Notícias

UN in secret talks with Reinado's lawyers

Mark Dodd, Dili
The Australian
March 13, 2007

THE UN has been involved in secret talks with lawyers representing army fugitive Alfredo Reinado despite having agreed with the EastTimor Government to stay out of any deal-making with the country'smost wanted man.

According to a senior UN source in Dili, the head of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste, Atul Khare, met last week with the East Timor Lawyers Association president, Benivides Correia Barros, to discuss surrender terms for Reinado, who has been on the run forseveral weeks and is wanted over political violence last year.

Mr Barros, as a representative of the fugitive major, presented a memorandum written in perfect English seeking to negotiate surrender.

In exchange for a range of concessions, Reinado was willing to submitto justice, the UN source said. Another source confirmed the meeting.

The Australian understands Reinado's demands included provision of a house in the exclusive diplomatic suburb of Farol, round-the-clock security to be provided by New Zealand soldiers, military decorations commensurate with the rank of major and the dropping of anunspecified number of charges.

The Government is believed to have rejected the wish list and restated its demand that Reinado turn himself in and face justice before the court.

But the meeting with the UN is significant because it appears to bein breach of a pledge made last week to stay out of negotiations with Reinado following a presidential order for his arrest.

The UN had met Reinado during failed joint talks involving the Ramos Horta Government in December and January.

Reinado was surrounded by Australian troops and in the early hours of March 4

Australian special forces attempted to make an arrest.

Five armed Reinado supporters were shot dead during the operation andat least three others arrested. But Reinado and a small group ofarmed supporters managed to escape.

The Australian understands President Xanana Gusmao had requested Reinado should not be harmed during the operation.

As many East Timorese mourn the deaths, feelings in Dili are running high and expatriots fear the outpouring of grief by the family of slain rebel Deolindo Barros could create discontent across the country.

Reinado supporter Nelson Galucho said the rebel leader wanted to negotiate with Prime Minister Jose Ramos Horta but feared he would be killed if he left his hideout.

Mr Galucho said the rebels would not attack international security forces but would respond if they came under fire.

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Violence mars pre-poll Timor
Mark Dodd
March 12, 2007

GANG violence on the streets of Dili and rebel army major Alfredo Reinado remaining at large are destabilising conditions for East Timor's presidential elections, due in four weeks.

Vicious gang warfare that has displaced more than 60,000 people is being stoked by political rabble-rousers who want to crush Fretilin, the country's biggest political party, a senior party powerbroker and central committee member said yesterday.

In its first official response to the failed attempt by Australian special forces to capture Reinado, Fretilin said it had no desire to see the rebel killed. Reinado, a former commander of the country's military police and a major player in last year's political violence, is wanted for treason.
The search continues for the elusive rebel, embraced as a hero by many of the Dili gangs, after Australian soldiers failed to catch him last week following a six-day stand-off in the southern town of Same.

"There is no need to have more dead heroes than we already have. Fretilin want him (Reinado) alive. At least, it is in everyone's interests he lies low," Fretilin's Filomeno Aleixo told The Australian.

"These elections are very important to help us overcome the political crisis and restore democratic values. Things are not easy for Fretilin. The crisis has made us realise we are the main target by opponents wanting to make us look weak."

Security was at the top of the agenda at a weekend Fretilin party congress in Dili to discuss the April 9 presidential ballot, Mr Aleixo said.

The party was concerned by the security situation in Ermera district, where many of Reinado's supporters were based and had threatened Fretilin officials. Fretilin cadre intended to meet with youth groups and tell them not to be manipulated by self-serving politicians seeking to weaken the party that had delivered independence to East Timor.

Fretilin is the biggest and best organised of East Timor's political parties and holds 55 seats in the 88-seat Constituent Assembly.

But last year's political crisis revealed growing internal dissent at the leadership role of former prime minister Mari Alkatiri.

The Australian understands moves are under way to expel members of a rebel Fretilin reform group supporting Prime Minister Jose Ramos-Horta's presidential candidacy.

About 500,000 East Timorese - half the population - are eligible to vote for a new president from eight candidates. National parliamentary elections will follow although a date has yet to be set by President Xanana Gusmao.

