Will fear get everything?

Ah o medo vai ter tudo
tudo
(Penso no que o medo vai ter
e tenho medo
que é justamente
o que o medo quer)

- Alexandre O’Neill,
do “Poema Pouco Original do Medo”

Why is it that, according to Amnesty, there is only one person still in prison of the 84 convicted of crimes against humanity in 1999?

It has been called “forgetting from above” in other countries – but in the case of East Timor, it is also “forgiving from above.” Last year, the President released nine militiamen, whose crimes included: chopping people to pieces in front of their families, torture, the premeditated murder of priests and nuns, and mass execution.

(I wrote about the pardon of Joni Marques and Tim Alfa, but three members of Oecusse’s Sakunar militia and two members of Laksaur militia also walked free last year.)

They were tried at great financial expense, and psychological cost to witnesses and family members. (And they were released, because as the current Prime Minister says, we are all “saints and sinners”.)

Why is that the Parliament has yet to discuss the Truth Commission report, or the Truth and Friendship Commission report? Why is it the major figures of Timor’s political elite favor a blanket amnesty for EVERYTHING that happened since 1975?

What do they have to fear?

Will “fear get everything”?

Quoting Alexandre O’Neill: “I think of how much fear will get / and I am fearful / and that’s exactly / what fear wants.”

It’s going to have to wait

Until at least September. But I will be in Timor a week from now. Hopefully blogging.

The brink

Just a quick post to say “phew.”

For those who would like to relive all of the uncertainty and surreality of last February 11, go back to Wikileaks.

If on the other hand you would like to celebrate Timor’s uncanny ability to come back from “the brink”, I wrote a post about a fight over cigarettes on a bus in 2006 which seems strangely appropriate.

Regresso

Mas os meus passos soam e não param,
Mesmo parados pelo pensamento,
Pelo terror que não acaba e perverte os sentido
A esquina do acaso
– Ruy Cinatti, “Regresso Eterno“

Dili. I expected to feel more, to notice more.

All I could seem to fixate on from Bali was the conversation of the Portuguese VIPs in front of me.

The morning’s rain on the tarmac. The airport was well kept, green and pleasant. Military helicopters right next to the terminal.

I noticed the Fretilin flags flying high around the airport, on every lamp post, even on the center of that tacky fountain in the Comoro roundabout.

The helicopters were no longer at the Helipad which is now a gigantic construction site SPONSORED BY THE P R OF CHINA. The future Presidential Palace will be one of the more imposing buildings in Dili.

Passing through stop lights was a novelty for me, as they were installed a month after I left last time.

Seeing Jardim empty was surreal. Apparently on May 21, the camp was still full.

The bright playground – being used by kids – was just about the only thing there to remind it was ever a park. Heaps of cement blocks and torn up cement across the whole park. The tents apparently had foundations, people were given cement to elevate them above the mud and rain. The scene was gray and desolate, a bit like scorched earth.

And above it all, the statue of Dom Boaventura with a Fretilin flag on top. A Fretilin flag red like a cherry on top.

Telegram to Timor

Metropole MAR 13 – Communication difficult – tracking Timor events via sms & web – voice not option. Skype disabled. Please confirm existence phone company Timor territory. Metropole will fund Indo sat phone

Living without why

I am enjoying reading Richard Lloyd Parry’s In the Time of Madness, which is about Indonesia and East Timor in 1998-99. He has a simple, no-nonsense style with minimal ego. (Or at least not big as one might expect from hotshot correspondent.)

One passage in particular struck me. After a visit to the church in Liquiça in June 1999, the journalists and their fixer are told to leave by the sacred church attendants. The scars of the April massacre were visible in spite of the Indonesian whitewash. The town was full of refugees and red and white flags.

The passage reveals the power of living without why:

We climbed into the car and drove away from the church and towards the west. Within five minutes Liquisa was behind us, and we were back on the empty road in a landscape of scrubby grass and open-sided huts.

“No one will talk,” said Fernão. “The driver wants to go back.”

Then a man became visible on the road in front of us, silhouetted against the afternoon sky. He was walking towards Liquisa with the sun behind him, and a large and awkwardly shaped branch was balanced on his shoulders. He walked very slowly towards us and, as he passed the car, Fernão spoke to him through the open window. He looked ahead and behind him, but the road was empty. Carefully, he laid down his branch and climbed into the car.

He was from a village called Hatoguesi in the hills above Liquisa, and he had been here for two months with his wife, his five children and all his neighbors. The militia arrived in Hatoguesi one day and ordered them to leave. They burned a few houses, shot several cattle and buffaloes, and lamed a horse. There wasn’t much of an argument.

[He said], “[The militia] say ‘If you vote for independence then, when the Western people go back to their countries, we will come and finish you off.’ They say the Western people are only staying for two months, and when they are gone, we will be finished.”

“And what do you want? Independence or autonomy?”

“Independence,” he said. “We all do.”

[...]

Fernão mouthed to me we must go.

I said to the man, “Why do you support independence?”

Fernão translated, and the answer came immediately back. “He says ‘Yes, I support independence.’”

“Yes, but why does he support independence?”

Fernão put the question again, more elaborately.

“He says that all the people in the village support Falintil and support independence.”

“But why?”

Fernão began speaking again, a lengthy, patient explanation. The man nodded, but he was frowning and he kept interrupting, as if what Fernão was saying made no sense. Soon the interview had turned into a conversation, and the two were first smiling, then chuckling and finally laughing out loud. For the question was absurd. Why independence? There was no answer. It was like questioning a natural drive: why breathe, why eat, why marry? Without independence, Timorese were like men without air or rice or women.

No honest means in Dili

I was surprised to find, a couple of years ago, that the Portuguese administration of Timor struggled with urban unemployment long before I had imagined. The question of how to keep Dili safe from “indigenous who had no honest means of subsistence” arises in the Boletim Oficial de Timor in 1938.

An ‘edital’ from that year reveals that many Timorese were coming to the city in hope of finding work, and unable to places, according to the Administration, they were “induced to the practice of robbery.”

To that end, the Administrator of Dili prohibited Timorese from outside of Dili to take up positions without prior knowledge of the government. Instead it tried to require employers of Timorese labor from outside of Dili to procure this labor through the administration. Salaries were also to be paid via the Portuguese administration.

Whether this actually occurred in practice is unclear, but it shows that the Portuguese colonial administration made early attempts at controlling movement and the salaried economy well before Dili was as large as it is today.

I know the Indonesian administration tried to control movement in and out of Dili, often to no avail. It would be interesting to look at issues of migration and urbanization in Dili, starting before World War II and continue to the present, putting the hyped “gang violence” issue into greater perspective.

Thanksgiving

Halfway through lunch, I remembered it is Thanksgiving, my favorite American holiday. Largely because it draws the whole family together – which is, in my case five people – but also because it is so unabashedly about food. Even being a vegetarian (pescatarian) I get excited about it. Last time I had a Thanksgiving was 2004.

Today’s Thanksgiving meal, I really was thankful for. The owners of the guesthouse, one of whom is an old lady currently suffering from a bout of malaria, explained to me that there were no vegetables, no eggs and no fruit for sale in town. (I bought two pineapples, one ripe and one unripe, I gave the ripe one to one of my most fascinating informants.) So for lunch: rice, one sardine (in a rather unappetizing tomato sauce) and supermie instant noodles with MSG-flavor packets cooked in. Believe me, those flavor packets are good. They can make you want to eat, well, rice and noodles.

I decided I would drink Nescafe – milky coffee mixture – along with the food partly for the calcium in the powder and partly, well, to keep my stomach working with the absence of vegetable matter.

I sat there sweating under the tin roof in the midday run, with a feeble breeze coming through the windows. Sweat rolling down my legs and mosquitoes biting away – skirts are cool but leave you vulnerable!

