Fear of chaos shadows East Timor poll

The Australian
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Dili
April 09, 2007

JOSE Ramos Horta went to Easter mass at the weekend with "a host of sins" to confess, not least of which was having entertained lustful thoughts towards the film star Jennifer Lopez while presenting her with a prize in Berlin last year.

This morning, he will visit a small primary school on the eastern outskirts of Dili to cast a vote for himself as East Timor's next president, in an act he hopes can help expiate the sins lately visited on his benighted nation.

It's a risky move, partly because word on the street is that if Ramos Horta defeats his main opponent, the ruling Fretilin party's Francisco "Lu'Olo" Guterres, he will be assassinated.

In a broken-down country that thrives on rumour, the threat is probably an empty one, although there are genuine fears that a Fretilin loss could herald a return to the violence of last year that left dozens dead and injured and rent the country's body politic asunder.

There have already been scattered clashes between supporters of various candidates in today's poll, with the tempo of threat and counter-threat escalating at the weekend to the point where some families in regions outside the capital were fleeing homes in fear for their lives.

Ramos Horta is sanguine about the possibility of more chaos, though far from humble: "If I am elected, I will bear a wooden cross almost as heavy as Christ's," he said during an interview on Holy Thursday. "If I lose, it's my freedom."
Indications are that East Timor's Nobel Peace Prize laureate will not be free just yet to resume the urbane life for which he yearns: of writing, contemplation and courting the world's political elite.

Of the eight candidates running for president today, only Ramos Horta and Guterres are thought to have any real chance of success. Dark horse candidate Fernando "Lasama" de Araujo, of the Democratic Party, looks likely to make third place, with his main effect being to split the frontrunners' votes and force a May 9 run-off election.

A fourth, the Social Democratic Party's Lucia Lobato, could attract a decent following from certain sections of the population keen to buck East Timor's strong patriarchal tradition and install the country's first woman leader - one who is a cousin of founding president Nicolau Lobato to boot - but she is not expected to overly trouble the scorers.

Fretilin officials insist they have the result in the bag without even the need for a run-off, and while Guterres himself urges caution - "I am optimistic, but the only proof is the ballot papers," he said in a weekend interview at his comfortable Dili home - his advisers are far more gung-ho.

"Look, if you just go by the numbers - we'll get 80 per cent in Baucau, maybe 60 to 70 per cent in Los Palos, about the same in Viqeque and 45 or 50 per cent in Manatuto - then he's won," chief political adviser Harold Moucho said. "The rest is minor."

"We also have the votes of the small parties, many of whom are offshoots from Fretilin," adds Guterres campaign manager Filomeno Aleixo.

Others disagree, and with fair logic. Moucho's number-crunching focuses on the country's east, where undiluted Fretilin support is most evident, and ignores the western districts, where the heart of the military discontent that contributed heavily to last year's chaos lies.

Moucho is also relying on 270,000 registered Fretilin members, out of a total voting pool of 522,933 East Timorese adults, to get his man over the line.

It won't be quite that simple, however. Even within the party there is dissent, with an internal "Fretilin Mudanca (reform)" bloc directing members to vote for Ramos Horta, a party founder who left the organisation more than 15 years ago but resumed his alliance with the Marxist-based group when he replaced its secretary-general, Mari Alkatiri, as prime minister as an emergency pressure-releasing strategy at the height of last year's violence.

Fretilin Mudanca prime mover Jose Luis Guterres, who took on the job of Foreign Minister after Ramos Horta's ascent to the prime minister's office, says there is no way the Fretilin leadership can be allowed to continue "misdirecting the country".

"We have already seen that this Government cannot do a good job," he says, sitting in an airy cafe overlooking the Dili waterfront, filled with New Zealand police and foreign bureaucrats and aid workers, here as part of the massive international effort to steer a straight course for the struggling country.

"They are not doing any kind of rural investment, and they have not even said sorry for what happened last year. We had close to a civil war, and all they can do is blame others for it, not look to themselves.