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Cavan Hogue: No escaping the burden of good intentions
The 'liberation' of East Timor is coming back to haunt us

March 12, 2007

ANY foreign policy is a compromise between what you want and what you can get, and any analysis must consider the alternatives. Most of the public emotion expended in Australia about East Timor has shown little concern for facts, logic or alternatives. Let's start at the beginning.

Although you would never guess it from reading Australian media reports, the history of East Timor did not begin with the Indonesian invasion in 1975. For 400 years, Portugal ran it as a penal colony and did nothing for the indigenous people. We hear much about how Australia should have done something about the Indonesian invasion because of our debt to the Timorese who supported Australian soldiers during World War II. Nobody, however, showed much concern for the Timorese when they were being oppressed by the brutal dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. Why not? Is European oppression more acceptable than Asian oppression?

Conspiracy theorists argue that Australia should have done something to stop the Indonesian invasion of East Timor because we were told in advance what would happen and-or because we let them believe we would not oppose it. Even if we were to accept this argument, it is not clear what it is Australia was supposed to do. Any suggested action must be put within the framework of the world as it was 30 years ago, not as it is today. Thirty years ago the Cold War was alive and well, and Australia was licking its wounds after the disaster that was Vietnam.

We are told that Australia should have put pressure on Indonesia. How? We could cut off our aid, in which case the Indonesians would have told us what to do with our aid and gone ahead regardless. We could have broken off diplomatic relations, in which case we would have had no influence in Indonesia and it would still have gone ahead with the invasion. We could have sent troops to fight with Fretilin in repelling the Indonesians. In other words, we could have got into another war in Asia, only this time in support of the communists.

In the unlikely event that the Australian public would have supported such action, the US would certainly have strongly opposed action by Australia to install a communist regime in Southeast Asia. We could have been more active in the UN, but the world took the same interest in East Timor that we take in Africa. Some even suggest that we could exercise "moral" pressure on a regime that they believe to have been immoral, whatever moral pressure might be.

Let's be clear about Fretilin: it was and remains a communist party based on Frelimo and other fraternal parties. Fretilin would have installed a communist dictatorship led by people such as Mari Alkatiri. Internal opponents would have been purged and there would have been massacres of those who supported APODETI or other non-communist parties. Private payback killings would have been widespread. Recent events have only confirmed the validity of this analysis.

The reason the Indonesians invaded was to prevent the establishment of an unstable, communist state that would have been a base for subversion in Indonesia. Even allowing for Indonesian paranoia about communists, this was not an unreasonable assumption.

The new government would have turned to China and the USSR for aid, technicians and political support. Would Australia really have been happy with an unstable, Soviet-backed communist state on its borders?

There was a significant body of Timorese opinion that favoured integration with Indonesia because it would have made them members of a serious country with the capacity to develop them economically. Portuguese cultural influence did not extend much outside Dili and Portuguese was spoken only by the elite, who are now using it as a tool to dominate the masses. The East Timorese also had close cultural, linguistic and racial ties with the West Timorese. The border was a classic colonial creation and the notion of a nation struggling for freedom is a myth. Recent events have highlighted the kinds of divisions that existed then and still exist.

The Indonesians, to their credit, put in schools and medical facilities and did more for ordinary Timorese in a few years than Portugal did in 400 years. It is these facilities that were destroyed 20 years later. Unfortunately, the Indonesian armed forces were not as competent as their civilian counterparts. Instead of winning hearts and minds they picked pockets and beat bodies. The incompetence, brutality and corruption of TNI, the Indonesian military, was the reason Timor did not become a province of Indonesia and why in the referendum Timorese voted against Indonesia.

Those who blame Australia for what happened in East Timor clearly suffer from a neocolonialist mentality combined with an unreal understanding of the power that Australia can exercise outside its borders. You can blame Portugal for a bad colonial record and a totally irresponsible act of decolonisation and you can blame the Suharto government for failing to control the activities of TNI and therefore failing to peacefully integrate East Timor, but the blame game doesn't solve the issue.

We now have a poor, backward and unstable entity on our doorstep, a state manifestly unable to look after itself. Political and tribal factionalism are rife. Ultimately, this is the fault and the problem of the Timorese; they voted for independence and they got it.

