I really do not want to have to write about politics and conflict. Certain things must be said about these elections, just that I am not going to be the one to say them.
So instead, how about the amazing and FREE work of Swedish scholar Hans Hagerdal? He just published his new massive book “Lords of the land, lords of the sea” as an open access work. This is VERY exciting. (Thanks to one of my 11 readers for the tip-off.)
I wrote during the last presidential campaign about the images of military used by then candidate Lu Olo, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war machine – noting at the time the “persistent equivalence between the ruling party and the war machine and the state”.
Here I hope to bring to a wider audience the tragic and compelling story of a Topass “prince” from the island of Timor who was essentially kidnapped by a Dominican priest and abandoned in France in 1750.
Pascale Balthazar, the 12 year old son Topasse ruler Gaspar da Costa was taken with a couple of dozen slaves to Macau. There his charlatan “protector” Dominican Father Ignácio sold most of his slaves in Macau and his nice clothes in Canton, after which time they continued on to France, in a journey which took about nine months. During the journey, the priest convinced the boy not to reveal his status or walk around freely on the ship, as the French sailors were monsters and would eat him.
South Sudan gains its independence today – with many more dark clouds than East Timor had at the time. Troubling reports of fighting and of mass displacements in the border regions.
East Timor’s struggle against an invading force was quite different that South Sudan’s. In 1998, a referendum (and a half-hearted ceasefire) was brokered. 1999 was the year the referendum, the build-up and the bloody aftermath and mass displacement of the East Timorese population.
After a horrendous scorched earth campaign which cost many lives, transferred much wealth to Indonesia, and seriously disrupted the territory, East Timorese had over 2 years of UN administration before they formally declared independence (for a second time).
I cannot help but see events in South Sudan as a sort of “pile-up” of Timor’s 1999 and 2002. Continue reading
Arbiru. It’s an adjective and adverb in Tetum. Quite useful and on a list of words that are important and tough to translate. Interesting that I grasp for other Asian words in the English language to translate its meaning. Somewhere between kamikaze bravery, running amok, randomness. As a memory aid, I would think “arbitrary” in English.
Arbiru can go right and it can go wrong. It is somewhere on the edge of chaos, and something essential to the war machine.
Looking through Luis Costa’s Tetum-Portuguese dictionary, I notice that there are few words in Tetum that have ar- as a prefix. The only other words from Tetum (Terik) are aruma (meaning whichever, whatever) and aran (meaning to hate, synonym with hirus).
But the word’s second and third syllables are more potent. A biru is a totem, or an amulet, possessing power to turn its holder invincible in war. Falintil guerrillas used these.
I have never seen so many fake plastic flowers for sale in Dili. A week away from Loron Matebian – or All Souls Day, probably East Timor’s most important holiday – the streets near the Stadium, in Bairro Pite and other strategic parts of town are lined with lurid plastic flowers. “Loose” ones, fake bouquets, strings of flowers. They are bright purples, pinks, oranges, explosions of color.
The production of fruits and vegetables has caught up with demand in Dili over the past couple of years to an impressive degree. It seems a shame that the shame work to jumpstart these markets could not be done with cut flowers.
The fake flowers are probably an indication of the unparalleled disposable income of Dili residents – of the money splashed around with various cash transfer schemes and compensation schemes.
Today is both the anniversary of the 1999 Referendum and the International Day of the Disappeared.
Researcher Simon Robins wrote this assessment of the needs of families of the disappeared in East Timor earlier this year (pdfs in English and in Tetum). He quotes a representative of a womens group from Liquiça
I watched very closely the needs of victims‘ families; firstly it is important to have justice, secondly to have reparation for the victim’s family, that way they can live and carry on with their lives. Through reparation, the person can continue her life, look forward to the future and to be back again as she used to be. Looking at the side of education this time the Government has done some part of its duty as well as some payment for mothers to pay children school fees, again not all are getting this, only some of them. Another issue is the economic and especially health: why is that, because during this period, some of the victim’s family, wives are the most affected mentally. For these women, what they saw and what they’ve been through was notorious and they took it badly. A person like that had trauma and what will we do to heal that or to help them out of trouble? If there exists a treatment or counselling that can help her out so that person can continue her life normally.
On the issue of a detention center in East Timor for those seeking asylum in Australia: continued insensitivity by both sides, especially in what relates to the eventual location. One Timorese minister has suggested what he deems to be a “win-win” idea to resolve the impasse – put them on the Island of the Island.