"I think that Ramos Horta, and probably Xanana as prime minister, can help unite the country. Ramos Horta is someone everyone knows and they trust him to work for East Timor."

The support of President Kay Rala "Xanana" Gusmao will be crucial to Ramos Horta's chances. After bringing to his long-time ally the votes of the nation's "veterans" - those who, like Gusmao, spent most of their adult lives in the jungle waging guerilla war against the 24-year Indonesian occupation - the man regarded as East Timor's founding father will then almost certainly stand in mid-year parliamentary elections and run for prime minister in a government led by his newly formed National Congress for East Timorese Reconstruction.
The intensity and complexity of East Timor's politics can be bewildering, and the reliance on symbol and myth a crucial part of understanding it.

Gusmao's new grouping uses the acronym CNRT - the same as that of the former National Council for East Timorese Resistance, the umbrella group formed by Ramos Horta and Gusmao that ushered in independence and effectively functioned as both political party and state machine between 2000 and 2002.

Reigniting the CNRT brand will attract a nostalgia vote in the countryside, where heroes and freedom fighters are revered.

The phenomenon helps explain the support for renegade former military police commander Alfredo Alves Reinado, who appears to have been spirited away with the help of villagers in Same, south of Dili, during a botched raid on his hideout by Australian SAS troops last month.

Brigadier Mal Rerdon, the Australian commander of the International Stabilisation Force providing military security in East Timor, says "Alfredo Reinado is a fugitive who must face justice".

"Some people in the districts seem to have the impression that Alfredo is a hero," he said last week. "It's important for them to understand that Alfredo is not going to provide them with any kind of solution. While he remains a fugitive, he's only going to bring instability and unrest."

But for many East Timorese it's not so simple: they buy a parallel deliberately cultivated by the rebel with Dom Boaventura, who waged a bloody struggle against heavily armed Portuguese troops in the early 20th century.
Boaventura was finally forced out of his Same stronghold in a 1912 military action that resulted in the deaths of thousands of men, women and children; a statue in his honour stands not far from the Australian embassy in Dili, overlooking a refugee camp.

For many of the camp's displaced people and others in a nation where unemployment runs at well over 50 per cent and per capita GDP was $425 last year, expectations are low and relatively easy to fulfil.

All sides agree that the more than $1 billion in oil money sitting in a New York bank account needs to start flowing into infrastructure and development. A recent Asian Development Bank report predicted growth of more than 30 per cent for East Timor in the coming financial year. Filmmaker Max Stahl, who has followed East Timor's fortunes for years, is fluent in the Tetum official language and occupies the privileged position of documentarist and participant in the country's travails, likens it to a "basically well-constructed but unstable boat".

"It's as though it doesn't have a heavy enough keel," he muses, "so that as soon as it's hit by gusts of wind it rocks from side to side and threatens to capsize, although it never quite does. It's still well enough built that it doesn't tip over."

Stahl insists "the important question is can East Timor be governed, not who should govern it".

But first the mechanics of the poll must be managed and, despite the best efforts of UN representative Atul Khare to help East Timor run its first general election, problems are inevitable.

Criticisms have included concerns from a UN certification team as recently as last month that the conditions for free, fair and transparent voting remained to be met. These fears were emphasised on Friday, when it emerged that identity cards produced by the country's electoral commission did not include photographs and were unlikely to reach district booths in time.

"It's like he (Khare) is so desperate for it to go well, he doesn't want to admit there are any problems at all," says oneDili-based foreign analyst.

But for many, including Khare, the fact that a nation born in the fire of 1999's violent separation from Indonesia can so soon be holding its own elections at all is a minor miracle.

"These elections, if they are credible, free and fair, independent and if the results are acceptable and accepted by the population, then they can have a unifying effect," says the Indian diplomat. "Moreover, elections are not the final step in the democratic process but the first step - it is the day after which I believe is far more important than the day on which votes are cast."

Stephen Fitzpatrick is The Australian's Jakarta correspondent