"Ruined East Timor awaits a miracle"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times, April 22, 2000

Ruined East Timor Awaits a Miracle

By SETH MYDANS

DILI, East Timor, April 17 -- People here have gotten used to the scene: a
mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside
the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive
multinational police contingent.

"Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has
become a theme for critics -- both foreign and Timorese -- as the United
Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new
nation.

As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still stand
burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that
followed East Timor's vote last August to end 24 years of Indonesian
occupation.

As many as 80 percent of the territory's 700,000 people still have no jobs.
Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian
West Timor, still afraid to return.

The desperation of East Timor's unemployed, and the first spasms of
violence it has spawned, are the sharpest signs of a swelling discontent in
this physically and emotionally traumatized land.

Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to
lawlessness and political disarray and could open the door to trouble from
the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to Indonesian West
Timor after laying waste to the territory last September.

Despite an invasion of peacekeepers, bureaucrats and aid workers in the
months since, much of this battered land remains, as officials like to say,
at ground zero. There is still no working police force or justice system,
no government structure, few schools, no working water or power or
transportation system, no post office, not much of an economy, little
reconstruction.

"Very sad story," said one young woman, summing up this moment in her
country's history in halting English. "Hungry. Cry. Hope."

The slow pace of recovery has called into question the capacity of the
United Nations, with its lumbering, centralized bureaucracy, to address
urgent needs and operate as the government of a nation in crisis.

"It's hard to conceive of how anybody could go in there and make an instant
success out of such a complex set of problems," said Sidney Jones, who
heads the human rights office of the United Nations.

It has never tried anything quite like this before: to create and
administer a nation from a fresh blueprint of its own. When it tried to do
so in Cambodia nearly a decade ago, there was already a government
structure to work with. In Kosovo today, the United Nations effort is
closer to traditional peacekeeping.

"It's a huge machine, an enormous machine," said a Canadian aid worker,
speaking of the United Nations. "Every time you want something done it has
to be checked and rechecked. If something needs to be done right away it's
not unusual to take a week, two weeks, three weeks."

An urgent multimillion-dollar job-creation program that was approved in
January, for example, is now scheduled to go into operation in June, if
indeed there are no further delays.

"For the United Nations that's moving quickly," said Manoel de Almeida e
Silva, the chief spokesman for the United Nations here.

"Definitely we are dealing here with a level of expectations that is not
being met by international community mechanisms," he said. "You can destroy
in a matter of days but you don't reconstruct in a couple of days or a
couple of weeks or a couple of months."

Before the reconstruction can begin, he said, "you need to establish a
central payments office, a border service, a fiscal authority, a civil
service commission, because you are really starting from scratch, from zero."

East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, was invaded by Indonesia in 1975,
touching off a resistance war that eventually took as many as 200,000
lives. Last year nearly 80 percent of the population voted for
independence, despite a campaign of intimidation by the Indonesian-backed
militia groups.

That vote was followed by a brutal organized campaign in which 70 percent
or more of East Timor's buildings were destroyed and more than one-fourth
of its population kidnapped and forced into exile.

International investigators say as many as 700 people were killed and an
uncounted number of women raped.

Much of East Timor is agricultural, but most farm implements have been
destroyed and most farm animals killed.

Now the international community has pledged more than $500 million to build
a new East Timor during the next three years under the guidance of the
United Nations. For aid groups and development specialists, East Timor is a
sort of petri dish of nation-building where everything from the
Constitution to the currency to the national language has yet to be
determined.

One predictable, almost instant effect has drawn the most criticism: the
creation of a giant gap in wealth that threatens to distort East Timor's
economy for years.

Dili today does not present a pretty picture, with a separate expatriate
world superimposed on a scene of destruction and poverty. The foreigners
are rich, with cars, offices, hot running water, Sunday barbecues. The East
Timorese have almost nothing.

"They can't take a table out to the side of the road to sell things," one
United Nations official said, "because not only do they not have anything
to sell but they don't have a table."

A new Chinese restaurant serving $50 meals is so crowded with foreigners
that it has made a chic annex of the burned-out building next door,
stringing it with Christmas lights. Just down the street, Eugenia Gago
feeds her extended family on less than $5 a day, selling grilled meat to
passers-by from the rubble of a burned-out shop. Unlike the Chinese
restaurant she has no generator, so she stops when it gets dark.

As the head of security for an international agency put it: "Salary scales
are a real problem. We pay $3 a day for unskilled labor. I can get a good
cappuccino at the Dili Cafe for $3."