What follows is some historical perspective on the island that is the namesake of this blog, prisons and boat people.
Arriving for my first time in Banda Aceh, after having only superficially followed developments over the past couple of years, I was rather in for a shock. The place is bigger, more prosperous and seemingly, well, “autonomous” from outside (read: international) influence than is East Timor.
Although Aceh is not independent from Indonesia (or free from its military), there are many potential comparisons to be made.
To start with more obvious contrasts.
In Timor the destruction was 100% work of man. The Timorese voted for independence in 1999 knowing full well what was waiting for them – scorched earth. People even knew who their butchers and torturers would be.
Timor’s population had been reduced over decades of violence, forced displacement, and hunger. Banda Aceh’s population was reduced by a third from one census to the next. (There was never even a proper death toll from the tsunami apparently.)
We went up to Funar this weekend, with the company of two daughters (of sorts) of the household we would stay in. One was an anthropologist, who had stayed with the family for nearly two years a couple of years back. We’ll call her Menina. The other was Menina’s best friend and “sister” in the village during her fieldwork, who now lives in Dili.
I suppose any trip up to the mountains, up to a spot reachable only by 4WD on foot or by pony, for me ends up feeling like an amazing meeting of worlds. (It starts with the climatic shock of leaving the hot coast.)
Funar lies about half an hour’s drive (now that the road has been rehabilitated) above Laclubar, which in turn is now two hours rough ride from Manatuto on the coast. Time was the road to Laclubar was one of the best in Timor, as former Indonesian governor Abilio Osorio is from the region. But not so at the current moment! On the way up, we had to risk squeezing by a cargo truck bogged in a mud patch, about half an hour from Laclubar. We had inches to spare on either side of the car.
I did not know it on arrival, but I learned that the tree outside the house I am staying in has a placenta hanging in it. (In Timor, in different regions people save placentas in different ways. They are not something to be simply discarded or ignored.)
The placenta came with a baby delivered in Dili Hospital after nearly a 24 hour labor. During this time those accompanying the young mother had to buy sarongs for her to lie on during childbirth, as apparently the room where women give birth is BYO linens.
On Tuesday, as I was dealing with the consequence of an excessive amount of water and coffee I drank that morning in a subdistrict not far from Dili, I looked over at the fetid water in the tiled mandi tank next to me, which I knew for a fact to be little over a year old.
The first mikrolet to catch my attention in my first full day in Dili was “Greatset” – which at first it appears to be a misspelling, but after a second passes, one hopes there is a “great set”. Maybe a reference to some advanced number theory, or some special group of people, or the spectacular end to a three hour tennis match.
My day started with a walk from Matadouro to the café in Dare and back.
With the strange, continued rains, not only has the water continued to seep up onto the walls of the house I am staying, but it has maintained the hills fairly green. And the grasses in the hills above Dili had yet to dry out like they normally would have by now. We walked with them lightly scratching the skin on our shins, passing only a handful of people, mostly families walking down to Dili, on that road.
Imagine, for a moment, the German government “helping” Poland re-create a network of railways. Imagine that these train lines went to Auschwitz and various other prison camps. Imagine that these railways would be built by German engineers, contractors, and were supported by German army logisticians. Imagine that these railways would periodically have German emblems and flags commemorating the “gesture”, and that there would be ceremonies to inaugurate the lines with Polish head of state.
Inappropriate?
Well, imagine that the German government had never actually said “sorry” in the past 60 odd years. For anything.
Inappropriate?
We were all tickled in 2002 when we found out that Bill Clinton would be landing in Baucau for the independence celebrations (the airstrip in Dili was too small for his plane).
But some of us remembered how Mr Clinton did little from 1992-1998 to promote Timorese self-determination – in fact, he literally fled from the question, as Amy Goodman recounts. (Please listen to this fierce question by Allan Nairn to Bill Clinton from May 2002. Clinton: ‘I can’t say that everything we did before 1999 was right.’)
Interesting, now, that in a big December interview with Foreign Policy Magazine, that Clinton cited East Timorese President José Ramos-Horta as “a top three leader” to watch in the world.
Talking to a friend who grew up on the slopes of Matebian a couple of days ago, hearing stories about his childhood, I was struck by one thing in particular – his memories of the ala mutu, which translates from Makassae as “the jungle people”.
