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Why Timor-Leste?
After nearly 500 years of colonization, 24 years of Indonesian occupation and thousands of deaths, Timor-Leste finally achieved national sovereignty on 20 May 2002. However, this hard-won sovereignty was constrained by the new State’s heavy dependence on international community resources and the nature of the mechanisms used by the international community to pursue its visions of development. Timor-Leste provides an ideal platform for reflection on and further exploration of the conceptual framework underlying international interventions due to its status as one of the largest recipients of aid in per capita terms. The country’s small size (occupying half an island with just under one million inhabitants in 1999), relative homogeneity (when compared with other states currently receiving international development assistance), and the fact that both its political leadership and civil society have a genuine interest in building a strong and viable state were also factors in its selection. Timor-Leste’s population was unusually welcoming to the international presence after the violent Indonesian withdrawal. Indeed, expectations of the benefits of a UN presence initially permeated the popular discourse. In the 1990s in particular, East Timorese joined with international activists to campaign for a UN intervention in defence of the East Timorese against Indonesian human rights abuses and in support of self-determination. Initial support for UN intervention was also a reflection of the fact that it never recognized the Indonesian occupation.
I am also writing about Timor-Leste in part because, before the 2006 crisis, it was widely seen as a successful model of international intervention. Timor-Leste did not seem to suffer from the challenges posed by the continued presence of belligerents, and international development partners1 thought it was a relatively straightforward context in which the international technocratic development apparatus would have a high chance of success. In what proved to be a fundamental flaw in perspective, the international community considered that with the departure of the ‘enemy’, Timor-Leste had become a ‘blank slate’, somewhat naively discounting the existence of ‘residual’ conflict dynamics from centuries of colonial rule and 24 years of Indonesian occupation. Mari Alkatiri, the country’s first prime minister, told me that the international community believed Timor-Leste would “be an example to other nations”. This has, indeed, been the case, although unfortunately not always the ‘shining’ example hoped for, in part due to the impact of international interventions themselves.
Starting with the 1998 tripartite negotiations and culminating in 2006, when a political crisis led to widespread violence and displacement and the resignation of Timor-Leste’s first prime minister, this book encourages an examination of experiences at the individual and institutional levels. It seeks perspectives across multiple levels of society, drawing upon a wide range of voices, including input and opinions from urban and rural elites, veterans of the liberation struggle, members of the clandestine resistance, subsistence farmers, local religious leaders, young women and men, high-level government and UN officials and members of the diplomatic corps. I have tried to access voices beyond English-speaking elites in the capital. Given the relevance of the past in the shaping of identities, socio-economic relations, politics and culture, the book necessarily briefly explores two previous periods of political settlement2 interruption: Portuguese colonial rule and Indonesian occupation.
The argument
Timor-Leste experienced a series of turbulent political transitions from the Portuguese colonial period through the brief civil war in August 1975, the Indonesian occupation and the referendum that culminated in independence. It was also the site of violent confrontation between Japan and Australia during World War II. These experiences challenged and influenced social and economic realities, hierarchies and interests among the population, impacting the survival strategies of a mostly rural populace dependent on subsistence farming; they also influenced belief structures, as, for example, the Catholic Church became a place of refuge and resistance that thrived alongside strong animistic beliefs.
Given the superficial geographical penetration of Portuguese colonization, the Indonesian occupation was the East Timorese people’s first exposure to a truly unified state structure. After a brutal entry, and notwithstanding persistent human rights abuses which led to a conservative estimate of 102,800 conflict-related deaths (±12,000) (CAVR, 2005:44), Indonesia tried to ingratiate itself with the East Timorese by investing heavily in infrastructure, including schools, health and roads. They subsidized rice, provided inputs to farmers and, in line with general Indonesian government policy, purchased the output of agriculture production for redistribution throughout the archipelago.
While the majority of East Timorese rejected Indonesian occupation, the experience had a significant impact on popular expectations of the role of the state in contributing to community livelihoods, particularly in rural areas. The aborted decolonization process and brief civil war that preceded the Indonesian invasion had strained intra-East Timorese political and socio-economic relations and the social fabric was further damaged by occupation. Some benefited from their association with the Indonesians while others joined the armed resistance or clandestine networks to fight the military presence; many did both.
