[Kabar-indonesia] 4 of 5: ICG: Resolving Timor-Leste's Crisis

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

-4 of 5-

A.  The 22 June Speech

Then, on 22 June, with international forces patrolling
Dili streets and much discussion in the international
press about whether the UN had left the new country on
its own too quickly, Xanana made another extraordinary
speech. In a televised address to FRETILIN members
that seemed to draw on wells of bitterness and
feelings of personal betrayal, he accused their
leadership of destroying the country. The speech is
worth quoting at length, because it demonstrates why,
more than three months later, it is almost impossible
to get members of the political elite in the same
room, let alone work out a common strategy for
resolving the crisis.

He started with a broadside against the party,
referring to delegates to the recent congress as
people "who only know how to raise their hands because
they're afraid of losing their jobs and it's their way
of providing food for their wives and children, and
because they received money under the table". 

He said the congress violated the country's political
party law and the constitution but it did not matter
because the people who drew up the laws were the ones
who violated them. "They're the ones who know better
than anyone else in the world, and everyone else is
like cheap noodles". 

He then recounted the history of FRETILIN from its
origins in 1974. He noted that as a member of the
central committee in 1977, he took part in the
decision to adopt Marxism-Leninism, and that if many
of those present were alive today, they would realise
that the old ideology was no longer relevant in the
post-Cold War era of globalisation.[72] 

Now a small group, coming from outside, wants to
repeat what we went through from 1975 to 1978. In
August 1975 UDT launched a coup to expel communists
out of the country in a move that sparked a civil war
among Timorese. In 2006 FRETILIN wants to launch a
coup to kill democracy that they themselves enshrined
in the constitution.

In 1978, he said, after support bases in the east of
the country were destroyed, he began organising the
resistance in the west - that is, in the areas now
home to the petitioners. In 1981, the struggle moved
from resistance to guerrilla war, and in 1983, during
a six-month ceasefire with the Indonesian army, "we
began to speak of democracy". A year later, he and
others formed a national unity pact (Convergência
Nacionalista) that included "all corners of Timor, the
Church and political parties". 

But Rogerio Lobato, he said, had other ideas:

Stories were reaching our Timorese friends abroad
about how Gardapaksi [a pro-integration youth group
set up by the Indonesian military] was beating our
people black and blue..In Mozambique, Lobato tried to
do the same by sowing discord, and eventually Ramos
Horta became a prisoner. President Chissano, who was
then the Mozambique foreign minister, was the one who
got Ramos Horta released. If you think I'm lying, ask
them because they're the ones who were living quietly
in Mozambique for twenty years.

After the Convergência Nacionalista was formed in
Lisbon, I was very happy because it was another step
forward. On 4 December 1986, I set up CNRM [a national
front] and left FRETILIN because as the top commander
of FALINTIL, I wanted to take it away from political
party influence. In this way FALINTIL became the
liberation army for the whole country, for all
parties, for all people, for loromonu and lorosae,
from the north coast to the southern sea.

Lu Olo says that for 24 years, he has always carried
the FRETILIN flag in his bag. Maybe, but I've never
seen it. When I was on the FRETILIN central committee
going around in the middle of Timor-Leste to
reorganise the resistance, he was hiding in Builo.
Maybe he was sewing the bag that he used to hide the
flag.. 

Xanana noted that about this time, Amnesty
International and others were reporting that FRETILIN
had been involved in killing its ideological
opponents. He sent a message from the jungle
acknowledging this and expressing regret. The
admission created a firestorm among FRETILIN members
abroad, some of whom publicly accused him of lying.

He then returned to his history of the party, laced
with bitter comments about his opponents: 

In 1989 I was in Ainaro when I received a letter from
Rogerio Lobato accusing everyone abroad of not doing
anything and also saying that when the war was over,
everyone should be brought before a people's court.
Rogerio Lobato told me in that letter that Mari
Alkatiri was busy in Maputo keeping rabbits and
chickens..

In May 2000 I was invited to speak at the FRETILIN
congress [and I] asked three things: they should take
back Xavier do Amaral [a former leader, now opposition
politician] because he wasn't a traitor; he simply
didn't accept the ideology; that the good name be
restored of all those whom FRETILIN killed because
they didn't accept Marxism-Leninism, and FRETILIN must
apologise to the people, especially to the families of
its victims..