A mere change of timing and change of point of view, and everything changes.
[Dear readers, My guest blogger rightly fears reprisals, so even a pseudonym is out.]
At the ‘development partners’ meeting a few weeks ago I was reminded of a line from a the book Outliers, where the First Officer says to the pilot “the weather radar has been very useful” suggest that other devices apart from the naked eye could be used to land the plane as they are about to crash into a mountain.
Except that not one of the ‘development partners’ would even hint that there was such a thing as a weather radar. At this meeting the government, the DSRSG congratulated the government on its excellent progress to date, especially on matters such as food security and security sector reform – what the hell?!
The World Bank also appeared to be in an extremely congratulatory mood. When the national priorities of justice and governance came up, not one ‘development partners’ raised a question about the President’s, Prime Minister’s, and Minister of Justice’s alleged breaches of the constitution with regard to the Martenus Bere case, nor did any of the ‘development partners’ raise any questions about the lack of accountability, transparency, and apparent unlawfulness and outright craziness of the misappropriation of the $70 million from the now postponed(?)/cancelled(?) heavy oil plant for pakote referendum.
The excuse appears to be that these issues are raised privately in meetings between high level representatives of the ‘development partners’ and Ministers. I know that these issues are not raised or even hinted at.
Why are the ‘development partners’ so afraid of offending their hosts? I understand that bilateral partners have a long term relationship to think about, but what about multilateral partners. What is the worst that would happen if they do offend their hosts by telling them the truth about what they are doing wrong? Would they get kicked out of the country?
Unlikely as people like the President are too cautious about their international image for that. What is the worst that will happen if they don’t inform their hosts about what they are doing wrong? The country may descend into civil unrest again. And isn’t the raison d’etre of a DPKO mission to “keep the peace”?
Why won’t the UN openly state: security and justice sector reform in Timor-Leste is a joke. Today some government civilian staff who were trying to uphold some administrative systems were threatened by senior FFDTL members and PNTL officers waving weapons in their faces because they would not just handover cash to the FFDTL and PNTL.
What can these civilian staff do?
If they complain about the unlawful behaviour of these FFDTL and PNTL to the PNTL or the Prosecutors Office either 1) nothing will happen or 2) they will be faced with reprisals by the people they have complained about.
If they just handover the cash to these FFDTL members and PNTL officers they will be accused of maladministration and may face investigation by the Provedor or the Office of the Prosecutor.
If they just handover the cash it will also give courage to others trying to violate the system.
So where is the progress on security sector reform the DSRSG was so effusive in his praise about? And what kind of lawless state are we living in when the FFDTL and PNTL can pull their weapons on civilians and because the formal justice system is so dysfunctional and both institutions are so unaccountable (despite millions of dollars of bilateral and multilateral support) that only the civilian will be punished?
Malaes continue to privately bemoan the lack of accountability and responsibility of Timorese for anything – whether it be for not turning up to work, stealing fuel from generators and vehicles, handing out millions of dollars of contracts to companies which only exist in the scrap of paper in the back pockets of Minister’s wives/husbands/brothers/sisters/sons/daughters, paying tens of thousands of dollars in spurious medical costs of convicted murderers who tried to overthrow the state, or providing clemency to mass-murderers.
And malaes also complain that Timorese will not honestly tell each other “NO, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. YOU CANNOT TAKE A 50% CUT OF EVERY CONTRACT THAT COMES THROUGH THIS MINISTRY.” But why should Timorese be accountable, or responsible, or honestly tell each other anything, if their malae ‘partners’, and especially the biggest malaes – the UN, World Bank, and other ‘development partners’ will not provide the same courtesy?
“Ukun rasik an” is a term that many in the Timorese in power like to bandy about. I am not sure what is so rasik about the fact they still have malaes to police the state, malaes to provide external security, malaes to write the budget, malaes to manage the country’s wealth (the Petroleum Fund).
The only thing that seems to be done rasik is to fail to execute the budget, fail to tender for or oversee contracts, and to violate every single law in the country on a daily basis.
As one commentator has suggested, if the Minister of Finance and Prime Minister are so delusional as to believe that Timor really can ukun rasik an, maybe its ‘development partners’ should let them do it for a while and see how they go.
How much more of the Petroleum Fund is left?
This fund that was supposed to last more than 50 years (and probably would have if Fretilin had not been forced out) will be lucky to last 8 years.
