|
By Marianne Kearney
JAKARTA: Last week’s protests in East Timor
were sparked by a group of sacked soldiers, but a combination of
disaffected youth, poverty and anger as the government turned them
into deadly riots, analysts say.
At least four people were killed, dozens of
homes were torched and thousands of people fled after a huge
protest, apparently in support of the soldiers, degenerated into
violence last Friday.
The government’s failure to quickly deal with
the soldiers, who left their barracks in February complaining of
discrimination and were dismissed a few weeks later, had allowed
dissatisfaction to fester, analysts say.
“In the beginning the leadership was immature.
They kept attacking each other,” said Dili-based human rights
lawyer Aderito de Jesus Soares, arguing that the decision to sack
the men before consulting with the military’s supreme commander,
President Xanana Gusmao, had been unwise.
“They kept saying, ‘It’s not a big
problem.’ When half the defence force deserts, that’s stupid,”
he told AFP.
Nearly 600 soldiers left their barracks—about
one third of the fledgling nation’s armed forces —claiming that
they were being passed over for promotion in favour of colleagues
from the country’s east.
Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri’s pledge to
launch an investigation into the claims and his offer to start
paying the men again from March—if they turn themselves in—would
assist in resolving the conflict, de Jesus Soares said.
But for the longer term, the government also
needed to look at ways of keeping East Timor’s underemployed
troops occupied, he said.
“If you have a whole lot of young guys in the
barracks who are not doing anything, it will create trouble,” he
warned.
Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta in an
interview with AFP before the unrest said that the sackings had
already prompted a rethink of how the defence forces in Asia’s
poorest nation should be structured.
The idea being floated was for East Timor to
have a force of two battalions numbering around 500 men each, with
one battalion trained mainly to serve on UN peacekeeping missions
and the other prepared for civic duty, he said.
Ramos-Horta later blamed the violence on the
Colimau Dua Ribuh gang, which claims links to the resistance
movement that fought against Indonesia’s 24-year occupation but is
accused of being no more than a criminal network.
Witnesses confirmed that members of the gang had
joined the protests. Still, only 13 out of more than 100 people
detained in the wake of the violence were former soldiers,
suggesting a confluence of triggers for the unrest.
Analysts point to East Timor’s deeper
problems—widespread poverty, high unemployment and dissatisfaction
with the new nation’s first government—as helping to stoke the
mob violence.
“Most of us after independence think we can
have a house, everything is easy. But after independence. . .
nothing has changed,” said Virgilio Guterres, the head of state
broadcaster TV Timor Lorosae.
East Timor marks four years since its
troublesome birth later this month.
The nation voted for independence in a UN-backed
referendum in 1999, resulting in bloody rampages by
Indonesian-backed militias who killed some 1,400 people and
destroyed most of the nation’s infrastructure.
--AFP
|