I’m not being sarcastic when I say I’m ‘thankful’ for the meal. I’ve had much less appetizing. And it’s just a fact of life that there is no market or transport up here to bring produce to market. The kiosks used to sell eggs. They no longer do. Beans, greens, fruit used to be more plentiful because there were more cars, there were more civil servants to buy them in Indonesian times. The lack of rain is not helping the situation!

The Nescafe was an especially nice addition. I could pretend I was drinking Thai iced coffee. The sardine didn’t even taste as bad as I thought it would!

The big holidays are coming up here: November 28 – the day of the unilateral declaration of independence in 1975 by Fretilin (which not everybody is so eager to celebrate) and the day of the Immaculate Conception, a holiday which I only learned about moving to Portugal and then reading online about it. This day celebrates Mary’s immaculate conception, not that of Jesus !! (Which makes sense cause Jesus couldn’t be conceived on the 1st and born on the 25th.)

P.S. The following day I had a veritable feast after having gone to the market in Baguia, which I was intrigued to see, has cashew fruits for sale. My feast: salad, bean stew, fried eggs, and rice. Mmmmm.

The D-word

Drought. I’m talking about the fact it hasn’t rained yet. The riverbeds are dry. Lots of deer being killed in the hunt because they are being driven to small stagnant pools of water to drink. People look tired and hot from Dili to Baucau.

It’s time to get the corn growing, and other crops but people are not going to start until the rain clouds start gathering.

There are no big rain clouds in the sky. Even the really muggy humid pre-rain air has kind of dissipated. Now it’s rather dry and hot.

This is quite worrying, given that rice is in short supply in Timor. Rice growers basically only grow for their families’ consumption here, because the market price is too low. So the government has started buying up huge quantities of rice for the refugees and relief, creating temporary rice shortages in Dili.

I was just starting to think that Timorese farmers could benefit from this crisis, with the haywire prices of food. But not if it doesn’t start raining. Nobody will be trying to market surpluses if the clouds don’t start piling up in the mountains and watering the land.

Headed to the Mountain, one last time. The long way, through Viqueque and along the south coast. More in about a week!

Eighty-something

I have roughly a week left here. I have spent probably more time in the past week with 80 something year old men than people closer to my age.

On “malai road” I am starting to feel a sense of deep alienation to the other malais here. I honestly just do not want to be a part of the UN/NGO scene. I’m not saying I’m any “better” I’m just a leach like the rest. But a solitary leach. Perhaps because I’m visiting and not living here, I have adopted a combative attitude to the expat-dom I once actually liked.

But I never felt comfortable with the lifestyle. The big cars, the scuba diving, the trips to Bali, the humanitarianism-snobbism. They say there are three species of expatriated peoples in places like this: the missionaries, the mercenaries and the misfits. I guess I always was hanging out with the Misfits.

Today I spoke for three hours with a man who was a nurse during the Portuguese times. He has lived through it all: the Japanese occupation, colonial discrimination and a violent rebellion, cold war hysteria, civil war, a civilian jungle resistance (during which time he made pills out of jungle plants), prison/torture, exile, return, and the “crisis” in response to which he moved his belongings from Dili to the mountains.

Nurse is an extremely engaged, lucid and thinking individual. His trim white hair frames his bald pate, his facial features indicating he was handsome in earlier days. His lower jaw trembles slightly as he speaks, but I noticed after two hours, it trembled less.

His oldest child was disappeared in 1980. Another went on to become big in leftist politics. Others are in the foreign service now. Only two remain in Timor.

Age feels better to me. I was never comfortable with my youth. As a child I felt oppressed by the limits that my age imposed on me, the arbitrariness of things (Adults telling me “do it because I told you so!”) As an adolescent, I felt condescended to and expected to misbehave. So instead of misbehaving, I opted to simply ignore the rules. Not violate them, or rebel for the sake of it.

I have always felt a vague sadness or regret for things I have not done and will not have done in due time. It’s funny I studied “Development” at university (modernization, progress etc), because in terms of my “development” as an individual, I’ve always felt oppressed by the rites of passage and personal progress that our culture imposes. I’ve savored and grown to like my sense of “missing out” on a lot of these markers.

It’s almost like being prematurely old, regretting preemptively, before aging, and liking that feeling.

Now, for example, I should be biking to the beach, it’s the end of the day. There is a lump in the back of my throat. I feel like I have become mired in this aged, sad, nearly defeated Timor. Not the Timor of the beach, of the spear fisherman, of the dolphins, and kids fishing in the sewers with wide smiles on their faces.

I’ve even come to feel better in this Timor of empty prefab housing with waist high weeds growing inside. The Timor of sending “pulsus” to get paper work done in government. Of the kid who is now too old to beg on Malai Road, cause he is big and scary and his voice has cracked. The Timor of the stalling taxi going too slow at too high a gear.

But people have lived long fulfilling lives with greater deprivation and struggle. This Timor will get easier for my generation. But only with age.

Plump, not ripe yet

Joey could end up in the Guggenheim

Paparazzi pup pic

Snapshots

Worse than Greyhound

“My teenage wife sucks mean dick” – I am sitting inside a bus in Baucau’s new market being subjected to this awfully crude hiphop music. It’s blaring in my ears. There is a Mestre sitting in front of me who I’m sure understands the words, but does not request them to turn it off. The bus’ name is “Sozinho” (alone).

Three to four years ago, the Mercado Baru was one of the most feared places in Timor. Now it’s downright pastoral. Except for the explicit, weird hiphop deafening me.

A textie to Dili was enough to chill me, and convince me that I would make a rather military-style incursion for cash, internet and medicine. Docogirl advises that people are none too keen on Australians after Australians shot dead two rock throwers yesterday. Caution advised in town. We’ll see how much of this is malai rumor mongering. (Now Missy Elliott’s “Get Your Freak On,” at least something ironically explicit.)

On the way here I came in a 1997 Mitsubishi dump truck bought with money from a Timorese guy working in Northern Ireland. The driver Chico, a man who stopped in Laga to be rather tongue-lashed by his wife in front of the bus by his wife. In the cabin also was Lourenço, a teacher in Baguia who was going to see about getting paid. He said all the teachers have to go individually to get paid (during a school day) because there is nobody to transport their salaries to the district. They pay their own expenses to Baucau (although I’m not sure he was asked to pay). Before in UNTAET times, the police escorted a Ministry of Education employee to the subdistricts where they paid out salaries in cash. They can’t just send one person to fetch the money because they have yet to be issued proper identification cards. (Kids around me in the bus are singing along to Shaggy now “Girl you’re my darling, my angel baby…”)

Lourenço says they are having a hell of a time learning Portuguese. Before they had a Brazilian teacher who they understood better. It’s really tough for them to understand the Portuguese from Portugal, their mouths are so closed.

Back on the bus in Mercado Baru. Hours pass. We are waiting for “two people” to show up.
The Golden Rule, I realize, is difficult to apply between cultures. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because our standards are completely different. I’ve been on tons of buses here, I try to relax myself. But I just cannot get used to such wanton disrespect for other people’s time!

When these “two” people arrive, they seem to have no problem with the fact that there is a half-full bus waiting for them. Not only that, they stand out side gossiping and smoking with the driver for another full 45 minutes. My cultural-relativistic seal breaks. I march down and demand that we get moving. I get back up thinking, now I’m definitely the halo an foreigner! I prepare myself mentally to wait another hour.

Miraculously we get moving. (And wait for another person across town.)

When I get to Dili, I am hot, tired and irritated. But I decide to bike all the way to the house. The boys who help me fill my bike tires take me for Australian. I tell them I am not. I also point out that before, when the Australians were not shooting, they were complaining that Australia was weak. Now they are, and, Timorese say they are no good.

Knua, or real life

During my moras (sick) time, I still was able to get some valuable information. A lot of people stopped in and chatted, mostly ladies. I heard the feminine perspective on 59 and most conflict around here.

Found that some of the same families notorious in 1959 were involved in a fistfight the prior weekend, after drinking too much palm wine.

