June 30, 2002

WELCOME TO THE NATIONHOOD

ERIC ELLIS, Dili

Bob Marley and his democratic dreadlocks might be all the rage among the rabid cabbies of the Democratic Republic of Timor Lorosa'e but if the newly independent East Timor has a soundtrack, I venture its more more likely a duet of the the duelling banjoes of Deliverance and Pink Floyd's Money...unplugged and quite possibly unhinged.

Diplomats, rednecks, get-rich-quick merchants, do-gooders, journalists, religious workers, spies and various oddballs have turned Dili into Asia's latest and, indeed, wackiest boomtown.

Some are legitimately helping East Timor's transition to nationhood but for many the lure is the $A3billion of United Nations money that has sloshed through East Timor since the Indonesians left it in flames in 1999.

"I find it quite rapacious here," says a disgusted Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel laureate and East Timor's foreign minister. "Many of these people are simply opportunists who will leave when the UN leave. They do not have East Timor's interests at heart."

For a taste of Dili's strange society, think of a fruity blend of Northern Territorian redneck, Nimbin hippy, a touch of Mediterranean "dolce vita" and a whiff of Angola, post-civil war. Then add Washington power politics and Asian values. And when it all warms up, as it does daily in the sweltering 36 degree heat, one thing is clear. Dili is no place to take your holidays.

"I'm kind of used to it but it is quite a bizarre place," said 30-year-old Canadian lawyer Catherine McKenna, now finishing a two-year stint negotiating East Timor's oil treaties with Australia and Indonesia. She relishes business trips to Darwin "because I can be guaranteed a hot shower".

Despite the privations, being in the 10,000-strong UN authority has its advantages. Daily allowances run to $US100-150 on top of attractive salaries paid in US dollars, in a land where 60% of its 800,000 people get by on less than $US2 a day. One American UN worker, a veteran of the 1993 mission in Cambodia, noted that "the personal savings rate of UN people is higher here than in Cambodia because there's nothing really to spend it on".

Dili has become one of those places where people spy each other across the crowded beer garden of the Hotel Dili and ponder why the other is there. 

Take Peter, for example, a fortysomething, bald and gay performance artist. He is here spending part of a $A20 million university grant his Sydney-based theatre group received to spread the word of the Brazilian activist Augusto Boal. In the 1960s he founded a leftist movement called the Theatre of the Oppressed, which sought to relieve the Brazilian peasantry of their suffering by the panacea of street theatre. Earnest Peter and his batik-clad troupe are convinced that what the East Timorese need after 24 years of Indonesian rule, and several centuries of Portuguese neglect and subjugation before that, are the Thoughts of Boal "to relieve their inner suffering and equip them for the complexities of modern life as an independent nation".

Across the beer garden are the tattooed Hard Men from Darwin, who clearly think inner suffering is better relieved by a half-a-dozen VBs after a day's hard work "shiftin' pallets" on the port. After more beers they reckon, loudly, that East Timor needs saving from the likes of Peter the "poofter".

I'd seen the same six blokes saunter into the Dili at about seven each evening, filthy after a day's pallet-shiftin and scowling at anyone who wasn't wearing singlets and Stubbies, which was everyone but them. They'd slap cash on the bar, and beers and burgers suddenly appeared. That went on every night into the small hours, whereupon several adjourned with remaining cans to the "lounge" - a rattan chair and table - emptying them before some sleep and another day's shiftin' pallets.

The Hotel Dili competes with the rugged Dili Club, a pimple on the city's seafront embassy row, a few doors from the official residence of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the suave Brazilian who heads the UN mission. At the Dili Club's open-air bar, the beers are cold, the Chiko Rolls hot, the drinkers hard-core and the bar furniture plastic, just in case things get out of hand.

Dili has other attractions. Famous are the two saltwater crocodiles, Antonio and Maria, guarding the convent in Dili's heavily Catholicised suburb of Motael. They previously protected Dili's Indonesian military commandant until the convent's priests liberated them in 1999.

And famous too is Chinese-run City Café, a refuge for the latte set, particularly the unpopular peackeepers from Lisbon, or the "Third Portuguese Armoured Cappuccino Brigade" who swing by for coffee at least three times during a hard day's peacekeeping.

But sipping coffee is at least a recreational advance on the UN's recently closed Internet Café, for two years the only place to get online in Dili. Here UN staffers with far too much time and money cuddled up to sexindia.com, sexspy.com and sexcentral.com, these sites being hot favorites of the UN's Internet browsers.

"You'd go in there to check your hotmails and you couldn't help but be checking some hot females," said one appalled staffer. These days, however, porn is only $US1 away, in VCDs sold by the myriad Timorese street vendors offering "jiggy-jig" to passers-by.

Sleeping is a status symbol in Dili. When people here refer to their "quarters", they're usually describing the way entrepreneurs have divided shipping containers into four, added beds and a fan and each sold for $US30 a night "hotel" rooms.

When the UN arrived in 1999, staffers bedded down in tents or converted shipping containers housed on a Russian barge berthed in Dili harbour, next to the rusting landing craft used by Indonesian marines in the 1975 invasion.

Since then UN personnel have moved to houses renovated with their allowances by their Timorese landlords, but the containers are still put to good use. Entrepreneurs rented them to house some of the 5000 visitors gathered for last month's independence celebrations.

An Australian bricklayer called Pete doesn't mind his quarters. Chatting over beers at the Dili Club, Pete explains how he drove his truck onto a Dili-bound UN ship intent on making his fortune. The work is hard and the weather hotter than home, he complained, but "geez, the money's real good".

And how does Pete find the East Timorese? "They seem orright but don't really have much to do with them."