Given these problems, some local people have begun to give up hope that the
United Nations can fix their broken country, said Milena Pires, one of the
few expatriate Timorese who have returned to help rebuild.

"There is a growing impatience because people do see the United Nations
embodying all these ideals," said Ms. Pires, who leads a campaign to
establish women's rights.

"People see all these cars going back and forth and they think, 'If the
United Nations is doing so much work, why don't we see a difference in our
own lives?' " she said. "So now some have begun saying: 'O.K., wait two
years until the United Nations is finished. Then we'll begin to rebuild.' "

The view of one Western diplomat was only slightly more moderate.

"What everyone has to do is lower their expectations a bit," he said. "The
most they could hope for, I think, is to just get through, to keep the
political process stable, to keep divisions within the community to a point
where they are manageable."

If this fails, some people fear, die-hard militia groups that still lurk
just across the western border may try to stir trouble. If they cannot
reverse East Timor's independence, perhaps they can at least vindicate
their predictions that independence would be a catastrophe.

Small groups of armed men continue their forays along the border,
occasionally eliciting exchanges of fire. "The militia are still around and
they are still getting some support," said James Dunn, author of the basic
history of East Timor, "Timor, a People Betrayed" (ABC Books, 1996). "The
militia wouldn't exist if the Indonesians really wanted to switch them off.
It's a bit dangerous. It's tricky now."

One critical problem, as the United Nations looks ahead to an eventual
transition to local government, is that relatively few local people are
being given important roles in the planning and running of the
reconstruction effort.

Foreigners, rather than local people, have been named as district
administrators. And East Timorese deputies within the United Nations
structure tend to have little influence, officials here say.

"I thought they were coming to work with us, not us with them," said Father
Jovito de Jesus Rego, an influential young Roman Catholic priest. "Now
everything is being determined by outsiders. We have these big, big, big
nations here and it seems we are becoming alien to our own culture and
history."

But given its history of colonial domination, East Timor is desperately
short of the qualified people it needs to administer itself.

When the United Nations set out to create a court system, for example, it
found only 70 people in the country with law degrees, not one of whom had
been allowed by the Indonesians to work as a lawyer or a judge. Legal
training is proceeding on an elementary level, starting with the concept of
the presumption of innocence.

Under Indonesian leadership, most senior civil servants, teachers, doctors
and technical workers were Indonesians. Virtually all of them have fled. As
schools prepare to open later this year, high school students are being
drafted to teach. And given the repressive nature of Indonesian rule, a new
police academy is refusing to accept anyone who has ever worked as a police
officer in East Timor.

At the demonstration outside the United Nations headquarters the other day,
none of the young men demanding jobs appeared to be qualified for the
available openings as interpreters, clerks and computer operators.

The demonstrators were calmed only by the arrival of José Alexandre Gusmão,
East Timor's independence hero and its moral center. Don't count on
government jobs, he told them. He said Indonesia's bloated East Timorese
civil service of about 30,000 people would be replaced by a government
roster only one-fourth that size.

East Timor will grow on the basis of private enterprise, not government
make-work, Mr. Gusmão told them. "Just guarantee the peace," he said, "and
we will guarantee that investors will come to help East Timor."

Ted Loh, a potential investor who was visiting from Hong Kong, was not so
sure.

"It's too early for anything," Mr. Loh said. "They've got to give investors
peace of mind. Everything is still wait-and-see. One problem is land
ownership. The United Nations loves to say, 'Where is the document? Where
is this? Where is that?' But all the documents are burned."

The delays, the discontent, the confusion, the bureaucratic nightmares --
all may simply be "bumps in the road," as Mr. de Almeida of the United
Nations put it.

It is easy to be cynical about this, like the Western diplomat who smiled
and muttered, "Optimism is a wonderful quality."

But indeed, there is no shortage of optimism among the East Timorese, who
have so recently been rescued from a time of horror.

"We are really happy to have the foreigners here," said Mrs. Gago as she
sold grilled meat from a broken building, her hungry children sitting
around her. "The foreigners have made everything safe. We don't have to be
afraid anymore."

Xisto Soares, 23, who teaches English at a seminary, summed up his view in
this way: "For now in East Timor, just hope and try."

Mr. Soares represents that rarest of qualities here, normalcy.

With his excellent English, he could easily find a high-paying job with the
United Nations or a foreign aid group. But he said: "I love my students. I
will always be happy among my students. And also, this is my profession."


Louis Proyect
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