I recently visited Dili, capital of Timor-Leste, in connection with some work I’m doing for the World Bank. Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) has been one of the great experiments in state-building by the international community. East Timor was a colony of Portugal until 1975, when it was briefly set free and then immediately conquered by Indonesia. A UN-sponsored referendum in 1999 led to its independence, but not before militias backed by the Indonesian military wrecked much of the country’s physical infrastructure and drove much of the population into West Timor as refugees. The UN initially assumed sovereign powers as the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), and went about constructing a new government for an independent East Timor virtually from scratch. UNTAET formally handed over powers to the Timorese in May 2002.
This experiment in multilateral nation-building in one of the world’s poorest countries seemed to be going remarkably well until April of this year, when members of the army staged a protest that quickly escalated into violence between the army and the police (which largely disintegrated), and then, in May, into communal violence in which two-thirds of the population of Dili found itself burned out of their homes and forced into IDP (internally displaced persons) camps.
A large number remain internal refugees today. Many said that the violence was worse than that experienced in 1999. There was an IDP camp right in front of our hotel; we talked to some of the refugees there who said that they had tried to return to their homes the week before but were attacked by unknown assailants. The government called for foreign peacekeepers, and today Dili is swarming with Australian, New Zealand, Malaysian, and Portuguese troops riding around in the white SUVs typical of post-conflict situations.
The underlying problem would seem to be that Timor-Leste has not created a sense of national unity or identity since independence. The long struggle against Indonesia was led by Fretilin (The Revolutionary Front for the National Liberation of Timor-Leste), which started out as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party along the lines of the MPLA in Angola or Frelimo in Mozambique. The party currently holds a strong majority in the parliament, and while it has dropped its Marxist economic ideology, its leaders (many of whom, like Mari Alkatiri who was prime minister at the time of the crisis, spent time in Mozambique and other parts of the former Portuguese empire) still have a bit of the vanguard party mindset. They were unresponsive to complaints from a large fraction of the army from the west of the country that they faced discrimination from Fretilin-dominated easterners; in response to the breakdown of order the interior minister Rogerio Lobato began distributing arms to former Fretilin fighters. Communal tensions opened up over a perceived conflict between easterners and westerners (the rootedness of which is disputed by different observers), and is kept alive by gang violence between different martial arts clubs that have proliferated on the island.
The actual degree of state-building that has occurred since the “handover” of power from UNTAET to the Timor-Leste government is questionable. The finance ministry, for example, does not have a single Timorese lawyer, accountant, or economist on its staff, and is still largely run by foreign aid agencies that backfilled when UNTAET departed. Recruiting an indigenous civil service is absurdly hampered by the choice of Portuguese (spoken by only 10 percent of the population) as the national language. The country’s few lawyers were trained in Indonesia and speak Bahasa; many were disqualified by the requirement that legal decisions be written in Portuguese.
While the crisis forced Alkitiri’s resignation and replacement by Jose Ramos-Horta, tensions between the Fretilin hard-liners and the opposition are palpable and have not been resolved. The country will hold national elections next year, but they may stimulate division rather that yield national unity. After I left, Dili experienced another big outbreak of communal/gang violence, which seems anomic and random, and feeds suspicions that it is being fostered by the country’s contending political forces.
State-building is not a technical exercise. It is ultimately a political matter, and cannot occur when a country’s political leadership either seeks to politicize institutions like the army or police, or lets political divisions spill over into them. The success of state-building cannot in the end be divorced from nation-building, that is, creating an underlying sense of national identity that serves as a brake on the ambitions of individual leaders and political factions. This indicates the limits of what outside powers and organizations like the UN can accomplish in such situations. The UN did a very creditable job of overseeing Timor-Leste’s birth, and international forces played an important role in containing this year’s violence. But it cannot do more than provide capacity that will be in the service of local political forces, over which it ultimately has no control.?
