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East Timor
Primary Researchers:
Damian Grenfell and Paul James
Global-Local Database for East Timor
As a major site within the Sources of Insecurity Project, East Timor
is of unique interest as the last nation-state to be formed across
the globe. Interest in the period of independence has focused on the interlocking themes of gender, reconstruction and reconciliation. However, this work is part of a broader study into the transition from Portuguese colony, to Indonesian occupation and through the independent republic that Timor-Leste is today.
Following nearly twenty-five years of occupation, the Indonesian
withdrawal in September 1999 provided the historical circumstances
in which the East Timorese could finally move towards formal nationhood.
With the United Nations administering East Timor as a mandated territory
however, it would not be until May 2002 that the new republic could
join the world of nations.
Yet how was nationhood achieved during a period of intense globalization
and at the very time in which so many were predicting the very demise
of the nation as the dominant political community? Moreover, what
was it that propelled an East Timorese resistance, in all of its manifestations,
into a long-term and finally successful movement for national independence?
We hope that the answer to these questions, along with an examination
of the kind of nation that East Timor is becoming, will tell us much
about the experience of violence and insecurity in East Timor and
more generally about the nation in the world today.
In the case of East Timor, the conflict of 1975-1999 is examined at
the level of identity, integration and differentiation. From the initial
invasion in December 1975 through to the overwhelming destruction
of 1999, the experience of violence, repression and resistance plays
a central role in this study. As Irena Cristalis's book about recent
events in East Timor tells us: 'Born amid flames, pillage and mayhem
that surrounded Indonesia's reluctant withdrawal in 1999, it will
for years be coping with the effects of that destruction' (Bitter
Dawn, 2002, back cover). Generalizing across these images we
can say that in keeping with the bloody history of nation-states as
they were formed from the late-nineteenth century and across the twentieth,
violence and nationalism have been bound up with each other in the
birth of East Timor. However, questions of what this means for understanding
the sources of insecurity remain contentious.
Televized images only give only a sense of the violence, and its most
public manifestations, but they are of limited help in understanding
why the violence occurred. In 1999, what appeared to be anarchic and
chaotic acts of violence have since been linked to the highest levels
of the Indonesian state, with the militias funded, trained, armed
and protected by a military elite concerned with losing the half-island
they had so long tried to subdue. Reaching past the images of anarchy
and disorder to consider these deliberate and planned attacks is one
step in understanding the origins of this violence as a moment in
a long struggle. To some extent, the question of why and how the violence
occurred can also be answered by making an over-arching political-historical
analysis of the experiences of repression and a compulsion for self-determination
within a given territory. This would include a tracking of the development
of an East Timorese nationalist movement across the later stages of
Portuguese colonialism, and an investigation into the reasons behind
and character of the Indonesian invasion and occupation for 1975 until
1999.
As with the research on Aceh, it is also important to move beyond
the direct day-to-day experiences of those involved-the lines of military
responsibility, the strategies of the armed forces and the immediate
international machinations at work, and even further beyond the particularities
of Portuguese colonialism—in order to examine violence and nation-formation
and questions of identity, integration and differentiation. What is
it that makes people feel part of a community to the extent to be
willing to fight and die for it?
The first step is to ask how nationalist insurrection requires particular kinds of social conditions to be in place for there to be contestation that we may suitably describe as being national. The same question may be asked of national reconstruction. Such social conditions are bound up with patterns of practice that in turn give rise to a conception of a territorially bound and temporally unified community that in modernity has overwhelmingly taken the form of nation.
The next step would be to take account of the ways in which the resistance
movement brought together expressions of tribalism and traditionalism
with modernist expressions of nationalism. These arguments serve to
undercut the kinds of arguments expressed, for example, by Benjamin
Barber in Jihad vs McWorld. Barber and others have argued
that the locus of the dispute may be found in an anti-modern localism;
we would argue that this is too simplistic. Perhaps most importantly
in the study of East Timor, unsustainable contradictions between ontological
formations may have potentially framed the early stages of nation-formation,
carrying with it the potential for future sources of insecurity.
The main focus in terms of research publications has been directed
towards a co-authored book by Damian Grenfell and Paul James, Millennial
Nation: Violence, Identity and Nationalism in East Timor, which
will be completed in 2006. Millennial Nation draws on the
day-to-day experiences and changes in people's lives, from before
the first attacks by Indonesian soldiers in 1975, to the long guerrilla
war, through to the violence and destruction during the period of
the independence ballot in 1999 and beyond into the period of independence.
This on-the-ground analysis is drawn into a broader consideration
of the transitions in the structural patterns of societies—from
East Timor to Indonesia and around the globe—not only to understand
how East Timor achieved its independence but to also understand the
kind of nation it is becoming. The book tracks the transformation
of pre-national social formations in East Timor into the period of
independence, and considers what the role of an international conglomeration
of military personal, technocrats, international NGOs and global finance
has meant for how nations are being formed in the world today. The
study is wide-ranging, and covers various institutional forces such
as the international presence, as played out through the United Nations
in East Timor, as well as a range of international and local NGOs,
the reconciliation process and the development of key economic industries,
such as coffee and oil.
As part of its research work on East Timor, the Globalism Institute
has organized or supported seminars on Reconciliation (Reconciliation
and Colonialism in East Timor), Timor Sea Oil (Behind
East Timor's Claim for Oil in the Timor Sea), Australian Foreign Policy
(Revisiting September 1999: East Timor and Australian Foreign Policy and East Timor: Possible Futures in a Globalising World)
, and Women (Barriers to Women's Participation in East Timor's
Reconstruction, Challenges and Possibilities: International Organisations and Women in East Timor and Human Rights, Development and National Reconstruction: Timor Leste’s Independence in a Global Context). Also see East Timor Network for more
details of upcoming events.
For links to websites related to East Timor please see our Global Reach page.
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