I also had a lot of time to meditate on this rural, hamlet-based life in Timor. This was and is life for the majority of Timorese. The most basic unit of life in Timor is the uma kain, the hearth. Then comes the knua, the hamlet, often made up of little more than one hearth, maybe up to 5-6.

I remember Professor, when interviewing his students, asked them the provocative question: what distance is greater, that between your knua and Dili, or that between Dili and New York?

To get back to Dili, I will have to walk 4 hours across the valley, wait another day for a dump truck, then hope to make it to Baucau in time for a bus from the market. In other words, Dili is farther away from Ossu Loe than Dili is from New York. And it feels farther.

From this knua, Ossu Loe, even the town Afaloicai 45 minutes away, seems a filthy, turbulent place. There people do not keep their pigs penned up. They throw garbage everywhere. They drink too much wine and get in fistfights. They tell rumors about each other.

Here in the knua, there are chores from sun-up to sun-down. There is just the immediate family around, sometimes their kids. They play together and do chores together. There are animals everywhere, and all kinds. All are vital to life there. Dogs provide security. Chickens, food and alarm clocks. The pigs are like a bank, turning leftover food into money. Buffaloes are both a bank account (better returns than the interest rate!) and they serve to prepare the fields. Even the toke lizards inside the house are busy eating bugs.
There is a whole world of meaning here that is far removed from even the village a short walk away.

What are the key elements of life here? First a knife, or a machete, and a sharpening stone. Then the mortar and pestle for separating rice from the chaff. Palm leaf and rope, for baskets, for building. An iron axehead, some pots. Large baskets for food shortage. The house, on stilts to protect food stores, made of: bamboo, palm “rope,” eucalyptus and pine cross pieces, teak flooring, four huge trunks, and fine thatch from the “black” palm.

Water at Ossu Loe was one of its most redeeming features. There is a spring just above the road. Pedro paid for plastic piping to bring water directly down. The kids don’t have to spend the morning getting water. We can take luxurious daily baths.

One morning Meta doesn’t want to go to school. She doesn’t want to go without her mother. Separation anxiety? She likes hanging out with the Malai? I asked if there was psychological reason she wouldn’t want to go to school. Her mother explained that she was being made fun of by a 15-year old boy from the village because she was a pengunsi. He called her a loromonu girl because she was from Dili! How ironic, a small fragile 10 year old girl who grew up in Dili, has been driven from her home there because her parents are from this very region, is now being labeled a Westerner. She hides in the family’s fields, refusing to go to school.

Her father is a small man, all bone and muscle. He is not too bright, and has limited hearing. He is proud of the fact that he worked for nearly 20 years with the Indonesian police. He wears their hat, belt and t-shirts all the time. He shows me the documents which prove his time of service, which he brought from Dili (leaving of course, his kids documents and the title to their house behind.)

He describes the Indonesians with a mixture of nostalgia and fear. He said that would beat people first and ask questions later. He pantomimes being beaten by them, and nearly arrested for taking leave without sufficient notice. They used to beat people who ate with spoons, he says. They eat with their hands. They cook with the hot peppers in the food! They taught Timorese to eat many new fruits and leaves in the jungle.

He married her mother when she was 15 years old. Her mother agreed to marry because it turns out, she was being pursued by an extremely aggressive member of a notorious liurai family.

She explains to me she is devout Catholic because she has suffered so much. She did not bring the suffering, it just came. God will look after her. (And my stomach, which she repeats ad naseam.)

She has five children. Meta is the youngest. Two are living “at the beach,” Uatocarbau, where they are studying. Two are living up here in the mountains. The other I’m not sure of! The family was split apart when it left Dili six months ago.

The pengunsi family comes up to Ossu Loe from another house in the village below, essentially, to look after me. Life is better up there here than in the village, and they don’t seem to mind. Although the Mother Aljira says she has to work harder up here. In town, the kids do all the work, she says. Not intended to be a complaint.

Twilight lasts longer here in the mountains. The sun sets behind the behemoth Matebian early, but then the spectacle of the mountains changing colors. They go from brown-green to pink to purple to dark gray. The pinks and purples last for 30-40 minutes whereas in Dili it is a quick, abrupt equatorial sunset. Birdsong takes us towards evening, and star-filled sky. The sound of the blue toke lizard from inside the house. The old man burning heaps of roots and bits he’s cleared from the brown earth. People hooting and singing on the main road, as they head home from the fields. A cool, verging on cold breeze blows.

Mesak

The next morning, I was out by the side of the road at 6am waiting for a ride up towards Ossu-ona. I was ditching the bike. My food bag would have to rest on top on my backpack.

I was going mesak. Alone. I tried to figure out why this concept was so disturbing for Timorese people. Men walk alone. Girl children walk alone short distances. But an adult woman walking alone. This just shouldn’t be!

Father Jojo drove up at about 6:10am, and I decided to take the ride to Yarbau, which would save me about 4km of all uphill. There were lots of kids inside the troop carrier Landcruiser, and a liurai. The kids were singing. Padre Jojo was taking the s-curves really fast! When we reached the end of the line, a village called Yarbau, he tried to convince me to go to mass, but I explained the longer I stayed the harder it would be to walk in the sun.

I walked towards Ossu-ona, past the dry rocky riverbed up which I once made an unsuccessful attempt to climb Matebian. The road had been significantly improved since then, a major roadworks program it seems.

The sun rose shortly after I crossed the riverbed. It was big and glowing orange. I was already sweating.

Just before Ossu-hona, I ran into one of Pedro’s in-laws there, this really nice guy there who is a Head Teacher and wanted to practice English with me before. He looked at me like an alien dropped out of the sky. Then he made the typical “Huh!” (exclamation of shock) and asked where I was going and if I was alone. I explained, and told him I was in the groove, pointing to my headphones. I continued on, promising to stop at Ossu-ona for matabixu. I realized when I turned the bend I was already at Ossu-ona, and the Mestre was not far behind. Everybody cleared space for me and they prepared coffee and fried sweet potato.

I met Mestre’s father, who was really quite young. They told me a little about the rota, or the intricate system of vassalage that the Timorese and Portuguese worked out in the region in the late 19th and early 20th century. But they didn’t know as much as a true katuas would. I was supposed to talk to one katuas in their village who was always out in the fields, and by 7:30am he was already gone, no exception!

I thanked them for the coffee and told them I had to move before the sun got too hot.

Are you going alone? I said, yes! We malais even like to walk alone. To listen to the birds, to get peace and exercise. They said, but a woman alone is not good. Then I said, just to get their goat, I said, “You guys are like the Taliban! Women can’t walk alone!” They laughed. But still thought I was being a bizarre malai.

I made it to Ossu Loe by about 9:30am, which was lucky cause it was getting hot. On the way, I saw a woman from the village Afaloicai who was protecting her fields from birds. She was surprised to see me. She said that they had waited for me yesterday to come up from the south coast instead of across the valley from the North.

I had a coffee and unloaded food and Ovaltine for the kids and antibiotics and first aid for the old man’s foot. They seemed ok with the fact that the malai was coming to stay. Then they suggested as Sunday was bazaar day in town, that we should walk down to Afaloicai and catch some katuas who were there for the cockfight and to resolve a dispute. So, with little rest and a lot of water, I headed off.

We got to town and a similar market scene to the one I had described a week ago. Everybody was at the cockfighting arena. They suggested we wait at a relative’s house below. The relative insisted to me her house was “aat” (bad). I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say. The katuas of the house in Ossu Loe showed up, his wounded foot and everything, to announce that the other old men did not want to talk to me about history. They were scared. (Notice the irony of his t-shirt in the photo…!)

