as our members have a high level of discipline,” said the former prime minister, who also offered to cooperate with the United Nations in investigating the events of the last few days.

The profound political division that has arisen from the struggle for power is frequently mentioned to explain the lack of stability in East Timor since its period as a U.N. protectorate (1999-2002) came to an end.

However, the frustrating economic conditions, and especially the lack of prospects for young people, are also a considerable factor to be kept in mind when analysing the roots of the violence.

With per capita income of just 389 dollars, this tiny island nation of 15,000 square km, located in Southeast Asia on the southernmost edge of the Indonesian archipelago, northwest of Australia, is one of the world’s poorest countries, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

In a March 2006 report, the UNDP stated that “Four years after gaining independence, impoverished Timor-Leste remains one of the world’s least-developed nations.”

The U.N. agency reported that half of the population of less than one million has no access to safe drinking water, 60 of 1,000 infants born alive die before their first birthday, and life expectancy, at only 55.5 years of age in 2004, is not improving.

The National Human Development Report 2006, titled “The Path Out of Poverty: Integrated Rural Development”, also said that job opportunities are few, and that although “politically the country is free, its people remain chained by poverty.”

But that explanation does not convince analyst Leonídio Paulo Ferreira, with the Lisbon newspaper Diario de Noticias, who wrote a column Monday titled “He wanted to be a pumpkin farmer, but today he is prime minister”.

Ferreira describes Gusmão as “the national hero who became the country’s first president in 2002 while spending all of his time saying that he was not seduced by power.”

“Surrounded by his Australian wife Kristy Sword and their three children, he claimed that he dreamt of having time to dedicate to photography, that he was anxious to finish his term in 2007, and he even admitted that he would like to become a pumpkin farmer,” wrote Ferreira.

But seven months later, “Xanana is prime minister, the leader of a hastily created party, which did not even win the greatest number of votes in the legislative elections,” and in the streets, “there are some who are now calling their ‘big brother’ a ‘traitor’ and are torching houses in protest.”

The most bitter pill to swallow, according to the columnist, is that “Xanana traded the more than 80 percent of the vote that one day (in 2001) elected him president for the CNRT’s 24 percent of the vote. Photographer or pumpkin farmer, he could have been a Timorese Nelson Mandela, a reference point for the entire population which is still seeking a direction, but he chose instead to be just your usual politician.”