May 16, 2002
Rewriting Timor's past
Eric Ellis, Dili
A WARRIOR of the East Timor Defence Force stands guard outside the offices of
Aderito Hugo da Costa, editor-in-chief of Dili's Timor Post.
The soldier's teeth are stained with betel. He looks wild, as if he's just
stepped away from a jungle guerilla campaign. Indeed, he may well have. East
Timor's troops were mostly hard men from Falintil, the armed wing of the Marxist
Frente Revolucionario de Timor L'Este Independente, or Fretilin, who fought the
anti-Indonesian independence struggle for 24 years.
He's guarding his boss, who is briefing da Costa on security plans for this
coming week - East Timor's independence week.
Although only 30, da Costa's independence credentials are impeccable. His father
was a Fretilin fighter who died when da Costa, a political science graduate from
Dili university, was young. Too young to really remember a non-Indonesian East
Timor, da Costa is no less a patriot.
That's why, he says, in August 1999 he and 12 staff walked away from East
Timor's only other daily newspaper, Suara Timor Timur, (STT, or Sound of East
Timor). The paper's title provides a clue as to why da Costa, then the managing
editor, walked.
"The editor came into our office and said we weren't to publish anything
but a pro-Indonesian line on the referendum," da Costa recalls, referring
to the August 30, 1999 UN-sponsored poll that erupted into militia violence but
which gave the East Timorese self-determination.
A quiet and serious man, da Costa calls it a "dark experience".
The former STT has since been re-named Suara Timor Lorosae, acknowledging the
official Tetum name of the new nation. But Salvador Ximenes Soares, 45, a
one-time Indonesian parlimentarian representing disgraced President Suharto's
Golkar party in East Timor and secretary-general of the biggest pro-integration
group in Dili, remains as chief editor and publisher.
With his back-slapping ebullience, Soares is in sharp contrast to da Costa.
Soares denies there was a split in his newsroom over policy in 1999. In fact, he
says, he was going to fire the reporters because times were tough.
Soares has been a journalist since the 1970s, after the Indonesian invasion,
starting as a stringer for various Jakarta dailies. His STT first published in
1993, with support from the respected Jakarta daily, Kompas. Never known to
question Jakarta's activities in East Timor, it published until September 3,
1999, the height of the militia violence. Its pro-Jakarta stance didn't impress
the militia, which trashed the newsroom.
The STT didn't publish again until July 31, 2000, when it was re-born as Suara
Timor Lorosae. Soares is now busily de-emphasising his Indonesian past.
Sometimes he goes too far, as on May 1, May Day, when the STL produced a rather
bizarre sole page in English, a re-print of a Marxist text taken from the
internet and plonked on the page.
Still, neither da Costa nor Soares have it easy as newspaper publishers in East
Timor. At $US50c a copy, their papers' cover price is about half the average
daily earnings of 70 per cent of East Timorese.
The Timor Post began publication on February 29, 2000. Da Costa says the paper
has missed a few days and sometimes its 1500 circulation has been photocopied
rather than printed. There are 25 staff including 12 journalists.
Both papers receive aid in the form of computers and office equipment from the
US and Canadian governments. Australia's News Ltd, publisher of The Australian,
has provided training and plans to send a $1 million printing press to the Timor
Post. And then there's the cost of producing pages in four languages: the main
Timorese Tetum dialect, Bahasa Indonesia, Portuguese and English. News judgment
in both papers seems fairly robust, more so in the Post.
Despite their different journalistic backgrounds, Costa says the local media's
challenge in an independent East Timor is to adopt a more professional position.
The independence struggle has been won. Now we have to behave like an independent media."