Who shot JR Horta – Asia Times
September 4th, 2008
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JI04Ae02.html
DILI - Turbulent East Timor may going through its own Watergate, or at least a watershed political moment depending on which version of the events of February 11 finally emerges as the truth. Conflicting accounts, questionable evidence and reversed recollections continue to cloud an alleged assassination attempt on the president and prime minister that sent a popular rebel leader to an early grave.
Ramos-Horta was shot close to this beach outside Dili (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
East Timor’s post-independence politics have confounded outside observers, and for the most part the Timorese themselves. Simultaneously transparent and opaque, what was thought to be a mono-cultural, impoverished, Western-backed, state-building poster-child has morphed into a divided half-island, with obscure tribal-linguistic rivalries once considered dormant since stirred by political rivalries and manifested in quasi-mysterious gangs.
The Timorese political elite remain at odds along familiar regime lines, demarcations so old that these rivalries were, broadly speaking, established when Richard Nixon was still in the White House and more sharply honed in the 1980s – when soap opera addicts spent months wondering who shot J R Ewing, the fictional Texan oil mogul in Dallas.
But East Timor may now have its own Watergate, or at least a watershed political moment depending on which version of the events of February 11 finally emerges as the truth. (more…)
The long way home in Dili – ISN
September 4th, 2008
East Timor’s capital now seems serene and lively, and a version of normality looms – but the country has confounded observers before.
By Simon Roughneen for ISN Security Watch
Normality? Ceremony on rooftop of Dili hotel (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
The first thing a returnee to Dili notices upon emerging from the airport is nothing: Empty fields behind the fence across from the parking lot, where until recently hundreds of tents sheltering some of Timor’s thousands of conflict-displaced once stood.
The camp was dangerous, inside and out, with political instability prompting riots, and the occasional projectile aimed at passing vehicles – the ubiquitous gleaming white UN SUVs a favorite target. Now only trees are left, a welcome sign that East Timor may be veering toward a long-awaited normality, even stability.
Six kilometers across the city, Marcelo has spent most of the past two years living in a tent just off Avenida Nicolau Lobato, close to restaurants and hotels used by Dili’s plentiful expat aidworker and consultant contingent. (more…)
Fledgling nations can learn from each other – Irish Examiner
February 25th, 2008
Timor-Leste and Kosovo flags (Crossed-Flag-Pins.com)
http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2008/02/25/story56145.asp
Simon Roughneen in PRISTINA – To a sea of Albanian and American flags, Prime Minister Hasim Thaci called the republic of Kosovo into being last Sunday week, setting off a diplomatic firestorm, raising Russian- backed Serbian ire and sparking fears that minority ethnic groups from Spain to China would have a new basis for resistance.
Kosovo can draw from examples elsewhere, as well as set what Sri Lanka described as “an unmanageable precedent”.
East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta awoke from an induced coma on Thursday, after an assassination/coup attempt by his former military police chief. The 1996 Nobel peace laureate will have seen Kosovo follow Montenegro and his own former Indonesian garrison into statehood.
In 1999, just weeks after Nato routed Serb forces from Kosovo, East Timor broke with Jakarta, after a brutal military occupation However, political stability is in tatters today. (more…)
East Timor faces new rebel threat – Asia Times/ISN/Asia Sentinel
February 12th, 2008
Jose Ramos-Horta (US Government photo, on World Politics Review)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JB16Ae01.html
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1043&Itemid=172
An apparent coup attempt has left East Timor president Jose Ramos-Horta in critical condition and underlines the shakiness of the country’s transition from occupation through UN fief to fragile state.
He has undergone emergency surgery in an Australian hospital after being shot during an assassination attempt at his residence on Monday in the Timorese capital, Dili.
The leader of the plot, former military police chief-turned-renegade-soldier Alfredo Reinado, was killed during the dawn shootout at Ramos-Horta’s residence, a few hundred meters from Dili’s beach road, just after the president took his usual morning seaside stroll. (more…)
East Timor: Bishop sees hope after the elections – The Irish Catholic
August 23rd, 2007
The old saying “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” might seem to be a relic – in more ways than one – of the early Christian era when Nero and Domitian sent saints to a gory death in Rome’s Coliseum.
