Unforgiving Politics

The Age

Saturday June 24, 2006

By HAMISH McDONALD

The world's youngest nation is struggling to hold together as rivals play their sometimes violent cards in their push for power.

IN TIMOR, there is the politics of the city, where Portuguese-speaking political leaders drive from meeting to meeting in luxury four-wheel-drives with carloads of bodyguards.

And there is the politics of the mountains, where bands of armed renegades mostly speaking the common Malay-Portuguese patois of Tetum sit out in occupied properties high above the sea, trying to parlay their moments of notoriety and threat into political and personal concessions from those below.

This week, the two forms of politics collided and merged. The immediate target was to oust the Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, who has held a whip hand over the Government in this nation of 970,000 since it was launched into independence by the UN four years ago.

Beyond that, there is a struggle against a bigger monster, the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor or Fretilin, the ruling party behind Alkatiri occupying 55 of the 88 seats in the country's parliament, the dominant seat of power under the country's Portuguese-style constitution. Believing the party was on its way to becoming more powerful than the state itself, President Xanana Gusmao and Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta have set out to diminish and tame it. Both once belonged to Fretilin, but had left by the early 1990s to make alliance with the more conservative Timorese elements who had attempted to work with the Indonesians and who, disillusioned with that experience, now saw an an opening for independence in post-Cold War international politics.

After four years of watching Fretilin run the new country, and culminating in the disastrous violence of April and May when the army and police fell into pieces and Australian-led peacekeepers were called in, the two leaders are now on the attack against their old party. Their thinking is that once Alkatiri and his authoritarian clique of former exiles in Mozambique can be prised out of state office, and the UN called in to supervise next April's parliamentary elections, they will launch a new, inclusive political party.

The objection is not so much to the way Fretilin was running the economy. The past four years have had austere budgets, and if anything an over-careful husbanding of the first oil and gas revenues coming from the Timor Sea, which Alkatiri has placed in a Norwegian-model petroleum fund invested with the US Federal Reserve.

The perceived fault is more Fretilin's Leninist organisation, its squeezing of the weak opposition parties, its nepotism and its pervasive contract padding and kickbacks, though even his opponents concede that Alkatiri himself is clean. With the independence mood of "Ita mos bele" (We also can do it) now dissipated along with the prosperity generated by UN spending in 1999-2002, moderate voters would desert Fretilin, leaving it with a rump of diehard radicals.

But first, Mari Alkatiri. By Tuesday this week, Gusmao and Ramos Horta closed what they hoped was a fail-proof trap. Since late May, they had been aware of what seemed like a fatal overreach by the Prime Minister and the even more disliked former interior minister, Rogerio Lobato.

In 2002, Lobato blackmailed his way into Fretilin's new cabinet by stirring up disgruntled former guerillas, such as the charismatic "L-7", who had not been inducted into the new 1400-man army. Their threats and blockades ended when Lobato was inducted into the Government as interior minister, putting him in charge of the 3500-strong National Police. "It was like appointing Al Capone to run the bank or Imelda Marcos to run the shoe factory," said one source close to Ramos Horta and Gusmao.

As evidence gathered this week by The Age showed, Lobato immediately began turning the barely trained police into a rival force to the army, which remained politically neutral with the president as nominal commander-in-chief. Police commander Paulo Martins, who had been a colonel in the Indonesian police, was soon at loggerheads with Lobato over the way his force was supposed to support Fretilin.

Events of the past few months are still murky. Why were grouses in the army ranks, by young recruits from the Western part of the country against taunts and discrimination by old resistance veterans, mostly from the East, allowed to fester until 591 of the soldiers were led out of their barracks by an officer under a cloud over a smuggling incident? "There was mistake after mistake," says Mario Carrascalao, a leader of the small opposition Social Democratic Party, a former governor under the Indonesians, and a scion of a sprawling landed and business family. The soldiers were dismissed in March, and then brought their grievances to Dili, sparking riots on April 28, in which the army fired on civilians. In May, Alkatiri manoeuvred against a leadership challenge in Fretilin headed by Jose Guterres, Timor's ambassador in the US, in Fretilin's five-yearly congress on May 17 to 19. Always the sharpest reader of the rule-book, Alkatiri got delegates to agree on an open vote, counting on the climate of fear and official favour in party ranks. Guterres withdraw, and Alkatiri was reaffirmed almost unanimously.

But in following days, Dili lapsed into violence again, after dissident military policemen under their commander, Major Alfredo Reinado, started firefights with army units, while deserting police and the dismissed soldiers took control of the Western coffee growing centres of Ermera and Gleno. Then Gusmao became aware of a mysterious third force joining attacks on the army headquarters at Tacitolu, on the outskirts of Dili, on May 24 to 25, in which 11 assailants and soldiers died. These were mysterious men in badgeless green uniforms, armed with Heckler and Koch 33 automatic rifles like those donated to the police by Malaysia.

Their leader, a local Fretilin organiser and former Falantil guerilla named Vicente de Conceicao or "Commander Railos" was ready to talk. With four of his 30 men killed, Railos told Gusmao his group had been armed by the police after a meeting on May 7 with Alkatiri and Lobato, at Alkatiri's house. The Prime Minister and Interior Minister asked them to form a secret Fretilin security force to intimidate political rivals.

By coincidence or not, the ABC's Four Corners program was also on the case, assembling damning footage of Railos and his ease of contact with Lobato, and releasing a small taste of the documentary eventually broadcast on Monday night.

Gusmao had been in contact with Railos several times before hand, and on Monday dispatched Ramos Horta to take a formal statement from Railos, who handed Ramos Horta impeccably printed documents giving chapter and verse of the group's alleged dealings with Alkatiri and Lobato.

Prosecutor-General Longuinos Monteira issued arrest warrants against Lobato, bringing him before a judge on Thursday, facing charges drawing a maximum 15 years' jail. Gusmao meanwhile delivered Alkatiri a letter, instructing him to resign or he would be sacked.

But after reeling from the President's threat, and strong criticism in the Council of State on Wednesday, Alkatiri regrouped. The links between him and Railos were tenuously demonstrated, any criminal charges would rely on Lobato's evidence.

While the Guterres group came out against him, the party core rallied. Meanwhile, reprisal killing started with the brutal murder of a 17-year-old cousin of a Railos deputy. Fretilin officials said the case was a "political prosecution" as well as a set-up, suggesting a link between Railos and the Carrascalaos, since the group had been camped earlier at the Fazenda Algarve.

The Carrascalaos ridicule the notion. If, alternatively, the affair was staged by internal Fretilin opponents, with the help of police elements like the border protection unit chief Antonio da Cruz, who handed over the HK33s, then many are surprised the legally trained Alkatiri fell into the trap. Even before the Fretilin congress, a Railos band had been intimidating Fretilin delegates with their guns at Suai, on the south coast.

Facing a stubborn Alkatiri, Gusmao played what may be his last wild card. On Thursday night, he ended a two-hour televised tirade against Fretilin with a new ultimatum: if Alkatiri did not resign or the party begin moves to sack him, Gusmao himself would resign. "I am ashamed of all the bad things that have happened," he said, adding he "didn't have a brave face to show the people."

But shame may not count in this island's unforgiving political culture.

© 2006 The Age

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