While it was to be expected that the minority who directly benefited from Indonesian rule would be unhappy with the results of the independence referendum (21.5 per cent of voters preferred increased autonomy within Indonesia), many others unexpectedly found themselves wondering about the benefits of the previous regime after the withdrawal of an economic system that had, they now realized, adequately served the population, even if only relative to the new deregulated market-based system. As the effects of the post-1999 collapse wore on, frustration and disaffection with the state and international actors increased as many experienced the new system as chaotic, confusing and competitive. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the international partners, entrusted by the East Timorese to guide and support self-determination, did not adequately consider the conflictual nature of transition from a largely and significantly subsidized agrarian society to a market-based system.
It is in this context that this book seeks to identify the pathways and mechanisms through which the international community negatively affected the development of the country’s political settlement, the destabilization of which resulted in the 2006 political crisis. The evidence suggests that, rather than playing a facilitating role in the comprehensive development of Timor-Leste as the newest member of the international community at the time, the attitudes prevalent in and mechanisms used by the international community disempowered and marginalized national actors, leaving them unable to actively and constructively contribute to decision-making. In so doing, the international community contributed to distancing the state from the citizenry, undermined the establishment of a social contract and prejudiced the outcome of the post-independence trajectory of the state.
Contrary to the rhetoric used by development actors, interventions, including, crucially, technical advice, are always political. As the International Parliamentary Union notes: “[t]he government budget is not merely a technical document recording revenues and expenditure … It is the political expression of the Government’s strategy …” (IPU, 2003:134). In Timor-Leste, the allocation of national resources, determination of development budget and planning priorities, and design of state institutions and legislative frameworks were presumed by the international organizations to be technocratic endeavours to be controlled by international development partners with the technical capacity to do so. But all these are highly political as they determine the winners and losers of government policies, and provide the framework and parameters for state action and responsibility, and thus its interaction with its citizens. It is not an exaggeration to say that these policies reflect and determine the social contract essential for stability and effective state-citizen and inter-group relationships. It is no wonder that fiscal and monetary policies, and the nature and scope of state activities, are universally highly contested political processes.
With independence, the international community envisaged the establishment of a small, efficient state that would offer a “strong role for the private sector in development” (Planning Commission, 2002:22). To this end, the UN and the World Bank divided responsibility for state-building and reconstruction in Timor-Leste. While the UN focused on maintaining security, establishing the public administration and capacity development of the East Timorese civil servants, the World Bank administered the multi-donor Trust Fund for East Timor (TFET) and, with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), was responsible for reconstruction activities. In addition to TFET, bilateral aid agencies also financed their own projects of interest, often through national and international NGOs and international organizations, including UN agencies.
The result of this delineation of responsibilities meant that international financial institutions (IFIs) dominated the underlying policy framework employed in Timor-Leste. Their paradigm was consistent with the World Bank’s revised private sector development strategy of 2002 which sought to “extend the reach of markets … with a special focus on measures that help micro-, small and medium enterprises … [while] improv[ing] access to basic infrastructure and social services through private participation” (Waeyenberge et al., 2011:9). This description accurately reflects the international community’s approach to development in Timor-Leste and these principles were integrated into the mechanisms used by the international community to direct the development pathways and strategies made available to the East Timorese state.