Who will pay the FFDTL and PNTL then? (let alone all the other civil servants). How many other countries have descended into civil war because the government was so corrupt and so inept that it could not only not provide basic services, but could not afford or was incapable of paying the people with weapons? What will the UN and other ‘development partners’ say then? Sorry, we knew this was going to happen but because we held your delusional ukun rasik an in such high regard we did not want to offend you?
The plane is still descending through the storm clouds, and there may still be time to remind the captain about the weather radar and even better suggest an alternative means of landing before the plane crashes, and everyone on board, development partners included, becomes incinerated by the flatulence of their own egos.
I remember once, as the Merpati flight was winging its way into Dili, a UN staffer told me how excited he was to be back in Dili. Port-au-Prince was god-awful, even though it had a tropical clime, it was too dangerous, too complicated. Kabul was a boring dustbowl, while the per diem was high, there was nothing to do. He smiled as he told me he was happy to be back in Timor for a short stint. There he could scuba dive, things were calm (relative to Port-au-Prince), and Bali was close by.
I recently tweeted about the “elite of poverty development” (a nod to the painfully “real” NGO Inepd). Somebody asked me to clarify what I meant.
Here goes. International altruists tend to congregate, and stay longer, in places that are nice to live. I met more than one person in my last trip to Dili had more than a passing interest in moving to Maputo – a city with a similar “Palm Tree Index” to Dili.
Is there really anything so strange about this? People want to eat camembert, go scubadiving, AND save the world. Being honest, at age 24, I probably would have stayed longer in Dili if instead of scuba, there were bookstores, art-house cinemas and a better live music scene. And of course, I left before IKEA started delivering to Dili.
And, not to be overly cynical here, but Timor’s seesaw of conflict only adds to the attraction. The moment people get too accomodated and bored with the scuba diving and claustrophobic nightlife, a conflict erupts, and they get an adrenaline rush and big boost in their per diem. And of course they get to join the Facebook group “I Got Stoned in Dili“.
I scoured the internet for some old OCHA (?) NGO coordination maps from the UNTAET-UNOTIL periods. Unfortunately I couldn’t find what I was looking for. But I distinctly remember seeing that the number of international NGO projects in Lospalos was much higher than say, a mountain district like Manufahi. Lospalos has some of the most beautiful beaches in Timor, namely Kom and Tutuala.
Some highly populated central mountain areas hardly had any “coverage” at all, as compared to numbers of projects dotting less-populated areas of Lospalos, district with the highest Palm Tree Index. (For the record Lospalos is not any poorer than other parts of the country, nor was it disprortionately wrecked in 1999.)
There are other local factors that define where the BINGOs put their money and people. If I were to do statistical analysis, I would figure in social factors including something to capture the “entrepreneurial spirit” of local people, and their friendliness to outsiders. Any oral history of Lospalos, our palm-treed, INGO-favorite district, would show that people have been constantly invaded there for the past 150 years (at least) by outsiders, so they have probably learned to make the best of this. (So, friends from Lospalos, take this as a compliment!)
I also believe that the Palm Tree Index affects the way donor countries treat recipient governments – or “relations between development partners” – but I will leave that for another tirade.
Because instead of Rote, the land on top of this image could be Timor Leste’s Tasi Mane, I spent 90 minutes putting this page together on the Timor Sea Spill.
Judging by the Australian (non)-reaction to this environmental catastrophe, Timor Leste should not rely on its neighbor to clean up its future messes.
Environmental disaster knows no national borders, or redrawn maritime boundaries.
(Credit goes to Skytruth, who have been blogging and proving the extent of the spill with satellite photos.)
If you like this image by Wolf Böwig called “Matebian”, please take a look at the photo/essay “Shadows, Dreams and Shapes: The Lulik Reality” by Böwig and Pedro Rosa Mendes. (It also exists in Portuguese. Careful, it is a big download.)
Rosa Mendes writes,
In Timor, the dead or the part of them that survives, are the geography of their own relationships, in the literal sense of the word, the lines that establish contact between two points, two people, two lives. That defines a concept of life as a symmetry, with two reciprocal locales. It is not the elimination of one of them that will make – just the opposite – the other lose sense of where it is, or the place to which it belongs, and of where it is going.
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.”
The night before I left, grass fires lined the hills, like bleeding gums.