We were just about to go back for lunch when they insisted that I SIT DOWN and drink their be manas. This is the country equivalent to tea, except that one is left to wonder if the light brown hue comes from dirt or from some long-used tea bag. It is full of sugar as well. As the particles in the water plunged to the bottom of the cup I considered throwing it on the ground when they weren’t looking. Meta, the girl from Ossu Loe, said it was “too hot” to drink. Her dad started drinking it, and encouraged me to. I thought, the last thing I need here is a reputation for being halo an (arrogant), that will spread quickly, and I’ll never get to talk to anybody. So I forced myself to drink the be manas.

Well, I will spare my readers the gory details. But suffice it to say I spent the next couple of days resting, thanking my lucky stars that Pedro had installed a sit-toilet, and eating rice porridge and taking stomach-sealing drugs.

The katuas had told me to F*ck Off! And the be manas had sealed my fate. So this is what they call “fieldwork”!

Convergence

It took me 3 days to get to my mountain home. The last day walking. The first two waiting and on buses, priest’s car. Then I drank some “be manas” which had my stomach exploding just about the same time everything in Dili went out of control. Monday-Tuesday.

I just got back, after taking a full course of stomach drugs, talking with a couple of old folks, and slugging it back to Dili on a dump truck and a bus. I’m here to write, refuel and get cash, before I head out of this mess for Dia de Finados, November 2, at the foot of Mt Matebian.

Tomorrow, I will post photos and details from this exhausting trip! Don’t worry about me, I’m safe in the quiet, internet-connected part of town, keeping a low profile.

Terror as the norm

After reading in Xanana’s autobiography that he repeated intervened to save the “pro-Indonesia” or “1959” liurais in 1977, I decided to risk it and put some effort into understand the aftermath of this “mountain” period.

I spent the day comparing data from three lists of those killed in Uatolari-Uatocarbau in 1978-79. This period followed the rendição, the surrender from Mount Matebian, where the majority of the civilian population had lived for over a year. Many died of thirst, poor health and bombings with fighter planes sold to Indonesia by the Carter Administration. Some civilians snuck out of Fretilin controlled areas on the Mountain when the suffering became too great.

But most stayed until Falintil gave the order for a civilian surrender on November 23, 1978. When people passed through the military cordon, my informants say there were already Timorese collaborators pulling out Fretilin sympathizers from the crowd of civilians. People over the age of about 12 had their hands checked for gun powder or residue of munitions.

Once “down” in the villages and towns, those who saw themselves as victimized by Fretilin power on the Mountain seized their chance for revenge, mostly by working with Indonesia to hunt down Fretilin sympathizers.

The three lists I have are all public: from the CAVR or Truth, Reception and Reconciliation Commission (the final list for posterity), one from an activist group in London’s human rights reporting documents, dated 1979, and one from the “Konis Santana” archive. (The latter two are held by the newly open Archive of the Resistence, which was organized by one of Portugal’s most noted historians – a medievalist – José Mattoso.)

I have a total of about 130 people killed from the subdistricts of Uatolari and Uatocarbau from the three lists. The most “complete” list is the CAVR list, but it has many repeated names and gaping holes in its information. The Activist list dated 1979 has that very “human rights”-y feel about it, with age, profession and details of death, not in any apparent order. It is handwritten. The third list has a more “local” feel in that it is merely a list of dead, with village and suco carefully noted. Neither of the other lists contains consistent village information. (This last list contains very interesting annotations on the back, indicating the involvement of some pro-Indonesia Timorese in the killings.)

I suppose the thing that struck me, reading off this list, is how such bare names, dates, “facts” can be both terrifying and “normal” at the same time. I began to forget that I was looking at the names of those who were violently killed, and who will eventually be forgotten. Some of them didn’t even go by Christian names, so they were Lequi and Cai Mau. Or if they did, they didn’t have a family name. So there were 3 “Manuel”s and a number of “Luis”. I wonder what a “political” threat men like this could have been to Indonesian power.

I remember taking a slight comfort in seeing people that were executed together, realizing that it would have been very horrible to die alone. There was one 20 year old village head who was allegedly “tied up and burned alive” by the Indonesian special forces. A number of women appeared on the lists. Two were young women who appear to have been taken to the district headquarters and killed long after the majority of men. I pushed the thought out of my head of what they must have gone through in captivity.

It is easy, even for those who study recent history on a daily basis, to forget the impact of these stories on people here in Timor.

We can quibble all day about the way people here or “there” in the first world relate to trauma and loss differently, or the total number killed violently during the occupation. But for the majority of people over 30, these abuses cut so close to their own life stories.

They lie under the surface of perception, memory and feeling. People’s ability to trust each other, to trust the unknown, to trust in political and societal change has been formed by the disappearances, the torture, the murders, the cycle of revenge and stealing.

I had hoped to refrain from using the word “evil” but it is not possible. When you see humanity’s capacity for unspeakable evil up close, it must be hard to live in the stable, crystalline world that we grew up in.

I got back late in the evening and talked with Gonçalo, the security guard who is deeply religious. I could see that “look” in his eye, this disquiet. He said when he got back from choir practice today, he learned that one of his good friends was seriously wounded in violence in Kolmera last night. Gonçalo wanted to go to the hospital to visit his friend. But even the man’s own brothers are too scared to go to the hospital, because they believe they will be ambushed by the same people who attacked their brother.

UN Trailer park

The smoke we saw on the Comoro Road on Sunday was probably linked to disturbances there that afternoon. From AFP:

VIOLENCE erupted on the streets of the East Timorese capital today as two groups pelted each other with stones, forcing residents in the area to flee their homes. The disturbance occurred between two groups of youths from different regions of East Timor near the Comoro market at about 2pm local time, witnesses said. They said the incident appeared to follow the beating of a man the previous day…Meanwhile, the civil registry office next to the Fatuhada police post in Dili was burned by unidentified men today, witnesses said.

Today I woke up what to me is bright and early, but only seemed to make it to the UN Agency Compound by about 9:30am. I remember biking across town at about 8am so I wouldn’t show up at the office all hot and sweaty. Nine am is already a sweating hour.

I was surprised when the taxi driver stopped short, just in front of the Palácio das Cinzas, Xanana’s shell of an office. On the other side of the street, there was a large gate, security check point and tons of ugly UNTAET-style pre-fab trailers. He explained that the agencies had migrated over to this trailer park a couple of months before the crisis.

Interesting, I thought. Does this not seem like a step backwards? Or maybe psychologically, working in trailers makes the UN feel less institutionalized here, like they could leave any year now?

I went in to talk to my old Boss at UN Agency. She was just heading out for a meeting with “partners”, which I took to be an epic meeting in 3 languages that would take up the whole morning. She introduced me to the person who was working on the Theater project they asked me to try to start up, which apparently has had a thriving life with the help of a couple of strong local NGOs. They told me that they were going to put on a theater presentation in “the camps” this week.

Yet the overall feeling I got there was that they were busy with the same old shit, planning and reporting.

My former boss clarified that it was actually the Timorese government who asked the UN Agencies to leave the old building up the street, and that shortly after they left, it was occupied by Petitioners and looted during the violence. Everything was torn out, even tiles in the bathroom. Now, she says, ironically, the new emergency UN mission has occupied the building (presumably with the government’s consent).

I talked to the drivers, including the Number One driver who, by the look of it, gets to sit around and shoot the shit.

They said a lot of the younger Timorese staff left to study abroad, this is true of my good friend and colleague there. But also of the young man who used to work as a sort of “office boy” doing random tasks and making coffee. Off in Jogjakarta studying.

I guess three years is enough to see even the “local staff” bail out and try something new, especially when there is little hope of promotion. The life of these institutions is quite incredible if you think about it. How do they create permanence, besides branding? Often one International staff has very little time, or no opportunity to handover to the next. There is a fair amount of reinventing the wheel. And what should the permanence of the UN in these places be, especially if it creates such a distorted economic situation?

Walking down through Caicoli, towards the University, I saw more and more pre-fab trailers. The Kiwis or Australian forces are camped out there as well, with these huge concrete barricades and sandbag installations. I got to thinking about the life of a city, the geography of “emergency”. It would be quite fascinating to map (1) The camps (2) The UN/Aid agencies installations and lastly, and more difficult (3) the residential map of “internationals” paying exorbitant rents.

