East Timor: the Crisis Beyond the Coup Attempt
Monday, February 18, 2008 at 18:30 Richard Tanter
Richard Tanter, director of the Nautilus Institute Australia, writes that while the violence of the attempted coup in East Timor is shocking, it should not be a surprise. East Timor has been moving into multi-dimensional crisis for several years. He points out that the present crises in East Timor have at last three axes that have led to today’s events: rule by the gun; increasing and apparently intractable impoverishment and corruption; and deeply eroded legitimacy of all the major political players. Australia faces a profound dilemma of avoiding on the one hand a turn to East Timor, more than any other post-Cold War UN-led peace-building operation was the model of global stewardship. Unless the triple crises of East Timor are effectively addressed in short order the effects will be felt far wider.
The failed military coup attempt in Dili led by Alfredo Reinado led to his own death, the wounding of a number of his colleagues, and the wounding of one of the two targets of the coup, President Jose Ramos Horta. The violence of the attempted coup, while shocking, should not be a surprise. East Timor has been moving into multi-dimensional crisis for several years. For a variety of reasons, most foreign observers have been averting their eyes from this crisis, leaving their audience surprised when violence finally broke out again.
For the most part, foreign media attention fell away from East Timor once the moment of drama and crisis in mid-2006 appeared to pass – with very little systematic political and economic reporting by either journalists or the growing tribe of foreign academic researchers. Some foreign observers acted as if the three decades of independence struggle were still ongoing, with the same cast of villains and heroes centred on Indonesia and the Fretilin movement of 1975. Others looked only at the enclave of Dili and spoke only to the internationally-politically literate elite, ignoring the growing poverty and alienation of both the rural poor and the urban underemployed. Perhaps secret reporting inside government, especially in Australia, has been more comprehensive and responsible, but the activities of the ADF over the past year showed little sign of close supervision by a government deeply concerned to help resolve the fundamental issues and avoid turning bad blood to worse.
The attempt on Horta’s life and Reinado’s death will result in violent public clashes between the supporters of each. What is less likely to be correct is the prediction by some observers that once the rioting is over, Reinado’s death will clear the political air, take the steam out of the problem of the petitioners and the army generally, and allow President Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, who was also targeted, to get on with the business of running the country more effectively than former prime minister Mari Alkatiri. In fact, Mr Gusmao will be trying to govern in a vastly more volatile and threatening environment than that faced by Mr Alkatiri, and in the recognition that violence will surround East Timor leaders for much longer.
The present crisis in East Timor has at last three axes that have led to today’s events: rule by the gun; impoverishment and corruption; and deeply eroded legitimacy of all the major political players.
Post-independence East Timorese politics has been ruled by guns for at the last three years. It was the mutiny by the “petitioners” within the Timorese army (F-FDTL) that initiated the violence in mid-2006 that resulted in the government request for international military and police assistance. The removal of the Fretilin-led government and the subsequent electoral victory of the new government led by Xanana Gusmao took place under the guardianship of a United Nations-authorized Australian and New Zealand International Stabilisation Force. There are currently 780 ADF and 170 New Zealand Defence Force personnel in the ISF, and 1,473 police from some 20 countries in the United Nations police force.
Alfredo Reinado had a complex relationship to the remaining group of armed former petitioners, and the question of how to deal with both legitimate demands and violent intimidation remains, more than ever, the first task of the government. It was catastrophic to allow those plausibly legitimate demands of the ex-military to go unresolved for more than a year while allowing the wannabe warlord Reinado to continue swaggering around the country in a sinister media farce. Reinado was a highly unstable and somewhat charismatic thug who was able to accept the projected hopes of many of those for whom independence brought more disappointment and poverty. Reinado’s violent demise will provide little comfort. In a country where guns are endemic and intimidation by machete effective enough for many political purposes, a new Reinado is likely to appear in due course.
Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, Director of the Nautilus Institute at RMIT and a Japan Focus associate. He has written widely on Japanese and Indonesia security policy, including 'With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei Militarization and the Bush Doctrine' in Melvin Gurtov and Peter Van Ness (eds.), Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific. His most recent book, co-edited with Gerry Van Klinken and Desmond Ball, is Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999 [second edition].
He wrote this article for the Austral Policy Forum and for Japan Focus. Posted at Japan Focus on February 11, 2008.