I had been asking myself over and over again, toying with in my head, how Dili could be this calm, this “ok” only three years after the violence. The calm, at times almost giddy, sense of prosperity.
In 2006, people were pulled out of mikrolets and forced to prove they could count to ten without the wrong accent. Those who failed to effortlessly say “h-at” for four were beaten, or worse dragged away. People lived wracked with fear of their neighbors. Of strangers. They lived in fear of themselves. There was no longer a jackboot, it was a terrifying Timorese shinelo.
All that remains on the city landscape of 2006 is the memorial for the police killed in Caicoli.
But what happened to the dead civilians?
More importantly, the roadblockers? The mask-wearing rock throwers? The rama-ambon makers? The house burners? The civilians who FDTL distributed arms to?
During tours of the city limits of Dili — through Becora, down through Bidau Santana, then out to Cristo Rei, and back out up the back of Delta Comoro, back down through Fatumeta, then up Taibesse’s up and around China Rate and back down Lahane – I wonder how much is stored up there — how is stress and anger contained. Where does it go? Is it swallowed? Is it buried? Is it literally stored away like an unused rama ambon?
I met some young people who have made a conscious decision to leave Dili, to go to Indonesia, to go to England. Dili is too small to contain all of their stress and anger.
It is hard to transmit how it felt in 2006, so it is hard to capture the strange dissonance with today’s Dili.
The mad construction keeps the city busy, and Prime Minister’s spokesman gloats over 12% growth in GDP.
Heaps of carpenters buzzing away making window and door frames with deslokadu money; the massive $400,000+ Civil Society Fund renovation of Motael Church, and the bigger and more expensive work on the Cathedral; the new wooden crocodile heads around the Monument to the Discoveries in front of the Palace of Government (a symbolic encircling of the colonial object); the traditional houses going up like lightening around the new Presidential palace, and in time for the big party in August.
While most people display a dangerous level of distrust in their political leaders, Dili seems perfectly lanu and mosu at the moment.
Have people begun to tell 2006? How can it ever be told?
In the past four days, I’ve spent only three hours in Dili. I have another two days in Baucau, so I’m imagining this is sadly as close as I am going to get to some “deep Timor” experience. I have been trying, as best one can, from brief stops off of mostly paved roads, to get a feeling for the state of things beyond Tasi Tolu and the Cristo Rei.
Roadside Timor does indeed seem more prosperous. The evidence? New kiosks, painted and renovated houses from mountain Maubara all the way to Ossu. The MTCI rice appears to be reaching certain rural communities, where I have seen the odd new, full bag. But I have not seen it piled up anywhere. Mostly people seem to be recycling the bags for their own harvests.
In Ossu, there were new (since 2006) kiosks selling vegetables. Thriving bengkels and mikrolets being repainted, overhauled in Baucau district. Tons of new stickers and names on mikrolets and buses. All evidence of increased cash flow on almost every paved road.
(But I wonder: is this cash reaching the deep Timor, hours walk from the roadside? And are these merely signs of the relatively well-off getting richer?)
On the road near Bazartete, we stopped and chatted with the “dua dollar” work crews repairing the roads. This was one of the first and longest standing schemes to infuse cash into rural areas. There still seemed to be healthy competition for the work, and according to the overseer, rotation of people working. Payments were allegedly quite late.
During a chat hiking near Loe Huno, I asked about the new universal old-age pension, and our guide chuckled as he told the delight of those over 60, some of whom still remember the Portuguese head tax. He said, “Old folks say ‘Before the government forced us to pay them, and look, now they are paying us!’”
Obviously there have been major problems with the pension, which is paid out in six month blocks. In the first round, chefes de suco were apparently able to manipulate the system. In many places, people are continuing to use the voter IDs of deceased people as the government simply does not have databases linked up to prevent this.
There may be massive “leakage”, but the point is, money is clearly reaching cash-starved rural communities. These are places where before you could not even get change for a dollar in the market.
Last week in a “brown bag lunch” at UNMIT, one high-profile UN type revealed that the victims of the Passabe massacre said they interpreted the pension as a form of government reparation for their suffering.
Cash is powerful and is not a cure-all. But if there is one growing consensus, it is that not enough “nation building cash” stayed in Timor, let alone in Dili. I remember calculating how much each man, woman and child in Timor would have received if the UN never returned, and just gave the money for peacekeeping and administration to the Timorese. I think it amounted to something like $20,000 per person.