With the international community’s dominance over which mechanisms were used for policy formulation and implementation (including its monopoly on resource allocation) there were no fora for national stakeholders to discuss divergent policy frameworks or to challenge the dominant prescriptions. Instead, there was a chaotic international presence that divided national leaders as they competed for funds and influence. The interventions also failed to take into account the divisions within East Timorese society and the expectations of a population characterized by myriad cleavages, old and new, and who were still in the process of coming to terms with the traumas of the past, the structure and form of the new state, and how this might affect their desired outcomes. This was particularly relevant as former ‘heroes of the resistance’ returned, largely unrecognized, to rural life. What the new country needed was support for the negotiation of an East Timorese-led political settlement process that would address underlying conflict dynamics with the aim of preventing tensions escalating into violence. I argue that what it got instead was flawed mechanisms, which did not provide the necessary space for the East Timorese to negotiate and agree to strategies in response to the fast-changing evolution of the country’s political settlement. While certainly not by design or malign intent, it was in stark contrast to much of the policy-level literature and rhetoric by development partners in-country on participation and partnership.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “[f]rom a peace-building perspective, a key function of a settlement is to avoid violent conflict. For the task of building viable states, settlements are required to root an institutional arrangement in a solid elite agreement” (2011:10). However, this conceptualization of a settlement is far too narrow and could lead to poor policy responses, including short-sighted co-opting of elites alone. Indeed, the co-optation of elites is incompatible with principles of peacebuilding and the need to ensure that the structures of the state, and the relationships between the state and society, are supportive of a social contract based on trust, justice and equity. The definition of political settlement used here, therefore, extends beyond elites and incorporates the concept of the social contract. It is important to transcend the normative elite ‘tit-for-tat’ bargaining to avoid conflict and move toward a more robust systemic understanding that balances formal and informal institutions during transitions. It is also important to acknowledge that, although authoritarian regimes may exhibit outward features of a stable political settlement, when considered from a conflict dynamic perspective, autocratic arrangements should be considered inherently unstable. If violence is to be avoided, a political settlement must consider the state’s holding power, the cost to individuals and groups of challenging the established order and the capacity of the disenfranchised to mobilize like-minded constituents. Seeking a stable political settlement is therefore an iterative process of navigating and adapting to the changing social, economic and political realities, and addressing how external forces may impact these. Destabilization is thus made easier in the absence of a broadly acceptable social contract between the state and society. In this sense, I prefer Khan’s description:
Once it emerges, a political settlement is likely to be fairly robust in its broad outlines, even though it is inevitably evolving all the time. The configuration of holding power at the level of society is then buttressed by a range of formal and informal institutions that reproduce and sustain this configuration of power by enabling a consistent set of economic benefits to be created and allocated.
(2010:22)
Essential to the stable political settlement argument and its link to an equitable social contract is the understanding that in the absence of a suitable arrangement that satisfactorily incorporates a wider-reaching social contract among citizens, conflict is sometimes seen as the best option to alter the holding power of an individual or group, particularly when redistribution of resources and/or power is not otherwise considered feasible. Power does not lie solely in the domain of ‘elites’ and this book examines how non-traditional ‘new elite’ actors and institutions can profoundly affect political settlements. Even when achieved, political settlements are not static and require renegotiation over time to make a triggering event less likely to spark violence.
Historical evidence suggests that state-building and capitalist transitions are inherently conflictual (Cramer, 2006:205–206). If the shared objective of the international community is to prevent emergence of violent conflict, it needs to adopt a more explicit, human-centred and comprehensive approach to analysing how strategic policy frameworks affect political processes of transition. It must design the mechanisms it uses accordingly and move beyond the notion that it alone possesses superior technocratic solutions to complex socio-economic challenges. In that regard it can be said that today’s approach insufficiently departs from the days of the League of Nations, and Anghie’s discussion of the inherent contradictions with regard to trusteeship:
[The mandate system] simultaneously repudiates colonialism, but is convinced firmly that a particular model of government, of social and political organization, is valid universally and therefore should be promoted among, and adopted by, all peoples even when that model conflicts with the customs and forms of government found among those less enlightened peoples … The notion of trusteeship, central to the Mandate System, could be used to justify the continuing control of foreign peoples by presenting the control as being motivated by concern for native interests and a desire to promote their self-government rather than by the selfish desires of the colonial power.
(2001:557)
As in the past, the state-building model applied in Timor-Leste ensured that the international community maintained control over the political and financial levers of decision-making, thereby incorporating the newly established country into a global economy allegedly in the ‘interest’ of the local.
International interventions are fundamentally political in all circumstances. In Timor-Leste, claims of neutral technocratic advice notwithstanding, the impact of international interventions on the political and social spheres was particularly pronounced given the country’s high level of dependence on international financial and technical support, particularly at the early stages of the transition. The fact that international actors were effectively embedded throughout government structures and civil society institutions meant that they had a disproportion...