Past World Vision, which at one point had shrunk down to quite a modest size, and is now a gigantic operation again.

Then I saw these big grease stains on the ground from wax with burn marks and bougainvillea flowers. A moment to recent dead I thought. Then I realized, this is where the 8 Timorese police were shot, on May 25. There must have been a candle vigil here last night. People on the street confirmed this to me, it’s been exactly four months since that heinous blood letting on a major Dili street.

Mountain people

Headed out of town early with Professor and family early in the morning. I was so happy to get out of Dili. On the road, I watched little piggies run in the mangrove mud, the people of Ulmera with their salt production, past Liquiça, which hadn’t changed much at all.

We were headed towards the Professor’s longtime fascination, the old kingdom of Maubara.

It was a Dutch enclave until 1859, where the Chinese and Timorese ran extremely lucrative coffee plantations and earlier sandalwood trade. After its entry into Portuguese jurisdiction, with the fateful (unauthorized) trade of Solor for Maubara in 1859 by Governor Lopes de Lima, Maubara became the site of constant disobedience and struggle. After Maubara was linked to the assassination of Governor Lacerda Maia in 1881, it had a bad name until 1893 when it rose up under the leadership of a rebel named Mau Buti.

Like many places in Timor, the coastal town was basically insignificant for most of history. The Portuguese constructed a fort there in 1860, and attempted to control the mountain peoples above from below. The large Chinese community in Maubara region was highly suspect to the Portuguese administration. The wealth and majority of people lived in the cool mountain areas above the port.

I had only previously visited the coastal town, known as Maubara. (And had one amazing party with the first year of Peace Corps volunteers in the fort!) The beach there is beautiful, with dark black volcanic sand. We blasted through the town, up a dry river bed and onto an old paved road.

Professor explained that this road used to be the main highway East to West in Timor. The Indonesians built the road that clings perilously to the coast, which we know today as the “main road”. This older road was typically Portuguese, with lots of S-curves and beautiful views along the mountain ridges. We passed through what is equivalent to “Outback” scenery. Dry, arid, dusty and seemingly ready to go ablaze with a spark. Only a few human settlements, where there was feeble irrigation.

Then we made it up high to the shady Acacia tree highlands. We started to see heaps of flowers, bougainvillea, a beautiful sort of wild lily, poinsettia (those Christmas plants that are poisonous to cats), and of course forests of waxy-leaved coffee trees. Coffee in Timor is shade grown, under the shade of large-trunked Acacias. This is one of the driest months of the year in Timor, and this elevated forest seems like an oasis.

To the dismay of my rear end, which was bouncing on a wooden bench, we drove all the way to the top of the mountain, not far from one of the most remote and formerly rebellious spots in the kingdom. I was happy to observe that Timor Telcom had its celluar tower up and operational, run by a generator.

Looking out to the north, we could barely make out the hazy outline of the island of Alor. Professor said the people of Maubara used to burn coconut husks on the beach when they wanted to trade with the island neighbors. The people of Alor would bring slaves to sell. To the south, we could see the dry expanse of the Lois River bed, which leads up on the other side of the valley to Timor’s most famous coffee plantations.

I try to follow Professor’s discussion in Indonesian with one of his local informants, a thirty-or forty-year old man with brown and red betelnut teeth. He tells Professor that there is a big party in town because one of his neighbors was accused of witchcraft and possession with the devil, and was forced to prove that he’s ok by offering tons of meat and booze to his neighbors.

Informant told us that people on the mountain had switched their allegiance from Fretilin to ASDT. Xavier was the first “smart” person in Timor, he said. He was a journalist, who traveled in Africa and America. (I thought to myself, nooooo, that’s Ramos Horta!)

He also tells us he learned “his Portuguese” in an Elementary school that was down the mountain that was run by Portuguese troops in the 1970s. He said they built in the middle of the jungle, on unoccupied land. The building was destroyed in the “war” but there is apparently still a very ornate plaque there.

Professor says don’t worry, I know who can tell us all about this school. There is a Portuguese man living down the road we came up. “Avo” José Serra must be about 76 now and arrived in Timor in 1964. He knew nothing about the place when he arrived, except that his brother was here for military service. Serra refused to evacuate with the other Portuguese in 1975.

He went grudgingly to the jungle with Fretilin in the late 70s, and waited out the militia violence in 1999, which was particularly bad in his region. He showed us the only thing that survived 1999, a yellowed photo of him and two friends in the early 1980s in his garden.

Serra tried to switch from a mixture of Indonesian and Tetum that he speaks with Professor to Portuguese to speak with me. At first his speech was literally half Tetum and half Portuguese, and I myself had trouble speaking in one language or the other! But Professor insisted that we speak Portuguese and I plowed on. It was like Serra’s Portuguese had to unmelt. After about 10 minutes he was speaking what he called his Portuguese from the “interior.” (He grew up in Castelo Branco, Beira, in the north, a poor region of Portugal.)

He told us quite interestingly that he did not suffer from one bit of saudade for the 40 years he was here during Portuguese and Indonesian rule. Only with independence, and a flood of peacekeepers and professors bringing him olives, cheese, chestnuts and even water from his family’s springs that he started to get nostalgic. He said that they brought him these things to matar saudades, to kind of quench his nostalgia, but that it only made him more and more thirsty to return to Portugal.

Tomorrow he said he would go to Dili to finally take care of his passport. His nephew, who was up there visiting, told us that Avo Serra did not have either Timorese nor Portuguese passports. Just a simple “bilhete de identidade”, probably issued by the UN.

Serra believes, especially after recent events, that Dili is an evil place. It really is torture for him to go down there. He is reminded more of the fact that the politicians, who spent most of the struggle in exile, are ruining this place at the little people’s expense. He also seems very hurt by the way that Timorese people seem to always resort to violence to sort out their problems.

He was born in 1930, and only remembers Portugal when it was “repressed” by the dictatorship. He says they tell him things are very different now, with nice highways, and a better life. But he also says he is shocked by the number of forest fires in Portugal recently. He can’t say whether he wants to return to Portugal. He fears that if people in Maubara find out he wants to go to see family, they think he will never come back. People already began to mistrust his motives for getting his passport, he said.

Serra never married in Timor, and it seems fled his married life in Portugal. Certain less “masculine” mannerisms he has makes one speculate whether Timor was simply a more friendly place for him than Estado Novo Portugal.

If you need any proof of what an amazing character he is, please watch the “One Cup” documentary indicated in the links bar to the right. He is featured prominently, and you can hear his amazing way of speaking!

We made our way down the mountain, giving a ride to three young men. One was walking with a sparkling new boombox on his shoulder, like the 1980s ghettoblasters. Professor said they must not have batteries for it, and there is no electricity up there, but hell, it makes a great statement.

In Maubara, we drove past the church and down onto the beautiful black sand. Time for a late afternoon dip in the water. After the Atlantic ice of the Portuguese coast, it felt like beautiful, waveless bathwater. I don’t think I will ever like any beaches as much as I love Timor.

On our way back into Dili, we saw a plume of smoke coming from a government repair workshop in Comoro. Two Australian cops were casually interviewing some young men by the side of the road. They didn’t seem bothered at all.

Maybe Avo Serra is right, Dili is a wretched place.

Sushi, embajada and malai boot

I was back at to the books yesterday, reading the parts of Xanana’s autobiography about the time on Mount Matebian, when the whole civilian population of the East was living there in bases de apoio. Fretilin/Falintil basically convinced and coerced the civilian population into the “jungle” to resist the military occupation. They set up communal systems including schools and agriculture. But it was a severe time, when disobedience was treated as “reactionary behavior” or worse, got you labeled as a “traitor.” Xanana describes how he repeatedly saved the pro-Indonesian kings involved in the 59 rebellion from death at the hands of their more zealous communist rivals.

