Whose Agendas?

East Timor suffers under weight of world plans

Canberra Times - April 14, 2001 Jenny Denton

At 11 o'clock on a Thursday morning, a handful of people are standing around outside the Anarchist Bookshop in Newtown, Sydney, waiting to load a truck with food and goods donated for East Timor. Some of them have been there since 8am. Stacked in the warehouse are sewing machines, bags of rice and flour and cases of long- life milk for Tricia Johns's "self-help project", a wheelchair "for a boy named Elvis", bicycles, bongo drums and a set of encyclopedias for the Hadomi Orphanage, a mixing desk for Radio Falantil, tyres, a photocopier, a freezer and assorted tools for the East Timorese-run trade cooperative, FUTO, and a box labelled "crucifixes" addressed to Bishop Belo.

"We don't have any trouble getting the stuff donated it's getting it up there that's the problem," says Barbara, one of the organisers of the collection. This is the second attempt at shifting the goods from the warehouse to the shipping container which will go to Timor. Earlier in the week a truck organised through another company failed to turn up. Eventually this one arrives, is loaded and heads off to a yard in Alexandria. It gets there to find the container can't be located.

This is grassroots Australian aid to East Timor slow, chaotic, but committed. "There's tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars pouring in," says Andrew McNaughton, convener of the Australian East Timor Association and former AusAID worker. "You've got various levels. You've got the grassroots-type stuff, like people sending up a container, and then you have some of the NGOs with small budgets, and, of course, they're not perfect. But you've also got huge blocks of UN money."

In 2001, according to Koffi Annan, "the UN has cause to be proud of what they have accomplished" in East Timor. The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) report for July 2000-January 2001 outlines service and infrastructure achievements, from reopening 820 schools and the national university, to running crash-courses for diplomas.

Under the auspices of the UN's transitional administration, repairs have been made to water and electricity systems. Limited telephone, postage, radio and television services have been restored. District courts, a defence force and a police force have been set up. A registry of births, deaths and marriages was due to start registering inhabitants and issuing identity cards last month. Political parties have been established or re- established.

The UN-chaired National Council recently announced the date for the country's first elections. On August 30 this year, the second anniversary of the UN-brokered referendum on independence, the East Timorese will go to the polls to elect an 88-member constituent assembly. After broad public consultation, a constitution will be proclaimed on December 15 and on the same day the constituent assembly will be transformed into the national parliament. The world's newest nation seems to be well on track.

But scratch the surface of East Timor's "reconstruction" and the picture that emerges is a profoundly worrying one. As well as the persistence of chronic and debilitating shortages, raising questions of the efficacy of aid programs, there are serious questions about the bureaucracy, expense and paternalism of the UN presence and the appropriateness of the models of development being proposed and implemented by the UN in tandem with the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

In particular, the extent and nature of foreign investment, which is not subject to social or environmental guidelines, is a cause for great concern. The influx of foreign investors and comparatively wealthy UN and aid workers has led to the creation of a double economy and the perception of the UN as the new colonialists in East Timor. There is strong evidence of deepening divisions among East Timorese.

Many who were active in the struggle for independence, especially the young, have been marginalised in the influx of foreigners and returning diaspora (East Timorese formerly exiled in Australia and Portugal), and the adoption of Portuguese as the official language has locked them out of the political process and public-service employment. As evidenced by Xanana Gusmao's recent resignation as head of the CNRT (the umbrella group of East Timorese political organisations) and his statement that he would not become East Timor's president, there are clear signs that all is not well in the leadership of the fledgling nation.

This tiny half-island has been through everything colonisation, war, brutal occupation twice over. It has become an international cause celebre. And it has come to symbolise various things to different groups. To many, East Timor is an inspiring story of the faith, strength and unity of its people. In Australia, its recent history (though not the 25-year period when Australian government policy recognised Indonesia's occupation as legal) has been used to promote the Australian defence forces and to sell telecommunications. To the World Bank, East Timor is a clean slate to showcase economic development. To others, apparently, it is a new frontier, ripe for profiteering.

Whether the next stage of East Timor's history sees rampant free-market economics consigning the territory to a new form of colonisation and continuing inequities remains to be seen. A happy ending is not guaranteed. "If it was just one country helping us, we would understand," Robin Taudevin, an aid worker implementing the United Nations High Commission for Refugees shelter program, was told by a young Timorese villager.

In a contribution to the book East Timor: Making Amends? last August, Taudevin says that aid programs in rural districts are often underfunded, very late and of poor quality. The bureaucracy inherent in the UN system and big international aid agencies is compounded by overlapping levels of organisation and governance, and poor communication between them and local structures.

At the district level, UNTAET's overall control of the country is frequently "at odds in intent" with the leadership of CNRT. "It is my opinion," Taudevin writes, "that firm, if not formal, lines are being drawn in terms of primary governance of the nation and that there are too many conflicting interests pulling in too many uncoordinated directions." The fundamental problem of the transition, he believes, has been "the scant involvement of East Timorese."

In a recent interview with the Jakarta Post, Indonesian sociologist and Newcastle University lecturer George Junus Aditjondro discussed his impressions of East Timor after his most recent trip there in January: "I was shocked at the speed of investments pouring in; this certainly has a lot to do with the way Indonesia left East Timor this created the ideal bonanza for foreign investors, especially Australians from the Northern Territory."

In an earlier article, Aditjondro noted that Northern Territory Chief Minister Denis Burke, after sending his special representative on an urgent assessment mission to East Timor in 1999, had immediately fed the results back to the Darwin business community, which was assisted in applying for registration with the UN agencies and subsequently obtained 40-46 per cent of work in the disaster regions. "

Timor has been transformed from an Indonesian colony to an outpost of global capitalism with investors from Hong Kong, Macao, Portugal, Singapore everyone wants a piece of the reconstruction pie," Aditjondro says. "The World Bank says East Timor is a showcase in how to build an economy from scratch, thanks to the Indonesian military, but [rebuilding] also involves many other groups, so the Timorese are becoming guests in their own country.

"This is a more subtle and entrenched form of colonialism. The old colonialism was brutal. The new one is pervasive, filling in the gaps, leading to a begging-bowl mentality. If you're Caucasian, you're regarded as a donor and this applies from the top to the grassroots level; begging has increased, which is why the first English word for many youngsters is "Hello Mister", ironically now the name of a supermarket in Dili." Lansell Taudevin (Robin's father), who ran AusAID's East Timor programs for four years, says: "East Timor's got a very, very big uphill battle to face economically.

Its first priority has to be, of course, the needs of its people some of the feedback I get from friends and from being up there recently, is that people feel that they're worse off now than they were under Indonesia, economically. "There is very little change in the patterns. You're replacing the Indonesian-Javanese kind of investment with the carpet-bagger type of investment, which appears to be not necessarily dominating, but it's certainly a problem up there. I think a lot of the investments that are going on up there are very much short-term and when the UN and its entourage moves out I mean there was a figure quoted the other day there are 2700 four-wheel-drives and only three fishing boats. I think that encapsulates the whole thing in a nutshell."

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