Ifa Sousa's life began in the violent aftermath of East Timor's vote for independence. She was born at 6 o'clock in the morning of September 6th, 1999 to Sonya Sousa at the International Red Cross compound in Dili, in the middle of a crowd of several hundred people who had sought refuge from the rampaging pro-Jakarta militias. Ifa's father, Stevao, was not there; he had already been killed in earlier militia violence. Next day, Sonya and the baby were loaded with everyone else onto a ferry and transported to Kupang on the Indonesian side of Timor island.
Sonya's next-door neighbour, 19-year-old Nina Marcia, was in the same group. Nina studies law in Bali, and was in Dili when the violence started, and she too was forced onto the ferry and suffered terror and intimidation.
"In Kupang one of my friends was raped by the militia and is now crazy in the head," she said. Nina supports independence but her estranged father is an important militia leader. He rescued her and she and her sister got to the safety of Bali in Indonesia. Tragedy followed them. Her sister fell from a roof while putting out washing and was killed.
Sonya Sousa, baby Ifa and Nina Marcia are now back home in Dili. Their neighbourhood of cement-block houses in narrow lanes is full of activity once more, with dozens of laughing urchins who love posing for pictures. But their homes are burned-out shells and they all have heartrending stories to tell. There is only one room with a roof in Nina's house, where she lives with her stepfather and mother. Their possessions and property have been looted. At night they are plagued by heat and mosquitoes and have to listen to the tubercular coughs of children.
Such is the lot of most of the 100,000 East Timorese who have returned to the little capital. Many are afraid to leave their homes. "People worry about themselves," said Jilda Costa, who works in the Caritas office, which was Dili's main charity organisation before the city was torched. He and 32 staff are trying to organise an anti-TB programme without even a telephone line. "They worry about leaving their homes and how they will get back in the evenings," he said. "I had a sack of rice taken from my house two days ago. But I understand. People are hungry."
Not everyone is. The United Nations operation in Dili is well supplied. A four-storey floating hotel, the Olympia, has been moored on the harbour foreshore to help accommodate the global community. In the evenings it always crowded on the upper deck bar where UN officials, aid workers, journalists, civilian police, army officers and pilots tower like Gullivers over the diminutive East Timorese staff. Here, mobile telephone numbers are exchanged in a dozen languages over cheeseburgers and cold beer.
On the Avenida Sada Bandeira below, renamed the Avenue of Human Rights, crowds gather at the gangplank to gaze at the phenomenon or to seek casual work. There is a constant procession of air-conditioned four-wheel drives carrying officials from the transitional administration, UNTAET. On the tree-lined boulevards of Dili, Italian army half-tracks, Japanese land cruisers, Portuguese ambulances, trucks hauling Victoria Bitter (VB) beer, mini-vans supplied by Thrifty rental cars of Darwin, Australia, all jostle for space with ancient East Timorese taxis with no dashboards, which used to be the only transport. The most common registration plate is "NT (Northern Territory) Australian Outback".
The UN and the military have shipped in hundreds of computers, fax machines, mobile phones, and bedding, and many enjoy Scandinavian microclimates in their offices. There are, however, many who do not. Some aid workers, soldiers and journalists sleep on ground mats in patched-up buildings and prefer it that way. On a point of principle, Lt Col Derry Fitzgerald, the Irish army representative in Dili, declined to take a room assigned to him on the Olympia. The 30 Irish Rangers in East Timor also enjoy few comforts; they are based in a remote mountain village called Taraman near the border with West Timor and are frequently cut off by a swollen river.
But in Dili, supplies flow freely for the foreign community. In the evenings many crowd into colourful new bars and restaurants among the ruins, like Paul's Grill BBQ near the airport, and the open-air bar in the gravelled forecourt of the Dili Hotel where one evening I saw an intoxicated Australian woman riding the counter like a horse and shouting: "I'm in the KGB". Most foreigners adhere to the UN code of conduct (which states that "while consumption of alcohol is acceptable, loud, lewd or drunken behaviour is not,") but the very presence of an army of soldiers and bureaucrats occupying a city within a city makes a mockery of the code's basic premise, which "calls for particular sensitivity and humility". It states for example that "loud noises outside church during Mass are inappropriate" but the voice of the priest at Sunday mass in the cathedral last week was drowned out by a helicopter overhead. Another rule is that "ostentatious behaviour should be strenuously avoided". Which brings us back to the ship.
The $165-a-night cabins on the Olympia are in fact pretty basic by western standards and its restaurant is a factory-like canteen. Many visitors are forced to stay there because UNTAET closed down Dili Lodge, a hotel comprising 60 portable buildings brought in from Darwin by a 25-member syndicate headed by millionaire car salesman Wayne Thomas, on the grounds that the East Timorese landlord had no right to let the property. The ship, nevertheless, appears palatial to many East Timorese, and is as much a symbol of the new, benign, invasion as the rusting hulk of an Indonesian troop carrier from 1975 lying alongside. Xanana Gusmao, leader of the CNRT, the East Timorese Resistance movement and government in waiting, has asked that the Olympia be moved and Jose Ramos Horta has criticised highly-paid UN bureaucrats for behaving "in an arrogant, insensitive fashion" - though he made the point that having invited the UN in, they had to supply decent conditions for them to work.
The ship towers majestically above the CNRT headquarters, a two-storey Portuguese villa on the sea front with high arches decorated in hues of purple and cream which somehow survived the orgiastic nightmare of last year, as well as the Japanese bombing of 1942 (which also left Dili in ruins: it took the Portuguese two decades to restore). It was once the Chinese Chamber of Commerce - the faded words "Associacao Comercial de Timor" can still be made out under the paint - and also served as the Taiwan embassy in Portuguese times when Chinese merchants controlled 90 per cent of the business, and acted as middlemen in the purchase of grain and coffee. The few Chinese who survived the 24-year Indonesian occupation are now slowly coming back; they may be startled to find 10 policemen from communist China under Superintendent Li Ping patrolling the avenues of the capital as members of the 1,640-strong UN civilian police force, and incidentally answerable to Dili's new UN-appointed "governor", John Ryan from Rathgar.