Sat, Oct 23, 1999 page6

• Gusmao will have to win people back

  Independence leader Xanana Gusmao has returned to his homeland, but the recent horrors experienced by the East Timorese have left them second-guessing the man likely to be chosen as president of their new nation

  CHALLENGES AHEAD

  • Andrew Perrin / STAFF REPORTER
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  Sifting through the burnt-out remains of his home in the Dili suburb of Becora this week, Francisco Galvarres arrived upon a picture of his daughter, Theresa. She was photographed standing in the street outside their house, her head tilted slightly to one side and an impish grin on her wide, brown face.

  The grin, Galvarres said, was the way she always smiled. Before the trouble last month, it was his favorite picture of his 16-year-old daughter. Now it is the only photo he has left of her. He has not seen his daughter since Sept. 2, when her father told her to flee to the mountains with friends, while he stayed behind to search for his wife.

  Galvarres and his wife survived, but Theresa has not been heard from. He prays that she was captured by the Indonesian military (TNI) and transported to a refugee camp in West Timor, but deep down he knows she probably didn't make it out of Dili.

  

  An East Timorese man cries during a speech by independence leader Xanana Gusmao on Gusmao's return to Dili yesterday.

  PHOTO: AP

  Yet it is not just the militia or TNI he blames for the disappearance of his daughter. In a story now familiar in Dili, and other parts of East Timor, the people's anger for the events of last month is increasingly being directed at those people in which they placed their trust -- the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT), the umbrella group for independence parties in East Timor, and their armed wing, the Falintil guerrillas.

  "For 24 years, we supported them [Falintil]," said Galvarres. "We gave them our sons, our daughters, and we gave them food. Some of us put our lives at risk to run messages to them and tell them information of TNI movements. And in the end, when we needed them, they were not there to protect us. They stayed in the mountains and did noth-ing."

  The international community has lauded the decision made by the leader of both Falintil and the CNRT, Xanana Gusmao, who arrived back in East Timor yesterday, to order his forces not to respond to the violence inflicted by militia and TNI forces in the run-up to the Aug. 30 ballot on independence and its devastating aftermath. To have done so would have broken the terms of the May 5 tri-partite agreement on the ballot, signed by the UN, Indonesia and Portugal, the territory's colonizer prior to 1975, and may have provided Indonesia with an excuse to sink the ballot and then dissuade foreign governments from pushing for the deployment of peacekeepers to restore order.

  But realpolitik counts for little in East Timor right now, where the wounds from last month's violence are still raw. Gusmao, who won his reputation among the Timorese for his strategic leadership of the Falintil guerrillas in the mid-1980s, and then grew to mythical stature while languishing in a Jakarta jail cell after his arrest in 1993, clearly has much to do to win back the trust of the Timorese in order to guide them -- in conjunction with the UN -- throughout the difficult transition to independent statehood.

  "It is not just the decision to order Falintil to not use their weapons that has angered them," says Joaquim Fonseca, an investigator for Yayasan Hak, a non-governmental Timorese human rights group. "They are beginning to wonder why they were not told to leave the capital after the vote.

  "We could see that the militia actions were intensifying around the country, that there were blacklists issued by the TNI, and leaked documents suggesting Indonesia was about to launch a scorched earth policy. But everyone was overtrusting of the Indonesians and the presence of UNAMET [the UN mission responsible for the ballot], including the CNRT."

  Fonseca, the last Timorese human rights observer to evacuate Dili on Sept. 6 after the militia and TNI were in the process of burning Dili to the ground, had recommended in early August that an evacuation policy needed to be worked out in Dili, should things go wrong.

  "The instruction never came," he said. "There was no one telling the people to leave home and avoid being murdered. The people felt safe because UNAMET was here, and it had the backing of the international community. They didn't know how powerless UNAMET really was.

  "Xanana's decision was all about politics. He was misled by the presence of the international community and forgot what Indonesia was always capable of. It was a tragic decision."

  Such is Fonseca's disappointment, that during a meeting in Jakarta with Gusmao at the beginning of this month, he refused to accept a welcoming embrace from him.

  "I pushed him away and asked why he did not issue the order," he said. "His eyes filled with tears and he offered no explanation. But Xanana is our leader. The people will follow him as long as his voice reflects the deepest aspirations of the people."

  It is a sentiment shared by Francisco Galvarres. "Xanana has been the spirit of our struggle for 24 years," he said. "We will not turn away from him. But he must realize that things have changed in East Timor. He was not here for the worst time in our history. He must be prepared to work hard for the people."
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