We are not their paternalistic keeper and we do not have a manifest destiny to solve all the problems of the region.

Like the Indonesians 30 years ago, however, we do not want an unstable entity off our shores that might serve as a base for actions contrary to Australian interests. Our methods and our behaviour may be different, but that is why we are there. There are no easy answers to this problem and we have not set ourselves an easy task.

Australian troops are acting on behalf of the Timorese Government against the rebel Alfredo Reinado. We see this action as supporting the legitimately elected democratic government but is that how the Timorese see it? We should not forget Talleyrand's advice that what matters in politics is not the truth but what people perceive to be the truth. Already there is evidence of some anti-Australian sentiment and there is a danger that we could find ourselves sucked into what the local people perceive as a civil war. So we may be damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Welcome to the quagmire.

Cavan Hogue, a former Australian ambassador with extensive diplomatic experience in Asia, is adjunct professor in the department of international communication at Macquarie University in Sydney.

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Editorial - Jakarta Post

Unsavory Timor Leste

"You better go back to your country instead of making people (here) suffer," charged a youth in Dili.
In times past this verbal attack would have been directed at Indonesian soldiers. But eight years later such disdain is being hurled at the 'saviors' of East Timor -- Australian troops.
Such is the fickleness of the mob, the political vacillation of a discontented throng. A once great rebel leader turned president is denounced by his public and is set to be replaced by yet another icon plump with purposeless promise.

The honeymoon is over in Timor Leste. With the presidential election just a month away, Indonesia's young neighbor is on the verge of failing an important test of nationhood.

No state can ultimately persevere if it cannot install the rudiments of political conciliation and conflict resolution. While sending foreign soldiers may have been a necessary and "easy" option to quell the unrest that erupted in May, sending them has not of its own accord produced an uncomplicated or painless political process.

On the contrary, overdependence on foreign "intervention" has only widened the political fault lines that have emerged from bad governance, poor decision making and a lack of leadership from the presiding administration.

Senior members of the Timor Leste government are culpable in one way or another for failing to avert the crisis when it first emerged 10 months ago. Not least of those who should bear the blame is President Xanana Gusmao for failing to speak up when his voice and leadership were required to arrest a deteriorating situation. It was at this critical juncture in Timor Leste's history that Xanana displayed the same quality that made him such a great guerrilla leader: the ability to remain quietly in hiding.

The firing of Timorese troops last year has lead to divided loyalties. The only foreseeable solution the government seems to have is to urge Australian soldiers to "neutralize" a man who is quickly assuming the same revolutionary stature as Gusmao had in his guerrilla fighting days. How ironic.

But following such a strategy -- which the government seems to be doing -- places the Australian forces, under the guise of being "international" peacekeepers, as nothing more than mercenaries.

If Australian forces cannot effectively "dispose" of Alfredo Reinado within an acceptable timeframe, they will plunge themselves into their second quagmire, while still bogged down in Iraq .

The only differences with Iraq are that Reinado's supporters are not as sophisticated as the Iraqi insurgents and that this time Australian forces cannot ride on the coattails of their American allies.

Our friends down under certainly do not deserve such a predicament. There have been times when the presence of Australian forces have been a welcome respite -- the violence in East Timor in 1999 is a case in point. But to some, these recent developments may also be the cost of Canberra's eagerness to sheriff the porch beyond its front lawn.

Indonesia can only peer with sad anxiety at developments across the border. It was not asked to intervene. It was not consulted when others were called in to intervene. And neither should it seek to intervene unless the situation threatens the security of the bordering province of East Nusa Tenggara.

Hence President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's move to shut the border and gear up troops along the perimeter was an appropriate action which should be maintained. It is an act of brotherly love to prevent Reinado sneaking into Indonesia and securing the safety of Indonesians in the border vicinity.

Compared to the various challenges across the Indonesian archipelago, the scale of events in East Timor is trifling. Indonesia has other more pressing challenges to face on its own.
What's happening in Dili is a domestic issue which Indonesia should keep abreast of but not concern itself with.

Dili has to learn that the implications of being a sovereign state means resolving one's own family scuffles. It cannot keep looking for a sheriff (or deputy, as the case may be) to fight its battles.