It is quite amazing how actually something as cold and hard as cash can be something so hard to know what to do with.
On Monday, making my way to work at quarter past 8 the city struck me as quiet. At the City Courts of Dili, however, the GNR packed into its small parking lot, with two vans. At least three UNPOL cars as well. Soon the street was shut off, causing mass disturbance to the city’s traffic.
Not this much security or attention was paid to the trial of the Tim Alfa militia from Lospalos, whose members were accused of ambushing and killing nuns and priests.
This week the trial for the alleged conspiracy leading to the February attack on Ramos Horta began.
On TVTL Monday night Angela Pires appeared calm but focused, wearing a tais dress. Newspapers reported she was barefoot – which they interpreted to mean she had come ready to fight. (I do not know what to make of that.) The other defendants, dressed in what can only be described as Guantanamo Orange jumpsuits, looked more the part of people accused of plotting to kill the President.
This morning on the way to Cristo Rei, I biked over some fresh graffiti in large capital red letters “Viva Lia Los. Viva Justisa. Viva Alfredo no Angie.” This is the first graffiti I have ever seen with Angie included. The message was tailor-made for the trial, and cleverly painted in a place where the President would be forced to walk past to continue his morning exercise routine to the beach.
Later in the day, I tripped over some of the bigger conspiracy theories, which seem hyperbolic and indicative of a huge distrust for the two most powerful people in the country. I did not realize, for example, that a great number of people doubt that Ramos Horta was ever shot. They are actually waiting for him to show his wounds at the trial to prove that he was actually attacked! Moreover, some believe that Alfredo’s mate fatin was not on the pavement at Ramos Horta’s house. They believe his body was dumped there. I asked around, to know if these ideas are “regional” but the first person who told me this was indeed from Oecusse, which I imagine defies regionalism. All asked said these ideas are widespread and not limited to one group.
Dili, as in Portuguese colonial times, remains addicted to the whisper. The rumor. It does not help that the major sources of information, daily papers and TVTL are either at best too weak to cover events (let alone investigate), or at worst putty in the hands of a quite aggressive government.
This culture of rumor has serious consequences, one need only to look at 2002 and 2006. TVTL news coverage can be expanded, and from the sounds of it, people want to see Ramos Horta on the stand, and they want him to show his wounds. After all, haree hanesan fiar.
Let’s hope JSMP (whose website desperately needs updating) and some of the weekly papers can provide more information for the public.
Access to information aside, I have started to wonder whether these ema boot can ever regain the trust of a great number of people.
From the top of Ramelau yesterday morning, I saw the world. The boundaries of the visible from Timor. The top of Alor peaking out. Matebian to the east, the sun rising just next to it. Behind, the triangular shadow the mountain extending over West Timor, which was the most amazing surprise. Most of the island was covered in cloud.
Ramelau is the center for many Timorese. Not just mountain people. I remember during the time I lived here, it was still very rare to come across a world map, in a school or a workplace. A friend was saying how often young people take offense when you actually sit them down in front of a map and point to Timor. Not only is it small, but on most projections, it is far from the center.
In thinking of people’s worlds here, it is not on the spatial that is limited to direct experience. I was struck by a brief conversation with C., our guide up the mountain. I asked what his grandparents’ generation tell about war on the mountain. He immediately referred to a moment within his own experience in 1997. I persisted and asked about time before the Indonesians. He said this was something the grandparents knew as though to say that he did not either know enough or have the authority to share.
Often everything pre-1975 seems to be some primordial behemoth, stuck in time like a mastodon in a tar pit. Some carry with them crystallized images of colonial abuses, others of some kind of communitarian permaculture paradise. But this is mostly professionals and elites, people who I might have contact with in my work. In many communities, oral histories in fact reveal a Timor in constant flux, recounting arrivals of new groups, war, of expanding trade and tax networks, and of the consolidation of direct rule.
I remember thinking, as C. and his Maun pointed out Cailaco, Kablaki, Marobo, and the Loes river valley, how many battles with the Portuguese are written on this landscape. How absurd the idea of direct rule was in Timor. The Map of Cailaco (Planta de Cailaco) sprung immediately to mind – a lurid and strange image where 3D perspective and scale seem entirely lacking. Marauding Timorese war parties are depicted burning villages, and holding severed heads. Considering that map from the dizzying view from Ramelau, all of the episodic violence and history pre-1975 seemed so present, so written into the very landscape of the island.