Then Lost Anthropologist dropped by and we went to the Indonesian canteen next door. He said he had been at Xavier’s until 3am last night. Hard core! I wondered if he had been drinking palm wine and chewing betel nut.

I told him I was looking to buy a bicycle and we walked in circles looking for the legendary Australian department store “Harvey Norman” which apparently no longer exists in my part of town. I had 40cents left, and thought if we found a place like that they would accept a credit card. He he. How naïve. In Audian, which is the commercial neighborhood, there were two Chinese stores selling the $100 mountain bike specials. They are real garbage. I used one in 2001-3. It was not pleasant.

On the left, towards Becora from Audian, I saw the Cuban flag flying. I had to check this out! We walked over, and the façade on the first floor was tinted glass. A 3 meter fence in front. The plaque above, sure enough, read “Embajada de Cuba”. This is hardly the diplomatic neighborhood, but they got into the game late and maybe there were no houses left in Farol. Or maybe this is their statement, they didn’t want to be in that club anyways. I asked the security guard how long it had been opened. He claimed only a month. He said all of the Cuban doctors are based up in Lahane, to the South above town, where the Portuguese built Dili’s first hospital and the Governor’s house.

We headed past the site of the most posh Japanese restaurant in Dili, Gion, where some Japanese engineers, neighbors of Amerioca in Manatuto treated us to the best sushi I’d ever eaten. It was still there! At 2pm there was one table occupied. But I could tell they were holding on until the new UN mission sent the hundreds of new civilian staff.

Later in the afternoon, I headed to the ANZ Bank ATM down the street from me. I tried both cards. Neither worked. I was a bit nervous about that, because I had yet to withdraw money here. Then I saw Docogirl across the street. She was with her Fixer, this very ambitious and talented friend of hers of seven years. She said they were headed to the ONLY other ATM all the way across town at the airport. We all hopped in, and cruised across town at a lovely 20 kilometers per hour, as one does in Dili.

At the ATM, I saw my former boss at UN Agency. She was hakfodak, pretty shocked to see me, especially because I had dropped so much weight and had short hair. I felt a little embarrassed because I had been meaning to go over and say hi to everybody before I got caught out like this! Anyways, she has been here for over three years. I guess the “emergency” has kept her on longer than normal.

After the ATM trip, Docogirl and I went back across town to our internet café, where I tried to no avail to use Skype. The Chinese guys displayed a form of machismo yet unseen, which is to pretend you can fix a computer for a girl, when you clearly have NO idea what you are doing. I got frustrated and left.

I have yet to be able to properly upload photos, partly because the bandwidth I get at the café is so low, and photos these days are so big.

After the café, we went walking towards the old waterfront to have a beer. Passed a couple of real dives, that used to be decent places. Then we made it to Little Padang, which used to be a lunchtime favorite. They had a nice terrace, with views out over the quiet harbor. I had a beer, and they tried to convince Docogirl not to order an orange cordial (because it would take too long to make) but she insisted and 10 minutes later she had a drink. We watched the sun set behind the clouds over the lighthouse.

Then, surreally, the Malai Boot (Ramos Horta) walked straight across our field of vision across the street, in front of the assembled crowd of young men. His gate was very stiff, as if he was either out of shape, or straight off the plane. He had two Malaysian civpol with him and some Timorese close security. He was clearly heading towards Xavier’s place to compliment him on his lovely Congress/Party.

We were tickled. I thought it was a nice gesture to walk, and not to go in an insane entourage. We finished our drinks and both admitted to each other that we wanted to see the scene, so we walked towards the party. Still drum circles. People from Caicoli in Dili recognized Docogirl, and said their neighborly hellos. One man was speaking a mixture of Mambai, Indonesian, Portuguese and Tetun through his browned and reddened betel-nut stained teeth. The younger people around were giggling.

No sign of Malai Boot, he was probably inside having a chat with Xavier. Ironically, I had also been reading Malai Boot’s book this morning, where he really rips into Xavier as anti-mestiço (racista) and is pretty harsh about Xavier’s capacity for ideology and politics. I suppose that is all water under the bridge now. These are the only guys “left” that haven’t been dragged down with really ugly allegations in the post-independence era, having a Sunday afternoon chat.

Yoda’s Folk Rave Political Rally

Ok there is officially only one politician I still like in East Timor. It’s Yoda, Xavier do Amaral, whose party is called ASDT, which is actually the original name that FRETILIN took in 1974. He adopted this name for his party in 2001. (For background on the politics, please read earlier entries in this blog dedicated to him!)

The guy is amazing. Starting last night, there has been a growing camp of his supporters outside his house. They are staying on the nice patch of grass next to the ocean in front of his (relatively small) compound. The door to his compound is wide open, with a couple of men trying to keep an eye on the crowd.

Last night there was a live band there, playing typical Timorese music, but then a couple of songs with an accordion with a bit of Forró flare. There were not that many people there yet, but camps were already set up. There was a little muted drumming going on closer to the beach.

Today I woke to the sound of gongs and drums, it was carrying up from the beach about 200m away. The dancing started at the crack of dawn. Clearly the UN does not trust Xavier, or maybe their pilots wanted something new and interesting to fly over, because the whole morning, there were helicopters circling.

I had lunch at the “local” restaurant next door to Fundação Oriente ($1.50 for tofu, veggies, rice, noodles and ice tea). The place was very interesting, I think I will be going everyday now! Because the crowd was nearly all young people, 20 and 30 something mestiços and Chinese-Timorese, there was a nice atmosphere. A couple of flaming Timorese guys, with their fabulous (for lack of a better word) fag-hag girlfriends. Many of the people I swear I recognized. Most I think used to work for their parents in the various restaurants around town.

I decided I could not contain my curiosity any longer, I had to see the scene at Xavier’s place. I walked down to the waterfront and saw that there were two tebe dance/drum circles. The hypnotic sound of the gongs and the babadook, small drums in the middle of the group, surrounded by men with the rooster feather headdresses. Many were wearing the tais weaving sarongs. There were betel nut juice stains everywhere.

I was the only malai there except two Malaysian police and an Australian soldier. I couldn’t help but snap away photos. I’ve seen these events in 2001, and again in 2003. This is ASDT’s National Congress, and they had set up bamboo structures for the delegates from most of the districts. They had nice laser-printer labels tacked on them, and backpacks hanging from the back “wall.” Party officials had photos IDs hanging around their necks. I met a thirteen year old girl who looked about 8 who had her very own party ID!

The women were mostly gathered in the shade. A couple of people were drunk, but not many. Most were just buzzing on the drumming and the communal vibes! Kids were jumping into the ocean, which was at a nice high tide.

A huge water tank, about the size of my room, was available on one side.

The gigantic banyan tree in Xavier’s compound across the street was a hangout of choice for the katuas, old guys, with some status.

Xavier basically invites everybody to his place and it really feels like an open atmosphere. He was accused during the days of Marxist ideology of being “feudal” (and many of his followers were actually killed for this!)

But I cannot see this Congress as a feudal event. One does get the feeling that there is a certain “democratic” nature to this party. The people come, and Xavier gives them what they want. People are allowed to be crazy, to be themselves, within reason. I would like to see the actual “proceedings” of the Congress to understand the dynamics within the party, which started in one language group, Mambai, but appears to be expanding to other areas.

I bought two mini pineapples and a gigantic papaya on the street in the afternoon, costing a total of $3.50. If you think about it, papaya trees grow like wild fire and take little cultivation, and yet the fruit is quite valuable. The vast majority of Timorese live off of less than $2.

One of the common theories about the loromonu – lorosa’e conflict is that the Easterners (lorosa’e) are better entrepreneurs and sellers. That they dominate market trade and street selling, and that loromonu have always been more slack or less apt for commerce. And apparently one of the reasons more of the beleaguered lorosa’e have not returned to the East, their places of origin, is because they feel there is a lot to be earned with the new UN mission coming to Dili.

