May 19, 2002

East Timor tries to reconcile past - Megawati will be star guest at Sunday celebrations of independence

ERIC ELLIS, Dili

Four centuries of colonial Portuguese neglect, 24 years of Indonesian military occupation and 30 months of United Nations benevolence will come to an end at midnight Sunday for 800,000 of the world's most determined people when East Timor becomes the world's newest independent country.
Much of the territory remains scarred from the scorched-earth devastation Indonesia and its proxy militias wrought after East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence in a UN-backed referendum in August of 1999. But former guerrilla leader and current President-elect Xanana Gusmao is urging his people to reconcile the past and build a peaceful future.
"Independence is only the beginning," Mr. Gusmao said in a speech at a World Bank-sponsored conference for aid donors in Dili this week. "We must ensure basic needs are met and living standards across the country improve."
Timorese will see an important symbol of reconciliation on Sunday: Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri is to attend the independence declaration ceremony in Dili, defying sharp domestic criticism over recognizing her country's former 27th province as an independent country. As many as 30,000 Indonesian troops and 100,000 Timorese died in a 24-year-long guerrilla war. Megawati will be the star guest, even though she will be in Dili for barely four hours.

But more than 150,000 Timorese and about 1,000 foreign dignitaries, including UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio and Canadian Solicitor-General Lawrence MacAulay will attend the independence party, which is costing East Timor the equivalent of about $1.5-millionand has Dili buzzing in an 11th-hour frenzy of painting and sprucing.

Profiteering is rampant. Motor scooters are being rented for $80 a day and abandoned shipping containers have been divided into four "hotel" rooms each, going for nearly $100 a night. Internet access costs $8 for 15 minutes, and Indonesian airline Merpati has slapped a $275 surcharge on already confirmed $800 fares for the few flights out to nearby Bali after May 20.

But despite the official hoopla, East Timor has a daunting struggle ahead. It will not only become the UN's 190th member on Sunday, but also the poorest country in Asia and the sixth-poorest in the world, worse off than Rwanda and Angola. Economists with the UN Development Program say half of East Timor's population earns about $1 a day, surviving mostly as subsistence farmers.

And although Dili has become a lopsided boomtown and one of Asia's most expensive capitals, thanks to the six-figure salaries of many of the 8,000 foreign UN personnel in East Timor's transitional administration, little of that money has filtered to ordinary Timorese. Many people in the capital make a living by begging or selling pirated compact discs and local handicrafts to the moneyed UN staffers.

Much has been made of a treaty among East Timor, Australia and Indonesia to develop oil and gas deposits in the neighbouring Timor Sea. But at a donor conference this week (pledges were made for about $700-million worth of aid over three years), the head of the European Commission's delegation estimated that East Timor will be almost entirely reliant on foreign assistance until at least 2005.

About 40 per cent of East Timorese are illiterate and have never received a formal education. The grinding poverty is starkly evident at the Bairo Pite clinic on Dili's outskirts where, in bleak shipping containers converted to rudimentary surgery theatres, Iowa-born doctor Daniel Murphy and his local assistants have treated an average of 350 people a day without charge since 1998. "Dr. Dan," as he is known in Dili, earns no salary and relies on the most basic of donated medical supplies.

One recent day about 50 patients waited patiently outside his tiny consulting room. They were dying from tuberculosis, diarrhea and pregnancies complicated by the lack of basic care -- conditions all but eradicated in most countries. Life expectancy in East Timor is between 45 and 50 years.

"These people have been chased around and bombed and beaten up by the Portuguese, the Japanese [in the Second World War] and then the Indonesian genocide, and they are paying a very heavy price for all that," Dr. Murphy said. "We want this country to now maybe do it right, set an example for many other places . . . but I ain't holdin' my breath."

Across town at the Timor Post, one of Dili's two new daily newspapers, an armed warrior of the newly constituted East Timor Defence Force, his teeth stained red from chewing betel nut, stands guard outside the spartan office of editor-in-chief Aderito Hugo da Costa.

Too young to remember a non-Indonesian East Timor, Mr. da Costa, 30, is no less a patriot for it.

Publishing in four languages -- English, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia and the Tetum dialect -- the Post struggles to appear every day despite assistance from donors such as the Canadian International Development Agency, which helped pay for computers.

Mr. da Costa said there are few precious advertisements. And with a cover price of 50 cents (U.S.), about half what the average East Timorese earns in a day, its 1,500 circulated copies are read mostly by the elite or passed around by the foreign UN personnel.

But Mr. da Costa is determined to continue publishing to consolidate East Timor's democracy and check the spread of government corruption, a concern acknowledged by Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri yesterday when he asked donors to "rest assured we will only use the money for what it has been budgeted for."

After generations of abuse at official hands, East Timorese are desperate for its new government to honour that promise.