When Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo and Foreign Minister José Ramos Horta jointly won the Nobel Peace prize in 1996 they made the long suffering Timorese people immensely proud and brought great hope after two decades of brutal Indonesian occupation. They also set a world record for East Timor–it had one prize for every 500,000 people.
Ordinary Timorese had largely followed their example by practicing reconciliation following the events of 1999, and the previous 24 years of occupation. Until recently, East Timor was a remarkably safe and peaceful place in which to live, despite a traumatic past and overwhelming poverty.
But for a country with such a proud record, the new government installed in May 2002 pursued some very uncompromising policies. It refused to pursue justice for the atrocities of 1999, and in so doing left many wounds festering. More seriously, it created rival security forces and fostered a mini arms race as various factions armed themselves with the latest weaponry.
In 2006, the government’s inept handling of a dispute in the army involving soldiers from the western region of East Timor put the young nation on the brink of civil war, and has now created a new tension between east and west within East Timor.
This has been part of a broader pattern of questionable governance pursued by a government led by a clique of Timorese who lived in exile in Communist Mozambique during the Indonesian years. Alkatiri’s government has come to be seen by the population as arrogant, authoritarian, highly centralised and to some degree anti-democratic. They had controlled the portfolios of prime minister, natural resources and minerals, finance and planning, state administration, interior, defence and agriculture.
The new government managed to completely alienate the country’s oldest and most powerful institution –the Catholic Church. It had also shown contempt for some basic democratic principles; it proposed making defamation a criminal offence and it had intended to conduct next year’s parliamentary election without international supervision.
At the core of this crisis was a dispute involving 600 soldiers, representing almost half of the army, who claimed that senior officers from the eastern region discriminated against them. The government’s decision to sack the soldiers created an angry mob, and this spiraled into widespread east-west violence.
This violence continued as this latest edition of Eureka Street went to print. In the last week of June more houses and businesses were torched, despite