They have to protect their fruit vending territory.

A number of vendors came up to me on my way home trying to hawk phone cards and fruits. I thought I would have a laugh and offered them my papaya for $3, a bargain. A malai selling fruit, just what Timor needs!

In my head there is a Greyhound station

The past two nights I have woken up at 4am. And had that feeling, oh, I’m really not going to get back to sleep soon. For those who have taken a class with me, rented a movie with me, or ridden in a car or bus with me, it would be hard to imagine me as an insomniac! It’s actually laughable. Because I have been so prisoner to eight hours of nightly slumber for so long, part of me thinks it’s a blessing to be awake now because 4am is one of the most peaceful hours of the day. A good time to think and listen to Ben Gibbard’s voice, which has been making me sadly happy since I first left home in 1997.

I’m starting to get used to the strange feeling of being paradoxically quite alone but surrounded by people interested in me and watching me. I perhaps make the naïve American mistake of trying to be friendly with the Timorese staff at the house, when in the end, they are more comfortable in a hierarchy. Yesterday, the cleaning lady, who had previously been sprightly and friendly, was brooding, bringing her bad mood to me in the morning. The strange passive-aggressiveness around here. I tried to calculate if I could have possibly insulted her since the last time I saw her. No. So I offered a donut peace offering, which was of course, not refused.

In any case, more than ever, I just feel comfortable in my own skin here and now. I don’t get lost in Dili. I have a history here. Perhaps this comfort comes from not having to figure everything out, from having struggled through the hard stuff.

I spent the morning hours flipping through some of the canonical Portuguese colonial historians and anthropologists. Particularly two guys named Luna de Oliveira and Antonio de Almeida. The former was an army guy who did not spend much time here, but dedicated the latter half of his life to a detailed chronology of conflict and alliance in Portuguese Timor. (It is an interesting read, probably the most detailed of any source, recently republished by Fundação Oriente.)

Then Antonio de Almeida, a colonial “anthropologist” who published on archaeology, oral history, linguistics, social structure, material culture and art. The volume “A Expressão Portuguesa no Oriente” was also published by FO. It’s a real crap shoot. But today I located quite valuable pages: the etymology of one kingdom Afaloicai, and two accounts of the origin stories told by Naueti language speakers.

Professor had suggested, and rightly so, that I needed to understand the historical processes in the East of Timor that led to the late twentieth century landscape. It turns out the “kingdoms” which are my focus were never of much importance to the Portuguese, and while they are close neighbors, sharing both languages, they both consciously define themselves as having distinct origins. (This is confirmed by Almeida.)

Arriving in his rusting Landcruiser, Professor suggested we finally get to work systematically on a listing of the “kingdoms” recognized by Portuguese sources, starting from as early as 1703. It’s actually quite amazing that nobody had done this before us – there are a great many lists of this type, from a variety of sources. Our labor would be to produce a gigantic matrix of names of kingdoms by date, and by ruler. Easier said than done!

The Portuguese often had very little idea about their vassals and rebel kingdoms, and our growing matrix begs meditation on the early influence of Dominican missionaries in the creation of alliance between North and South. But what this exercise reveals more than anything is that the current “political” boundaries and balances of power, especially in the Eastern part of “Portuguese Timor” are extremely recent. Only starting 150 years ago do we really begin to see incorporation/subjugation of kingdoms around Mount Matebian.

I am really lucky to have Professor to work with here. He is tireless and extremely motivating. He studied under one of the most well known Southeast Asia scholars, who is read by most college undergrads, who was known for his capacity to collect and make sense of masses of information. Professor says, wisely, that I should not frantically dedicate myself to “fieldwork” here without writing a basic structure first. I need to know what it is I am looking for.

Unfortunately for my thesis (but fortunately for my health) I do not have time to hangout and let ethnographic detail dribble out of my informants.

There are birds chirping outside my window. I have matan dukur, sleepy eyes.

Nuns, Cubans, and basketball

A nun riding with her white habit under the motorcycle helmet. A soft gray blanket of cloud gathering on the dark and bruised hills above the city. The smell of burned grass ever present in the city, often a nice breeze running off the ocean.

Today I met up with a German anthropologist who is studying in the UK, currently doing fieldwork in the remote mountain town of Funar, which lies two hours walk from Laclubar. This is in Manatuto district, central mountain Timor. I think it’s near some of the towns Amerioca visited with nurses on horseback. This is the way the majority of Timorese live, when you look demographic patterns, aside from Dili the majority of Timorese live in a very disperse manner through the mountains. This is notable from the air, when flying in from Australia, because the zinc rooves are visible.

She helped me to basically officially abandon the attempt to discern group identity based on any kind of linguistic category. Here the term ethno-linguistic group is just a ruse. The Portuguese administration loved it, as is proven by the amazing Fontoura album from 1938. And the UN also seemed/seems dependent on it. There is no point in looking beyond self-identification when thinking of group identity here, because ritual authority and political authority are quite often overlapping, shared and extremely complex between two or more language groups. (The reason I have so clung to the issue of language, is because one of the groups I study has come to identify itself by its language group over the past 40 years.)

Docogirl showed up and told us about a hilarious run-in with one of hundreds of Cuban doctors now practicing in Timor. She had gone to film at the dust-bowl IDP camp set up across from the F-FDTL barracks in Metinaro, about an hour outside of Dili to the East. She had heard about the Cubans’ rather brusque manner, and indifference to their patients’ comprehension. And today, she witnessed the assembly-line activity firsthand. These doctors apparently listen to just the necessary amount of information and scribble off prescriptions incredibly quickly. No chat, no explanation. (To their defense, I remember meeting an Australian dentist here in 2003 who described her program as: arrive in town, wait for people to queue up and start pulling teeth like mad.)

I walked through the Liceu Antonio Machado, the first serious building the Portuguese dedicated to “higher education” in the 1960s. It was lavishly renovated by the Portuguese government in 2000, and is still well kept. Through the back part, coming through from the Parliament, I cut towards the tennis courts. No malais playing. I remember a time when by about 4-5pm there would be people warming up for a game before dark. Victorino, Mozambiquan tennis champion held court on these courts. Now it was a rag-tag group of Timorese kids, none older than 10 years old, with an eager young Timorese coach.

Before the courts is a rather nice basketball hoop. No net, but the rims are nice, and the court is level and uncracked. Nobody was there. The thought of shooting some hoops was really appealing.

I sorely miss Queen (of the Weekend), my partner in crime here in 2001-3. We used to go to Dom Bosco in Comoro and play with the neighborhood boys, I remember one in particular who we called “Dennis Rodman” – he had the jersey and everything. They were great sports, and mature enough to be able to play with us without a second thought. Dom Bosco is now full up with IDPs, I doubt there is the room or the patience for basketball!

I wracked my brain for anybody who can play basketball. I realize I really don’t know that many people here anymore. Living alone in Lecidere isn’t helping to build a “network.” (But then, neither is my aversion to the malai-magnet restaurants.) At night, it’s basically just TV, computer, kitchen and occasional chats with the security guards.

Tomorrow there was supposed to be a big rally, which was so hyped by the two daily papers, and by rumor on the street that it actually led to a mini-exodus from the city. This morning I overheard a funny conversation in Vila Verde on the street, two groups of ladies were talking about “tomorrow” and whether they would venture out, and on their parting one shouted to another, maybe I’ll just flee to Ataúro Island!

According to the two dailies and the international forces it has been cancelled. I think the biggest reason is because the Malai Boot (Big Foreigner), Ramos Horta is out of the country which is obvious because of the lack of security at the Palace. The organizers want to have leverage against Ramos Horta, but they also want the drama of the confrontation, and I suppose they want to give him a chance to respond in person to their demands. (Which are as of yet unclear: “democracy, justice, peace”.)

I need to start strategizing and planning to head to Baucau. Not only because that’s where my research is, but because Dili is just too heavy.

