Timor-Leste | Happy ever after? | Economist.com
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“PEOPLE feel that they are sick of waiting, waiting for something good,” observed Xanana Gusmão, the president of Timor-Leste, a few days before his people voted, on Monday April 9th, to choose his successor. Few would disagree. Five years after the former East Timor won its independence, following a bloody separation from Indonesia and a period under the United Nations’ control, things still look gloomy.
Since last May, when the country’s security forces collapsed, a contingent of foreign police and soldiers, led by Australia, has barely kept the peace between rival political factions and street gangs. Tens of thousands of people, driven from their homes by the fighting, are living in tents in refugee camps. Dysfunctional government has kept poverty, child malnutrition and unemployment high, despite the money that has started rolling in from oilfields off the country’s shores.
Having suffered so much in the fight for self-rule, the Timorese seemed determined to exercise their right to vote, lining up outside the polling-stations before dawn on Monday. The UN mission seemed just as determined to prevent any trouble, flooding the entire country with peacekeepers and election observers. When the UN’s chief in Timor-Leste, Atul Khare, arrived by helicopter to inspect voting in Mahaquidan, a remote and drizzle-soaked mountain village, he found an orderly queue of around 100 locals, shepherded by policemen sent from Lisbon and Singapore.
There were only small outbreaks of violence in the run-up to the polling day, most of them quelled rapidly by the peacekeepers. However, the presidential campaign has only widened the country’s most damaging split—that between Mr Gusmão, the former leader of the armed resistance to Indonesian rule, and Fretilin, the former rebel movement’s political wing. Mr Gusmão accuses Fretilin of corruption and mismanagement. In turn, Fretilin’s leader, Mari Alkatiri, who resigned as prime minister after last May’s violence, claims that it was whipped up by Mr Gusmão’s supporters.
Timor-Leste’s presidency is influential but largely ceremonial. So Mr Gusmão is not seeking re-election. Instead he wants to swap jobs with his ally, José Ramos-Horta, who took over as prime minister when Mr Alkatiri quit. Throughout the campaign Mr Ramos-Horta—formerly the independence movement’s chief spokesman—has been seen as the favourite. His main rivals are Fretilin’s Francisco Guterres (also known as “Lu-Olo”) and Fernando Araujo (“Lasama”) of the smaller Democratic Party. Early results on Monday night seemed to confirm this but, if no candidate gets more than 50% of votes, it will go to a second round next month.
Shortly after the new president is known, a date should be set for parliamentary elections. In these, Mr Gusmão will seek the prime ministership, under the banner of his new party, the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction. Fretilin, which currently has about two-thirds of parliamentary seats, is furious that Mr Gusmão has chosen a name so provocatively similar to that of the National Council of Timorese Resistance—the alliance of parties, led by Fretilin, that campaigned against Indonesian rule in the late 1990s.
Both Mr Ramos-Horta and Mr Guterres are projecting themselves as healers and uniters. They and the other presidential candidates have signed a code of conduct promising to respect the outcome of Easter Monday’s election, or at least to challenge it only through the courts. But a substantial risk remains that the losers will take their grievances to the streets, testing the peacekeepers' capacity.
The underlying causes of Timor-Leste’s conflicts are many and complex. Mr Alkatiri’s sacking of almost half the army, for going on strike, triggered last year’s violence. But the strike had its roots in a simmering regional dispute between junior soldiers from the country’s west and their commanders, who are mostly from the east. The UN has been accused of laying the foundations for this conflict by mishandling the integration of former rebel fighters and pro-Indonesian forces into the army and police after independence. But underlying all of this are even older clan disputes, dating back to Timor-Leste's days as a Portuguese colony.
There were hopes, at independence, that the UN’s intensive, and expensive, efforts at nation-building would have reasonable chances in such a small and relatively homogeneous place as Timor-Leste. Alas, so far it is proving little easier than in, say, Afghanistan or Congo.
Timor-Leste | Happy ever after? | Economist.com
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