This May, when he delivered his first speech as president of the newly independent East Timor, Xanana Gusmao said the country had “One body, one mind, one wish”. Seven months on, and the president needed to be hustled to safety into the capital’s police headquarters, after bravely but vainly trying to quell riots in which people died. East Timor may still have one body, but it is no longer of one mind, nor one wish.
When, in 1975, the Portuguese colonial authorities abandoned virtually all their overseas possessions, including East Timor, none of them was prepared for independence. East Timor had been ruled by the Portuguese for 450 years, save for four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. Indonesia, which owned the western part of Timor, thought it logical to unite the island. However, rather than negotiate a union, it invaded and so set in train a brutal 24-year military rule during which over 200,000 East Timorese were killed and as many again fled.
In the end, it was the sheer violence of Indonesia’s occupation that brought about a long-overdue intervention by the world community. East Timor emerged, after a UN-sponsored referendum, as the world’s first independent state of the new millennium, traumatized and brutalized, with an economy in ruins. The independence which had been the dream of so many for so long, brought no magical transformation of people’s lives. Indeed, despite the excellent aid and peacekeeping work of the UN, the reality of standing on their own two feet as an independent nation has proved unexpectedly tough. The economic situation was, if anything, made worse by the return of tens of thousands of exiles, many well-qualified but often lacking the capital to build up productive businesses.
Unemployment is thus dangerously high, especially among young people. The good life in the developed world that they see on their satellite television screens seems a long way off. Like youngsters everywhere, they have tended to ape some of the very worst aspects of Western society. What seems to be at the heart of this riot is a gang culture that has flourished in the capital Dili. This tragic outburst should be taken as a wake-up call, to both the government and the international community. Urgent consideration should now be given to extending the UN Mission of Support in East Timor (with its 5,000 troops and 1,250 police officers, beyond its planned departure next May.
More importantly, the thus-far supportive Australian government needs allay widespread local fears that it has cut itself too favorable a deal in the exploitation of oil and gas fields found off East Timor’s south coast, which come on stream in 2006. Development of the fields will do little for local jobs, because oil and gas are due to be pumped or shipped directly to Australia, while East Timor earns an estimated $180 million a year in royalties.
It is no good simply arguing that its oil and gas will help East Timor join the international economy. The country needs big outside investment in jobs and industry, sensitively executed. This is a people who have been ruled and exploited by outsiders for half a millennium. Their expectations may be excessive, but their pride is surely not.
