Repúblika Banana

In April last year, the incidence in Tasi Tolu became the focal point which gave many people the ammunition to justify their actions. A group of army mutineers claiming to represent the western East Timorese who were suffering from discrimination within the F-FDTL, staged a week long protest reminiscent of one organized by Timor’s Catholic church a year earlier. These mutineers had earlier deserted their barracks claiming that they were being passed on for promotions in favor of their colleagues from the east, a claim that does not stand up against scrutiny. The protesters made various demands which were simply impossible or nonsensical to even be considered, let alone be met.

On the fifth day the protest turned violent. It was a predictable course of event and appeared to have been a planned outcome rather than a spontaneous reaction. The protesters were licensed to stage their rally until Friday the 28th of April. When they failed to meet this deadline and disband, the government sent in the police to disperse them. Unexplainably, the police number onsite was inadequate making them vulnerable to attacks. The protesters reacted and attacked the police, setting fire to a number of government vehicles and breaking the windows in the government building. It was claimed that rogue elements infiltrated the protest and caused the violence. Fingers were pointed towards a shadowy group called Colimau 2000. The police acted albeit inadequately. Some people were wounded while the rest of the group retreated to the western outskirts of Dili.

Meanwhile in Tasi Tolu, where the army mutineers had set up their base, violence erupted simultaneously as houses were burnt to the ground and people were attacked forcing many of them to flee to the F-FDTL headquarters nearby. The attacks were carried out by unknown groups who claimed to be westerners against the easterners. They were enraged by the treatment their fellow westerners suffered in downtown Dili. It needs to be noted that that particular suburb has been inhabited by easterners and westerners alike since the end of Indonesian occupation in 1999. They lived side by side occupying houses formerly owned by Indonesian civil servants who left as Indonesia relinquished its sovereignty over Timor-Leste. It was said that this attack resulted from rumors that their western brothers were being massacred by the government forces (the police) in downtown Dili. Nevertheless the reprisal in Tasi Tolu was swift, catching many of the victims by surprise. However there is the possibility that the attack in Tasi Tolu had been planned to coincide with the events in downtown Dili to further stretch police resources.

While retreating towards Tasi Tolu, the protesting mutineers were attacked at the Comoro market. Days earlier some of the army mutineers attacked market stalls belonging to the easterners in Taibessi. So this attack against them in Comoro may have come as a reprisal for their earlier attacks. These incidents, initially dismissed by almost everyone as isolated and unrelated to the more clashes to come, cemented the foundations for a wider “ethnic” clash. Suddenly tension between the lorosa’e and the loromonu erupted.

As the attacks in Tasi Tolu got out of hand and the police force became overwhelmed, the government quickly summoned the F-FDTL to Tasi Tolu to help restore order. The F-FDTL intervention was successful in that they succeeded in stopping further violence. Up to 6 people died from the melee as revealed by an independent investigation launched by the UN. Some of them died in justifiable circumstances after posing a lethal threat against the F-FDTL personnel.

However immediately a rumor surfaced that the F-FDTL had committed a massacre in Tasi Tolu in which up to 100 people may have died. The reaction abroad to the F-FDTL intervention was furious and was being founded on this rumored massacre. This rumor was not only of great consequence because of the number of victims, but it was more so because the victims were westerners and the perpetrators were easterners as represented by the F-FDTL. Days before the army mutineers had presented themselves as westerners and attacked their fellow easterners. Now the F-FDTL has taken side and attacked the westerners. Ironically, weeks earlier, President Xanana Gusmão had himself kicked off the east versus west tensions by openly demarcating the easterners as being made up of the residents inhabiting the three eastern districts, Viqueque, Baucau and Lospalos, while from Manatuto, Xanana’s hometown, onwards to the border in addition to Oecusse, are the westerners. To many people, President Xanana’s speech seemed to suggest that he was sympathetic to the westerners, thus the east versus west divide deepened to a critical point.

In Australia this rumor was propagated by a number of academics on receiving information from their colleagues in Dili. This rumor was sent to Australia via sms by Dr. Lucas da Costa, a senior member of the PD party and a lecturer at UNPAZ; and by Jaclin Siapno, wife of Fernando Araujo, PD’s president, via email. Jaclin Siapno was airlifted in a special operation by the Australian army from Suai, a town in Timor-Leste’s southern border, to Australia, apparently due to fear that the "ruling party" was after her to eliminate her. Jaclin Siapno worked as an academic in Melbourne where she was also a PD activist. She holds Philippino and US passports and has close links with a number of academics in Australia and the US. Some of these academics quickly jumped into her defense and helped to lend credibility to her bogus claim. Despite skepticism expressed by many against this rumor, these academics went on the defensive and quickly went on TV. Jaclin Siapno landed in Australia just in time to make it to the evening news and counted on the support of one Damien Kingsbury, an academic from Deakin University in Melbourne.

After further rebuttals against their arguments in support of this dubious rumor, one particular academic said that it didn’t matter anymore whether the number was 6 or 100 because a massacre is still a massacre. In fact the real question that needed to be asked was the circumstances in which these victims died, whether they were 6 or 100. Was the F-FDTL intent on killing the petitioners? Was their operation in Tasi Tolu motivated by a sinister plan to eliminate the army mutineers or anyone else in opposition to the government? Today we can confidently say that that wasn’t the case. There was no massacre, there were no mass graves to hide the 100 or so bodies and there are no sinister motives behind the operation. The debate has been reduced to whether the government’s action to send in the F-FDTL was constitutional or not; or whether the F-FDTL was trained and equipped enough to handle civil disorder, a task reserved almost exclusively to the police force. A counter argument to this is that in exceptional circumstances where the security and the integrity of the nation, the state, state institutions, the government, are threatened by an aggressor, internal or external, the state can take all measures necessary to stop this from taking place. But this is largely an academic debate and any violation in this context is not a criminal act but an act born out of incompetence, misjudgment, etc. It can be resolved politically through elections.

However it is rather alarming that these academics never considered the consequences that rumors such as this could bring. Instead of helping their friends in Dili to keep calm and verify the rumors properly, they are actually reinforcing and fomenting these rumors. These academics were aware that the conditions in Dili were such that rumors of this type, specially one that involves hundreds of victims, could be verified so easily. In 1991 even under tight military control and without much foreign presence the news of the Santa Cruz Massacre quickly got out to the world. In 2006, Timor-Leste, in particular Dili, was saturated with the presence of foreign missions, NGOs, UN agencies, foreign press, and a UN mission, on top of an unrestricted movement anywhere in the country, yet these academics chose to rely on their biased sources rather than find alternative ways of confirming this rumor.

It never crossed their mind that the RDTL government’s decision to send in the F-FDTL was decisive in that it stopped a situation from quickly spiraling out of control and threatened to undermine Timor-Leste as a nation. There was the real threat that the clash in Tasi Tolu could provoke an all out war between the eastern and western hardliners and result in countless more victims not to mention the divisive “ethnic” wedge driven into the community as a whole. The resulting consequence could have been irreparable for generations to come. The fact that these academics quickly reacted and overreacted, reaching a decision to vouch for this rumor is somewhat suspicious. Either they have conspired with those in Dili responsible for spreading this malicious rumor or they are too emotionally attached to their friends in Dili than to stand as academics and unbiased observers. In either case, their stance as academics should be seriously questioned given that they may have been partly responsible for plunging Timor-Leste into this deep crisis, which resulted in the deaths dozens of people and counting.