In August 2000 at a CNRT congress, FRETILIN pulled
out..Mari explained that they had left CNRT because
they were angry with me because I had let a number of
[families of victims] speak at the congress and
because I had wrecked the image of FRETILIN. 

I said, "You don't have any reason to fear, because
you can say to the people, 'I, Mari, had nothing to do
with wrongdoing in our country. I, Mari, was in
Maputo, suffering for twenty years, but I washed my
hands every day with soap. So I, Mari, have clean
hands. Go and ask Xanana: he's the one with dirty
hands, with blood on his hands."

Xanana then launched into a catalogue of the FRETILIN
leadership's efforts to expand its control after the
2001 elections: 

Everyone has to join, whether they are police, army,
civil servants, business people, villages,
neighbourhoods, water buffalo, ants, trees or grass.. 

The people are suffering in Dili but they don't go to
visit, they don't even talk to them. They're too busy
mobilising the people from the districts to show how
all FRETILIN members are obedient to them and kiss
their hands and feet. They're brought to Dili in
vehicles for free so they can shout "Viva this" and
"Viva that", and they're fed and sent back to their
fields, and they still don't have money to send their
children to school, and in their homes, they're still
hungry..

Rogerio was sacked as minister but Mari chose him as
deputy chair of FRETILIN. This kind of dirty politics
makes us ashamed. Rogerio went to the police office,
asked for fuel for the official car he still uses. The
person on duty at the logistics department of the PNTL
said: "Your Excellency is no longer interior minister,
so you can't get fuel any longer from the PNTL".
Rogerio swore at him, "Stupid monkey, don't you know
I'm bigger now than I was as minister?"

Many people are afraid, Xanana said, that if Alkatiri
resigns, there will be war and bloodshed, that
government will come to a halt, that they won't get
money any longer. People were asking him, as
president, to guarantee stability, to restore
democratic institutions. If he resigned, the head of
the parliament, FRETILIN President Lu Olo, would
replace him, and the parliament would continue to
function as members raised their hands, thinking of
their families' welfare.

Everything is up to FRETILIN, he said, not the illegal
FRETILIN leadership, but ordinary members: 

Ask Comrade Mari Alkatiri to take responsibility for
this crisis and for the continuation of a democratic
state, or tomorrow I will send a letter to the
parliament that I am resigning as president because of
the iniquities perpetrated by this government on its
people. I can no longer face the public.[73] 

B.  Alkatiri's Resignation and Alfredo's Arrest

The speech sparked a flood of appeals to Xanana to
stay, including from Kofi Annan, and increased the
pressure on Alkatiri to resign. That pressure
intensified when Rogerio Lobato, during a preliminary
investigation session in Dili District Court over the
arms distribution, said Alkatiri had been aware of the
project.[74] As several cabinet ministers, including
Jose Ramos Horta, threatened to resign, on 26 June
Alkatiri finally announced he was stepping down for
the good of the country and to avoid the resignation
of the president, while maintaining that he was in
effect the victim of a prolonged coup attempt.[75]
This produced celebrations in the streets.

Alkatiri's resignation and his replacement as prime
minister two weeks later by Jose Ramos Horta, may have
been necessary to resolve the crisis but it was not
sufficient, and not that much changed. The new cabinet
looked very similar to the old, FRETILIN retained
control of parliament, and Alkatiri continued to take
part as an active member. Without a political base of
his own, Ramos Horta seemed to become more and more
dependent on his predecessor, until the more rabid
anti-FRETILIN camp began to accuse him of being
Alkatiri's puppet. 