Alliance (and violence)

A confused rooster crows at 11:45pm. Until now, there’s only been one chopper fly-over. A quiet night, until now.

My social day had ended relatively “late” with a beer wrapping up slightly before the witching hour, my Lost Anthropologist friend making his way back past “Jardim” camp on foot, said he had to get moving around 6pm to avoid walking past there at dark.

Today I walked by the government palace building around noon. Before lunchtime. The place was empty. I had never seen it like this. There were a couple of cracked windows where protestors had thrown rocks. The site of a burned out car was marked by a square black halo in the parking lot. There were virtually no security guards anywhere, the doors of the palace open and empty. Even access to the UN annexes behind the palace seemed unguarded. Part of me wanted to follow the lone international advisor in and check out the lack of activity there.

I counted the cars in the parking lot that were not UN. It was shocking. Maybe 5-10.

Is the government actually working? It seems like they have simply thrown in the towel.

There were twee colorful banners along the balconies of the palace reading “Timor Ida Deit” (There is only one Timor) and other slogans of unity. As I continued towards Kolmera, past Toko Lay, I saw other posters promoting unity by Timorese artists. Some with crocodiles, people in their adat clothes holding hands. I realized that I am an extremely cynical person in relation to posters, reconciliation and the international community. I wondered who was naïve enough to foot the bill for these latest ones.

I stopped by the Ministry of Education, and was happy to see a fair bit of activity. It seemed the vast majority of civil servants were there. I think reopening schools has been made a major (and realistic) priority by Ramos Horta.

I then walked down to the Comoro road. Passing the Dili District Tribunal, I was even more struck by the dead aspect of the place, which by all rights should be the busiest of all government institutions! There were three people sitting on a bench in the foyer having what seemed to be a personal conversation. They could have been sitting on the beach, or on a bench waiting for a bus. The security guard made an effort to get up and check me out, giving up without a word, realizing I was just some crazy useless malai. I asked, “Are there any hearings today?” The answer “No”. I asked “Is anybody working here?” He said, “Yeah.” Judging by the three motorbikes and 6-8 cars (many of which looked “international”), not much work could be going on. But then again the work load got lighter when 57 people escaped in broad daylight from Becora prison at the end of last month.

Word is Alkatiri will have his day in court in early October.

My Lost Anthropologist friend was staying at the “Backpackers Hostel” which costs $8/night for a bunk. It’s one of the cheapest places to stay in Dili, it’s only competition the long-standing Dili Guesthouse near the Old Market, which is too close for comfort to the neighborhood of Quintal Ki’ik. The Backpackers was a bit grotty for my taste, but has a nice collection of DVDs, a decent kitchen and patio/eating area. Had another nice “café timor” and share gripes about our projects and the lack of useful bibliography on Timor.

His area is where two (sometimes three) languages meet and coexist, in his case Bunak, Mambai and sometimes Tetun. He is attempting to model marriage and inheritance systems in this context, which must be a fascinating, and well, extremely difficult task. He was explaining (and I forced him to explain the anthro terms I had never been forced to learn) that certain models for marriage and inheritance are more rigid, and hence dominate in a certain situation, and others are more plastic. That is how groups can so effectively co-exist here.

He also said something which I found fascinating, and was not aware of. That Bunak and Mambai are of course from “opposite” language groups (Papuan and Melanesian, in that order) and yet, in areas where they coexist, they seem to share a hybrid ritual language, which is unintelligible to most on both sides.

This is what anthropologist with their obsessions with separating, classifying and rule-writing have glossed over here for so long: the incredible power of social creativity of humans. Thank god we are finally allowed to study what for so long was considered the vexing “exception to the rule.” If we look more closely, in a place like Timor, with incredible patterns of marriage alliance across regions, linguistic complexity spilled across the challenging topography of the place, what old school anthropology defined as exceptions are in fact the RULE, and the glue which has kept this place as peaceful as it has been. 

The “West” sees peoples like the Timorese as war-mongering hot-heads. Is it because they headhunted, they seemed to have created a ritual scheme for conflict, which we interpret as a relish for blood and revenge?

Look at the twentieth century in Timor. How many bloody episodes can we count in Timor? Only a couple snafus related to taxation, and the autocratic rule of Governor Celestino da Silva before the big rebellion of 1911-12. Then the cataclysm of World War II, a violence from outside which triggered waves of violence from inside. Then 1959, also an “exterior” event which gained a life of its own. And then 1975. Given how complex this place is, the recurrent hungry season and periodic famine, I think that’s really not a bad record. Look at the “West” in the same time period. Let’s not kid ourselves, our lovely national system of the twentieth century has a worse track record than the Timorese systems of alliance and ritual-linguistic co-existence.

I suppose either way, looking at the question of alliance and violence, one can be accused of (gasp) orientalism. I’m just saying we should challenge ourselves to view the complexity of human relations here, and not necessarily buy either sanitized view that the Timorese are a proud, peace-loving people victimized by colonialism and occupation, or the view that without outside interference, they are doomed to keep killing each other in an endless cycle of violence.

The trouble with normal

After three days here, I think what has most disturbed me is how “normal” the situation here has been made mostly by international people. What do I mean by that? It seems Timorese people have not lost a sense of sadness, shock, disappointment and anger over what has happened to the city. But the humanitarian and “peacekeeping” community seems to work under a completely different Cartesian logic.

Scared urban people who refuse to go home? Ok: “Displaced peoples”. So, register them. Give them tents, jerry cans, food supplies. Hell, even hook them up to the electrical grid. In the trouble spots, throw some floodlights over them and send helicopters over every night in regular intervals to check up on the situation. Elaborate, regularized flight plans.

This foreign view of “intervention” seems to have been transmitted to the Timorese government, which seems to believe that signing attendance rosters is keeping things “normal.” What’s more, Department of Labor and Solidarity statistics apparently show that over 90% of the district of Dili is “displaced” and receiving aid, which is not only impossible. Even if it were possible, how can this situation be acceptable? Ramos Horta seems to have given up on his pledge to have the camps emptied out by late September. What exactly is the end game here?

Has it ever occurred to DPKO and UNHCR that this situation is basically unprecedented in the history of “peacekeeping”? Never has the population of a capital city collectively moved to the nearest park and street corner, often a stone’s throw from home, and begun to call itself “refugee” — earning the moniker “displaced people” and everything that comes with it. This is a city of fear-inspired Hoovervilles which are being endorsed and sponsored by international humanitarian aid! Not since the feeding and housing of the militias responsible for the Rwandan genocide in Congo in 1995 has the “humanitarian apparatus” lost its purpose like this.

Is it also acceptable and normal that gang warfare including the use of machetes, potentially lethal metal-tipped arrows and blunt metal objects spreads through the city like a contagion, and all politicians and the UN can seem to do about it is talk about “reconciliation” and keep the night sky buzzing with helicopters? (Which by the way have to keep flying anyways because many pilots only get paid for days they fly.)

What is needed is good intelligence on the ground, to infiltrate these groups, get evidence, find out who the people are inciting the violence, and bring them to swift justice. Let people see that this is NOT normal, NOT acceptable and that the government is taking dramatic and swift measures to deal with it in cooperation with the UN. Instead the ema ki’ik (little people) are seeing their ema boot (big people) seemingly incapable of doing anything but letting the international community bring their “displaced” logic to the situation.

Few people are out after about 6:30pm. Last night, on what I believe to be the main commercial and social block in Dili, in Lecidere, during a twenty-four minute period, I counted 7 cars passing, and 5 motor bikes. (With DVDs, sex and sleeping, the international community seems ok with nighttime lockdown — as long as the beach is still safe during the day. “Hell, it’s not Haiti,” one UN staffer coming from Port-Au-Prince told me.)

The security guards here say that when their shift ends at 3am, they cannot convince anybody to come get them in a car or motorbike, so they have to walk home alone through the city, which fills them with dread. For them the situation is anything but normal.