But perhaps these are idle thoughts of somebody who does not commute six hours to high school on foot, like C. does. Thoughts of somebody who did not just lose a 25 year old friend to a “sick stomach.” (The funeral car from MSS brought the young man’s body from Dili the night before – C. had come from Ainaro for his funeral.)
On the way back, the bustle of Maubisse market seemed downright urban compared to the peace of Hatobuliko. Below the cemetery, dozens of horses “parked”. I saw peaches for sale for the first time in Timor. I asked what they were to confirm, the answer: “pissego”. They were hard and green, worlds away from the massive, soft peaches of Roald Dahl and my childhood. Another customer told me, “here, they are like this, Senhora.”
On this day, 50 years ago, the infamous Viqueque Rebellion began. I believe the acts of rebellion, as I write in my MA thesis, constituted
the unplanned, last gasp of a growing conspiracy discovered by Portuguese authorities in its early stages. Three sets of actors created the conditions for the revolt that started in Viqueque town on June 6, 1959: disgruntled Timorese civil servants; bold elites from Uatolari and Uatocarbau subdistricts; and self-styled ‘rebels’ from Indonesia. The revolt would not have occurred without the active participation of all three groups, and as such should not be perceived—as it often is—as a spontaneous local event.
From 2002 to last year, I researched, thought about and eventually wrote about the way this event is remembered in East Timor. As this is a blog, I decided to write about this today in a rather personal way. This is not an objective recounting of my findings or my research.
The Rebellion is an event that has suffered a number of official, formal revisions over the past decades. Principally during the Indonesian occupation. As such, it also began to take on new popular meanings in East Timor. In Dili and elsewhere, people are naturally quite dismissive of an event which they perceive either to be folly (cowboiada) or an Indonesian revisionist fantasy.
During my archival work in Lisbon, I stumbled on a number of fascinating tidbits about the Indonesian exiles involved in the Rebellion and Portuguese police paranoia. But what struck me most was the disconnect between the elite conspirators from Uatolari and Uatocarbau and their subjects. Interrogated by Portuguese police, one in particular said he did not know the names of the 30 or so rebels with him, as they were led by their village chiefs.
Existing documentation, and interpretation of events, tells a rather “outside” or elite version of the bloody end of the Rebellion in the eastern Matebian valley. In fact there is no official record of deaths (estimated between 50 and 500), destruction and damage caused by the repression of the Rebellion. Not surprisingly, nothing written subsequently captures local memories and interpretations of events.
So in 2006, I returned to attempt to interview residents to paint a picture of the way the Rebellion is remembered in the knua and villages between Uatocarbau and Baguia. My research was admittedly fraught with challenges and limitations. This is not the kind of thing one does in 10 weeks. Or even 10 months. Nevertheless, from this, I found:
The “Viqueque Rebellion” broke out in a remote area of Portuguese Timor and was ably repressed by a poor, isolated Portuguese Administration with machetes, matchbooks, and the centuries-old divide et impera strategy. That the repression of the rebellion occurred during “modern” times in such an antiquated fashion is a curiosity, but not my main interest. The Rebellion’s relatively recent date and the continued “isolation” of the involved locations provide a unique opportunity for a study of the “local” memory of extreme colonial-era violence. For those in three subdistricts in southeastern Timor, memories of the violent repression of the rebellion remain surprisingly local – that is, external actors and causes are minimized. The memory of violence sparked by external events appears to have been absorbed into a local logic, in spite of continued external attempts at revisionism for political ends.
The final product, my thesis, has been gathering dust since I defended it around this time last year. Why?
The only Timorese feedback I got – loud and clear – was that this is very sensitive material. Local conflicts, between people whose families still live side by side, are better not portrayed in print, or spoken of. Recountings of extreme violence, I was reminded, can provoke extreme reactions.
I have suffered from an acute mental paralysis, a loss of conviction, a feeling that this is in fact true that some how my work could cause problems for others. I have not been able to discern what in my research indeeds transgresses some invisible ethical line. For this reason I have been very cautious about disseminating my work.
For a number of reasons, including the feeling that I must unload a weight off of my shoulders, on June 12, the 50th anniversary of the end of the repression of the Rebellion, I hope to upload here a summary of my thesis that navigates some of the invisible ethical fault lines.
I feel that June 6th deserves more from me, but I am on the road and quite exhausted. More soon.
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