Dili remained highly polarised and physically
segregated, with makeshift camps for the displaced,
most of them lorosae, dotted around the city. One of
the main markets divided into two, one for loromonu,
one for lorosae. More groups handed in weapons, but
hundreds remained in circulation, most of them police
issue. On Ramos Horta's first day in office, Railos
turned a token eleven weapons over to him in the town
of Liquica; by 25 July, the deadline set by
international forces for weapons turnover, some 1,000
had been collected.[76] 

Meanwhile, Major Alfredo continued to hold court in
Maubisse; on 24 July Xanana ordered him to come to
Dili. The next day, responding to the summons, he met
the president there and renewed his call for dialogue.
On 26 July, he was arrested by international forces in
a house in the Bairopite area of the capital. He
reportedly had been given use of a house for himself
and his men by Xanana directly, and subsequently
commandeered two others.[77] When Alfredo and his
armed men arrived, someone summoned the Portuguese
police element of the international force, the GNR
(Guarda Nacional Republicana). When they arrived, they
found weapons and ammunition that should have been
turned in the day before. Australian forces soon
arrived on the scene as well, and after a day-long
stand-off, Alfredo and twenty of his men were led away
to prison (seven were later released).

Many in Dili saw this as violating a tacit
understanding that all arrests and prosecutions would
be put on hold until the Independent Special
Commission of Inquiry, appointed on 29 June, finished
"establishing the facts and circumstances relevant to
the violent incidents that took place in the country
on 28 and 29 April, and on 23, 24 and 25 May". The
commission is to determine responsibility and
recommend measures "to ensure accountability for
crimes and serious violations of human rights
allegedly committed during the period".[78] The formal
indictment against Alfredo, two days after his arrest,
included attempted murder for the "ambush" of F-FDTL
troops on 23 May, an incident covered by the
commission's mandate.

For many loromonu in Dili, the real issue was more
basic: Alkatiri and Lobato were not in prison, so why
should Alfredo be? The arrest also affected public
perceptions of the international forces. The
Portuguese were seen by some loromonu as having
displayed a pro-Alkatiri bias. An Alfredo supporter
told the press: "We ask Australian and Malaysian
police to stay in their barracks and let GNR patrol
Dili, so we can confront them".[79] Sporadic protests
against the GNR took place for the rest of the week.
On 30 August, when Alfredo calmly walked out of prison
with fourteen of his followers and more than 40
convicted criminals, without anyone trying to stop
him, Prime Minister Ramos Horta blamed the
international forces for not providing sufficient
security.[80] The pro-Alkatiri camp saw the escape as
another example of Australia helping its opponents.

Throughout August and September sporadic violence,
mostly minor, continued to take place in Dili. The UN
Security Council voted to establish a new mission, the
United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste
(UNMIT), and a 1,600-strong international police force
began to replace the Australian-led military force.
The Timor-Leste government and various international
advisers agreed on a program to rebuild the local
police, who had collapsed in Dili but still functioned
more or less normally in the rest of the country. But
top political leaders remained at loggerheads, and
everyone seemed to be waiting for the international
commission to finish its work and pronounce judgment -
even though it stressed it was not a prosecuting body.


As if to underscore the problems the commission will
face in recommending that individuals be held
accountable, the Dili Court of Appeal on 11 August
ruled that FRETILIN's use of a show of hands vote at
its May congress was not in violation of the political
party law - despite the fact that the text clearly
stipulates a secret ballot. The competence and
independence of the Timorese-Portuguese head of that
court, Claudio Ximenes, who chaired a three-judge
panel that ruled on the case, were already in question
after a series of extraordinary decisions in 2004 and
2005, and the husbands of the two Timorese judges held
positions in FRETILIN, one of them on the central
committee.[81] While the two judges themselves are
held in high regard, the feeling was that they should
have recused themselves. 

The problems in the Timor-Leste court system run deep,
and securing justice for crimes in 2006 may prove as
difficult as for the violence that wracked the country
in 1999.

VI.  INTERNATIONAL ACTORS

Everyone wants Timor-Leste to move beyond this crisis
and succeed as an independent state but several
international actors have a particular interest in
seeing that it does so. They include the UN,
Australia, Indonesia and Portugal. All bear some
responsibility for the current predicament, even if on
the surface it is largely self-inflicted, but all have
an even greater stake in a stable, prosperous country.

A.  The UN

For a few years, Timor-Leste was seen as the success
story of an institution eager for evidence that it
could succeed at nation-building. It was arguably the
child of the UN, its status as a non-decolonised
territory, rather than an Indonesian province,
protected for two decades, and its slow march to
independence shepherded at every step of the way by
the international body. After Indonesian President
Habibie impulsively declared in January 1999 that he
would allow a referendum for East Timor, the UN was
quick to work out the modalities. 

