Mission & Justice

25/6/08

East Timor’s Government is under fire over an agreement to turn more than a sixth of the country’s arable land over to a $US100 million ($A105 million) foreign-funded ethanol project. The Fretilin opposition has branded as a “land giveaway” a memorandum of understanding between the Agriculture Minister and GTLeste Biotech for a 100,000-hectare sugar plantation and ethanol plant. The agreement with the little-known Indonesian company guarantees at least $US100 million in investment in return for granting GTLeste a 50-year lease over “unproductive land” with an option for 50 years more. The Government is touting the move as a major potential source of foreign cash that could generate more than 2000 jobs. But opposition agriculture spokesman Estanislau da Silva said the plan was made with little public consultation and could threaten food production in the impoverished and overwhelmingly agrarian country.

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Paul Toohey; 25/6/08

East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta says Australia will never be the true gateway to Asia until it relaxes attitudes to visiting Asian students and workers. “I want to see hundreds of Timorese youths coming to this country, and yet right now we have 10 or 12 East Timorese students in this country,” he said in Darwin yesterday. “(This is) compared with Cuba, a poor country, one thousand times poorer than Australia. They have received, (on) full scholarships from Cuba, 700 medical students from East Timor.

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Steve Bracks; 16/6/08

Thousands gathered in the square in front of the main Government buildings in Dili, the Palacio do Governo, last month to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Democratic Republic of East Timor. There were fireworks, traditional dancing and a band. The highlight of the night was a spontaneous song by the Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao. For many in the audience this was a night of firsts. The first time they’d seen fireworks, the first time they’d heard their Prime Minister sing, and most importantly, the first time they’d gathered en masse outside the Government buildings without fear, anger and resentment and without violence since the chaos of 2006. The AMP Coalition Government of Gusmao is only nine months old and yet in that short period I have witnessed a remarkable transition.

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Stephen Fitzpatrick; 14/6/08

UN police in East Timor will hand over responsibility to the national force sooner than expected, despite a high-level report casting doubt on Timorese policing capacity. The head of the UN mission in East Timor, Atul Khare, will announce an “expedited” handover of policing duties - with complete control ceded by early next year - during an Australian trip beginning today. Some of the slack will be taken up by an increase of about 80 Australian Federal Police officers, announced in the federal budget as part of a bilateral policing arrangement. Mr Khare denied the handover meant a reduction in police numbers, saying UN police would remain in East Timor in an advisory role for several months.

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Stephen Fitzpatrick; 12/6/08

Controvesial former East Timorese defence minister Roque Rodriguez is to be dismissed from his role as security consultant to President Jose Ramos Horta, after a flurry of high-level cables between Dili and New York over the UN appointment. The sacking comes as senior security analysts in the country warn of a dangerous lurch back towards anarchy, even as the UN prepares for the “expedited” withdrawal of its international police force. Mr Rodriguez, implicated in the weapons distribution scandal that led to former interior minister Rogerio Lobato being jailed for seven years last year, signed a substantial deal several weeks ago, understood to have been for up to 12 months, to help advise on security sector reform. This was despite a commission of inquiry in 2006 recommending that he face criminal charges over the violence earlier that year, in which dozens died.

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Paul Maley; 27/5/08

The Australian Federal Police is considering pressing charges over the shooting death of Australian journalist Brian Peters, one of the Balibo Five believed to have been murdered by Indonesian troops during the 1975 invasion of East Timor. AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty told a Senate estimates committee in Canberra yesterday the AFP was considering a referral from the Attorney-General’s Department “in relation to the death of Brian Peters”. Mr Keelty declined to give any details on who, if anybody, might be prosecuted. “I don’t think it is appropriate to take it any further other than to say we are working with the department on this request,” he said. “Because the events are alleged to have occurred in a foreign country, there are a lot of issues about the gathering of evidence and where jurisdiction (lies), if it is possible, for any private prosecution that might take place.”

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24/5/08

East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta said no foreign elements were involved in an assassination attempt against him but criticised Australia’s silence on a bank account held by his slain attacker. In an interview in Sin-gapore, Ramos Horta also asked why the Australian police failed to question some Timor-born Australians who were in East Timor before the attack in February and immediately fled to Australia after the shooting. The 58-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner suffered multiple gunshot wounds in the February 11 attack on his residence led by rebel leader Alfredo Reinado and required life-saving surgery in Australia.

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22/5/08

The Catholic Church in East Timor is helping the government encourage thousands of people who left their homes in fear of violence to now return home. At a Mass on May 15 for 2,000 refugees preparing to go home in the coming days, Bishop Alberto Ricardo da Silva of Dili said, “The Church is always ready to collaborate with the government to resolve the IDP (internally displaced people) problem.” Parliament President Fernando de Araujo, other members of parliament and government officials attended the Mass at the Garden of Mother Mary from Fatima, a public park near the Dili harbor. Refugees have been a source of concern since 100,000 people sought safety from gang violence that erupted in 2006 and killed at least 20, following a dispute within the army. About 60,000 remain in makeshift camps, many on Church property, largely in the capital area.

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Paul Daley; 18/5/08

A week before the last election, Kevin Rudd placed on record his unambiguous views about a crime that many Australians have come to regard as perhaps the most shameful recent episode in Australian diplomacy. On November 16 last year, NSW deputy coroner Dorelle Pinch referred the case of the Balibo Five — the Australia-based journalists murdered by the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1975 — to the Commonwealth Attorney-General for possible war crime prosecutions. This move followed four separate Australian inquiries that amounted to nothing, and three decades of official intransigence here and in Indonesia. Finally, it seemed, officialdom had leapt the gaping moral abyss that for decades has underpinned a pragmatism-ahead-of-human rights approach to Canberra’s sacrosanct bilateral relationship with Indonesia. Justice might finally be achieved, damn the diplomatic implications.

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Sian Powell; 17/5/08

Naldo Rei was nine years old when he crept into the jungle on his first mission for the East Timorese resistance movement. Like so many in East Timor, he spent decades fighting for freedom. Now a 32-year-old public information officer in the troubled new nation, Rei says the 24 years of danger and bloody struggle have yet to deliver peace and stability. The tiny country is now riven by regional loyalties. Tens of thousands of dispirited East Timorese live in tents, fearing to rebuild their burned and destroyed homes. Worse still, earlier this year rebels tried to kill the East Timorese President, Jose Ramos Horta. “We wanted peace, stability, a democratic society,” Rei said. “We don’t want to live in violence and fearing everyone all the time.”

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