EAST TIMOR: Even as foreign forces arrive to try and quell violence and looting, East Timor is still staring into the abyss of civil war, writes Max Stahl in Dili.
While gangs of youths still roam Dili shooting and looting in sectarian attacks, the appointment, at President Xanana Gusmao's instigation, of Nobel-laureate foreign minister Joseph Ramos Horta as defence minister, appears likely to calm tensions in the divided country.
Gusmao and Horta have both the support of the army and state apparatus, dominated by the country's easterners, and are believed to have the respect of the dissident mountain people from the west who have fled the capital in large numbers.
East Timor has been staring into the abyss of civil war. Much of the capital Dili lies smouldering in ruins. Perhaps two-thirds of its people have fled to the mountains or to refugee camps huddled around churches or to foreign forces for protection from the gangs who have been torching and looting the city.
International intervention forces - 1,800 from Australia and further contributions from Portugal, Malaysia and New Zealand are back. This is less than seven years after they landed to save Timor from a scorched-earth campaign and slaughter at the hands of Indonesian military and militia and just four years after the United Nations handed over power to the leaders of the world's newest nation in an orgy of self congratulation and optimism.
Yet just weeks ago East Timor was seen as a model solution for failed states around the world. The world community invested about $3 billion here. The UN ruled this country for 2½ years, acting for the first time in UN history as midwife for a new nation and overseeing the setting up of democratic institution
When World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz visited in April, just two weeks before this crisis began, he heaped praise on the "functioning economy and vibrant democracy".
On May 19th, the prime minister, Dr Mari Alkatiri, was re- elected by more than 90 per cent of some 600 delegates at the first open party congress of the dominant national party and party of government to be held since East Timor was invaded and occupied by Indonesia in December 1975.
May 20th was due to be the formal end of the seven-year UN mission here.
By May 23rd, there was shooting in the streets of Dili. Within a week it looked like all-out war with the police fragmenting and taking on a divided army in heavy gun battles.
Within days young people carrying iron bars, knives and fabricated steel darts divided up the city in vigilante gangs. Looting and criminal opportunism soon followed.
For more than 100,000 ordinary people on the run, this is the cruellest twist. Seventy per cent of them lost their homes and possessions only in 1999. Before that they lost some 180,000 dead, about a quarter of the pre-war population, through war, starvation and disease in a 24-year occupation by Indonesia. Today it appears that they are back where they started.
For ordinary people it is bewildering and desperately depressing. But all-out civil war, which would make the current disaster look small, could still come.
The warning signs have been there to those who cared to see them, ignored not just by foreigners but by a government which may regret paying more attention to UN models than to its own history and people.
The trouble began in the army, the core and cradle of East Timor's independence movement.
The UN and bilateral agencies were concerned to build a non-political army. They championed the renaming of the East Timor Defence Forces. They commissioned a report from King's College London on the threat profile and an appropriate force posture and oversaw recruitment to create a strictly professional army along European lines.
But Falintil, the armed forces for the liberation of East Timor, which survived 24 years of struggle against overwhelming odds, was an alliance of regional and ethnic groups whose victory came not so much through force of fire-power, as through politics.
Commanders worked with their local communities, learning to listen and lead a grassroots mass movement.
In post-independence East Timor, Falintil's history connected it to the people - for good and ill - far more closely than the recent UN-approved institutions of parliament, government, judiciary and police.
From the first recruitment into the new army, some communities felt undervalued as others were over-represented. Some veterans were ignored while sons of pro-Indonesian families - even militia - were preferred.
The stresses emerged in bitter internal conflicts. Earlier this year, almost half the army walked out accusing key commanders of abuse and regional "discrimination" in promotions and disciplinary matters.
On UN military legal advice, 595 striking soldiers were fired when they refused to return to barracks. Young people from soldiers' families and communities and then marginal political groups flocked to a week-long protest staged by the dissident soldiers. Dr Alkatiri and the speaker of parliament made no move to meet them.
The sacked soldiers and their backers embarked on a wrecking spree, attacking government buildings and torching homes.
The UN-trained police force scattered. Some stood by, some fired indiscriminately into the crowd, taking sides in the melee. Dr Alkatiri - a returned exile not popular with many veterans and young people - called in the loyal army who drove their former colleagues and their supporters into the hills in a day and a night of terror, where the fugitives claim dozens died.
The dissidents from the west fled to their home districts alleging a massacre by the easterners, more soldiers defected and were joined by many western police. Amid clashes, more than half the population of the capital followed seeking shelter in their regions of origin and giving political substance to the soldiers' claims to represent the popular will.
Through these events over the past month, the institutions created, advised or supported by the UN and then handed to the independent government have failed.
Some, like the police, fragmented and evaporated, others like the parliament and the justice system, called upon to investigate abuses, remained on the sidelines. Most of the ministries were abandoned and even the party congress of East Timor's governing party Fretelin - once a great grassroots force but which was revived top down after many years in cold storage - failed to explore or debate the issue.
Today the alienated gangs of young people, who are turning to looting and sectarian burning and killing, and the dissident soldiers in the mountains are the ones talking grassroots politics, and demanding the dissolution of the government.
International forces are back to hold the line to give time for a debate to happen which the western-style political institutions they laboured to nurture failed to hold.
Max Stahl is a journalist and freelance documentary film-maker