East Timor: When Bad just keeps getting Worse

CMAQ (Centre for Media Alternatives - Quebec) - Monday, April 23, 2007 - 15:57

By Amy Miller

When bad just keeps getting worse. Everyone’s favourite and forgotten national liberation struggle of the 90’s-East Timor- is about to introduce mandatory military conscription on the decimated island.

The people of Timor Lorosae have been going through some difficult times in the past 5 years since the UN has handed over control of the country to the new government rulers. The spark that recently went off in Timor Lorosae and sent over twenty thousand people running into the mountainside of Dili for the second time in less than a decade, stemmed from the anger of the men who worked for the national security and military force. One third of these workers were sacked for going on strike in Feb 2006. They complained of discrimination by their superiors, most of whom were from the East of the Island, which is substantially poorer than the capital region in the center of the island, though in truth the whole set up of the new army - designed by the UN - meant that the top rank brass, would always be from an elite group in good standing with the business and political upper echelon of Indonesia, the World Bank, IMF and the neauveau elite and intelligentia of Timor.

Now needless to say, the massive displacement and exodus of people is obviously more complicated than simply that a bunch of people in the military got fired. The Timorese people are suffering deeply from the traumas of having one third of the island slaughtered during the 24 year occupation by Indonesia- unresolved justice for the thousands of crimes committed by the Indonesian paramilitaries and officials that occurred during the occupation, as well as the immediate aftermath of the referendum overlooked by the UN for independence in 1999, where over 3000 people were killed, and all infrastructure in the capital was destroyed by Indonesian paramilitary groups. Again we see justice swept away with another sham tribunal set up. Never mind the fact that Timor now suffers from a birthrate of 8.3, one of the highest in the world and hidden behind the miscalculated, often quoted source of the CIA handbook’s figure of 5.3- as well as an incredibly high morbidity rates, a barely functioning education system in which the majority of children are excluded, and next to no jobs for the majority of the people.

Unemployment continues to hover around 65%. Timor continues to be the newest and poorest country in Asia.

Australian troops showed up on the island once again to ‘save the Timorese from themselves’ in May 2006 after the ET government signed an agreement asking them to do so. Interestingly enough they had their warships perched off the northwest coast of Australia two weeks prior to this intervention. They managed to control the violence between the police and the military when they arrived but were totally unprepared for the gang violence that began overnight.

Controlling gang violence was the job of the Timorese police and the GNR (who are the special Portuguese paramilitary police, conceived of, incidentally, during the Salazar era) as well as the Australian and the New Zealand military. These foreign military units didn’t manage to keep the population from taking to the streets, and independent reports claim excessive violence and brutality towards the peoples of Timor from their hands. Indeed, the situation on Timor Lorosae has only calmed down slightly since the UN started their new mission here in August.

Meanwhile, the people meant to be kept under control, supposedly under the Australian responsibility, were kept cantoned in Maubisse. This group is led by major Alfredo Reinado, the ex-head of Timorese Military police, though arguably he should have been arrested and imprisoned pending a trial, because he launched an attack on his colleagues from Falintil-FDTL in late May, killing several people. After Reinado finally was arrested and imprisoned he managed to break out of jail in August 2006 and went into hiding.

The tension on the streets now is a combination of the Australian army's killing of two internally displaced people at the airport camp, and their attempts to apprehend Reinado in March. They failed but they managed to kill four of his armed supporters in the process. Because he is widely (and wrongly) hailed as someone that's fighting for justice - as opposed to a man who has positioned himself at the head of a millenarian-style movement with personality cult overtones.

So against this backdrop (which is well hidden, and isn’t visible beyond those who watch the politics of the military very carefully) there is now further instability in this country to add to everything that went on before. At first the number of Internally Displaced People were huge, estimates ranging from one tenth to one fifth of all people. Now it is slowly trickling down.

With elections coming up President Xanana has declared a state of emergency. With the ongoing social and economic problems that come from wanting to play new nation state in this neo liberal world, it is short term ill thinking to introduce conscription. The new law proposes an 18-month mandatory conscription period for all East Timorese, being hailed as a method for clearing Dili's troubled streets of angry unemployed youths. The government won’t have to worry about a repeat scenario of having to lay off the staff come two years from now, as conscription will be the loop-hole allowing for a substandard pay scale and negligent conditions to the workers, while re-enforcing a sense of national duty and pride.

UN officials estimate as many as 40,000 East Timorese will be eligible for the draft.

While the government, in collision with the World Bank keep on working towards unsustainable development schemes for the country, including the move to an import freeze zone, as always it is the mass majority of the people that bury the brunt. Empowering and long term development projects are not setting up a system to keep people in low skill, unhealthy, environmentally eroding jobs for the benefit of the people in economically wealthy and industrial countries. The people of Timor want a water and waste system that works throughout the country, control of the widespread malaria epidemic that continues to plague the people, funding to empower the women, who are subjected to the prevalent sexist subservient thinking which stems heavily from the influential Catholic church, roads, electricity and more support and leverage to the coffee and agricultural cooperatives and collectives that exist throughout the island. But the key, unoriginal and oft repeated, is education, and specifically geared towards young girls. There needs to be schools and teacher in the rural country sides of the country on the primary and secondary levels. Until then, there remains little chance of changing the economic make up of the country, and thus the rock bottom social position of the peoples.

While Australia has provided the bulk of funding to train East Timor's defense force it would be hard to forget the ongoing maritime sea boundary conflict between the two countries, and the multi million of dollars that are set to be made off of these underground oil reserves. In 2001, Australia opened an army-training centre at Metinaro, east of Dili, built at a cost of $7.5million. That money, as well as the millions that the US government, UN, World Bank and the IMF have put in military spending over the last 7 years on the island, could have gone to much better use.

The people of Timor Lorosae deserve dignity and peace after so much suffering. Propping up the economy with a conscripted military is a very shortsighted solution.

- Amy Miller is an organizer based in Montreal who spent time working in Dili in 2005.