UNAMET supervised the vote that enabled 78.5 per cent
of the population to opt to separate from Indonesia,
only to see unimagined violence follow in its wake. It
gave way to UNTAET in October 1999, which was tasked
to oversee the transition to independence and in turn
ceded place to the UN Mission of Support in
Timor-Leste (UNMISET) and then to the UN Office in
Timor Leste (UNOTIL) in May 2005, each smaller and
less intrusive than the one before. UNOTIL, unlike its
predecessors, was not a peacekeeping mission, but
rather a political mission funded from the regular
budget - although still managed by the Department of
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). As late as April 2006,
the assumption was that it would give way to an office
of up to 65 members, tasked largely with overseeing
the 2007 elections and providing advisers in critical
areas, particularly police training, which would
evolve into a "sustainable development assistance
framework" for the new country.

In hindsight, the UN has been accused of drawing down
too quickly, a charge better leveled against member
states than the institution per se.[82] The UN's fault
was rather passivity on the ground, particularly in
the failure of UNTAET to deal more quickly with the
cantoned FALINTIL fighters and of UNMISET to question
or even understand the implications of Rogerio
Lobato's politicisation of the police or FRETILIN's
accumulation of power. It was not for lack of
information: excellent reporting was coming out of the
political affairs office. Sukehiro Hasegawa, the
Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG)
under UNMISET, was widely seen as a well-meaning man,
eager to avoid conflict, but put in a position beyond
his depth and an uncomprehending bystander as the
forces that erupted in 2006 gathered strength. Both
UNTAET and UNMISET were responsible for lapses that
led to a court system that became politicised and
staggeringly inept.[83] 

As the political situation deteriorated sharply in
late May 2006, Secretary-General Kofi Annan returned
Ian Martin to assess the situation. In his report to
the Security Council in July, Martin said the most
serious underlying cause of the current crisis was
"political cleavages" in the security sector, not only
between the defence force and the police, but within
each service. He stressed that the priority had to be
determining the future of soldiers and ex-soldiers
(including the petitioners and others who deserted)
and re-establishing the police. He said critics saw
FRETILIN moving toward a one-party state, while
FRETILIN faulted the opposition for challenging it by
undemocratic means. 

Martin stressed the need for an independent
investigatory commission, saying this was what the
Timorese most wanted from the UN, and "evidence of
criminal responsibility should be conveyed to, further
investigated by and prosecuted in the Timorese justice
system" with international lawyers, judges and
prosecutors provided by the UN. The UN was also needed
to help organise the 2007 elections, which should
resolve the political competition democratically.[84]
But its main mission would be in the areas of
security, administration of justice, and the
functioning of democratic institutions.[85]

Based on Martin's reports, the Security Council on 25
August 2006 created a new, expanded mission, the UN
Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste, to field some 1,600
international police and up to 34 military liaison
officers for an initial, extendable period of six
months. On 13 September, a UN official assumed command
of national policing. 

The real challenge for the UN will be to recruit
politically savvy senior staff with the interest,
authority, and expertise to help Timorese leaders
resolve their differences and move forward.
Particularly critical will be selection of the SRSG
and the deputy responsible for justice and security
sector reform issues. Recruitment of international
judges also needs particular attention; the UN
Development Programme (UNDP) practice of recruiting
jurists largely by language capability rather than
international judicial experience and human rights
expertise needs to stop.[86] 

The issue for the UN police is not just to have
sufficient international forces on the ground to
provide a modicum of security in Dili as the capital's
police are reconstituted. The deputy SRSG for justice
and security, working with the UN police commissioner,
ideally also should be able to coordinate all the
technical advisers and consultants provided by donor
governments to the Timor-Leste government on policing
issues in a way that trumps parochial donor interests,
generates maximally efficient solutions and maintains
good relations with Timorese counterparts. A project
underway to vet the Timor-Leste police so that those
not responsible for criminal activity can return to
work is an example of what may be a maximally
inefficient solution, in part because so many
different fingers are in the pie.[87]

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