But it might apply just easily to a tiny half-island nation lying just north of Australia. In 1975, on the eve of the
Bishop Silva at his desk (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Indonesian invasion of what had had been a Portuguese colony for over 450 years, it is thought, though no precise figures are available, that around 20% of Timorese were Catholic. In 1999, when the Indonesians left, all bar 1-2% of Timorese were Catholic, and remain fervently so. As Bishop of Dili Ricardo da Silva told me “in East Timor, you will see every parish faithful and every Church full on Sunday”
In that quarter-century interlude, the occupying Indonesian troops contributed to the death of between 150,000 – 250,000 Timorese, if not through direct attacks, then because of the impact massive displacement of people had on food supply and healthcare. Given that there were only 700,000 East Timorese when the occupation began, the death toll is almost certainly the highest per capita of any country anywhere since World War II. As the Bishop says: “during the Indonesian time the Church was active, the Church attended to the people. People were frightened, and they ran to the Church”
The Bishop spoke to me before the recent announcement of a new coalition government comprising 4 parties, headed by 2002-2007 President Xanana Gusmao, a former resistance hero who spent much of the 1990s in jail in Jakarta. A week of riots ensued, led by supporters of the ousted Revolutionary Front for Independent Timor-Leste (FRETILIN) party.
With the Church percieved as anti-FRETILIN, and therefore helping the party decline from 57% of the vote in 2002, to just 29% this June, some of the violence in the east of the country targetted Church interests. Offices belonging to Catholic aid agencies Caritas and Catholic Relief Services were burnt down, while priests and religious took refuge in church compounds. However the safety of a convent proved illusory for an as-yet unknown number of girls in the Dom Bosco convent in Baguia, close to where the offices where torched. A group of youths broke in to the building late on August 10, raping what is thought to be 9 girls, the youngest of whom was 11. (more…)
Trouble in Timor – ISN
August 7th, 2007
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?id=53560&lng=en
As violence erupts over the president’s naming of Timor Leste’s future prime minister, the world’s youngest democracy remains unsteady.
Political wrangles aside, the vast majority of Timor Leste's rural poor are subsistence farmers. Like these labourers in Ermera district, they need basic amenities and infrastructure (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Violence erupted overnight on Monday across East Timor’s capital Dili in response to the announcement by President Jose Ramos-Horta that former president Xanana Gusmao will be the country’s new prime minister. East Timor’s new government will sworn in at ceremony to be held at 10am tomorrow morning local time.
Burning roadblocks, stone and arrow-throwing and vehicle destruction continued overnight and into Tuesday, as supporters of the ousted Revolutionary Front for Independent East Timor (FRETILIN) took to the streets to vent their anger against Ramos-Horta’s announcement.
Australian peacekeepers were attacked close to an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp, but it remains unclear whether the violence is a spontaneous reaction to the announcement by disaffected IDPs, or a coordinated, politically motivated protest. Protestors threatened to burn down government buildings in the eastern towns of Baucau and Lospalos
Gusmao, who spent much of the 1990s in an Indonesian jail for his role in leading military resistance to that country’s 1975-1999 occupation of East Timor, leads the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) party, which came second in the recent parliamentary elections with 24 percent of the vote. Gusmao was elected as Timor Leste’s first president in 2002, but stepped down in 2007, leading the newly formed CNRT in the parliamentary elections. (more…)
East Timor still learning democracy – The Irish Times
August 4th, 2007
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2007/0804/1186123300149.html
DILI, EAST TIMOR: “We want to go home, but our leaders will not help us.” More than a month has passed since East Timor’s first parliamentary election since independence in 2002 and the tiny nation remains without a new government.
The deadlock comes just over a year after almost half the army mutinied over alleged discrimination in favour of cadres from the eastern part of East Timor. The ensuing riots and pitched battles between police and army elements displaced more than 100,000 Timorese, most of whom remain in fetid and overcrowded camps in the capital, Dili, and the eastern city of Baucau.
Voter turnout in Timor Leste is usually high, but the unemployment is high as well. These women are on short-term labour contracts for a ILO/Government public works project in Oecusse (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
One of those, Martinho da Costa Ximines, a father of four, told The Irish Times: “We have been in this tent for almost a year and half. My home was burned down, because I am lorosae [an easterner].
“I voted for Fretilin, because they are a party for easterners. But I do not understand why we have not been helped to go home. I have not heard whether there is a government yet.”
Martinho has heard right – there is no government yet. (more…)
