EAST Timor was supposed to be a United Nations success story. Yet in recent weeks, a mere four years into its journey as an independent nation, it has exploded into violence, exhibiting many of the symptoms of state failure. Foreign troops — thus far mainly Australian — are back patrolling the streets of Dili, the capital, less than a year after the last of the UN peacekeepers left the little country. What went wrong?

The immediate cause of the unrest was evidently the dismissal in March of 600 soldiers after they went on strike, complaining of discrimination, and defied orders to return to their posts. They took their weapons with them. In many countries the defection of 600 troops would have been considered a relatively minor rebellion. In East Timor it meant depletion of the military by about 40 per cent, with the standing army reduced to 800 soldiers.

Apparently the rebels’ chief gripe was that troops and officers from the east of the country were being favoured for promotion and the like. Hardly anyone outside the country would hitherto even have been aware of any sort of ethnic divide; for the past three decades, the primary dichotomy has been between East Timorese and Indonesians. It is more than likely, however, that the differences that have surfaced — and which have now affected the rest of the population — are a symptom rather than the cause of East Timor’s woes.

The nation was born in extreme poverty: in its infancy it was designated the poorest country in Asia. Drought-prone East Timor has an almost exclusively agrarian economy, and the current level of unemployment is about 40 per cent. It’s worse than that for the younger generation, in a country where the average age is less than 21. The midwives that proudly delivered the baby showed far less interest in nurturing it. The level of aid flow, while perhaps not negligible, has certainly been inadequate.

There is the prospect of a steady stream of revenue from extensive oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea under a joint exploitation treaty with Australia, but it hasn’t so far started flowing. Besides, it is argued that the prospective income won’t automatically rescue East Timor from impecuniosity, because corruption has already set in.

The rising levels of discontent and despair are likely, in some parts of the world, to prompt the argument that perhaps it would have been best to leave East Timor under Indonesian control. But that would be patently untrue. Jakarta’s military invasion in 1975 led to the worst phase in East Timor’s modern history. It cost an estimated 200,000 lives — roughly one-third of the population. The toll was proportionately higher than that exacted by the Nazi-led Judaeocide in Europe, Pol Pot’s ruthlessness in Cambodia or the Pakistan army’s rampage through Bangladesh.

Before that, East Timor was a Portuguese colony for nearly 400 years. For a while Portugal controlled the entire island of Timor, but it lost nearly half of it to the Dutch in an 18th century battle. As part of the Dutch East Indies, West Timor was incorporated into Indonesia when the latter gained independence. By most East Timorese accounts, Portugal was a relatively benign colonial power: by and large it let the Timorese get on with their lives. After the Portuguese overthrew the successors of the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar, Lisbon lost little time in divesting itself of its colonies, notably Angola, Mozambique and East Timor.

In all three cases, liberation led to civil war. It dragged on for decades in Angola, which, along with Mozambique, became a proxy war zone for the superpowers. (At one point, Cuban military assistance proved crucial in thwarting a South African invasion of Angola.) Neither the Soviet Union nor China showed much interest in East Timor. However, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), like most liberation movements at the time, was deemed vaguely Marxist in orientation. It also happened to be the most popular faction. This helped Indonesia to project East Timor as a potential communist state. Australia was wary of the prospect; the United States was even more paranoid about the idea in the wake of its final defeat in Indochina earlier that year.

Ten years previously, the US and Britain had secretly collaborated with Suharto and other generals in their “war against communism” — which in those days was de rigueur for would-be western allies, just as the “war against terror” is today. The Indonesian armed forces killed an estimated one million people, sometimes acting on lists drawn up by the US embassy; many of the details (and mass graves) have begun to emerge only in the post-Suharto era.

In 1975, the US, Britain and Australia were keen on Suharto occupying East Timor. Privately, they indicated as much; and the US didn’t even bother to issue any strident public protestations or pretend to have been taken by surprise.

Suharto launched his invasion on the very day US president Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Indonesia after a two-day state visit.

This continued, on and off, for nearly a quarter of a century. Even when Indonesia’s post-Suharto president B.J. Habibie agreed to a referendum in 1999, the Indonesian army, or TNI, embarked on a full-fledged intimidation campaign aimed at coercing the East Timorese into rejecting independence. Among the most vociferous supporters of the TNI’s role in those years was the then US ambassador to Jakarta, a gentleman by the name of Paul Wolfowitz.

Fortunately, the UN was called upon to organise the referendum. More than 90 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote, and 78 per cent of them opted for independence. That proved to be the signal for a final paroxysm of punishment by the TNI and allied thugs; it left 1,000 dead and destroyed much of the infrastructure before an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force was deployed.

That last blow helped to guarantee that East Timor’s rebirth as an independent nation would be an extraordinarily painful affair. In all likelihood it would all have been rather different if Fretilin’s declaration of independence in November 1975 had led directly to statehood. Western military intervention would not have been required to achieve that objective. Washington and Canberra were well aware at the time that Suharto, who basked in western adulation and was heavily reliant on western arms sales, was extremely nervous about the possibility of annoying his benefactors. A stern frown from Uncle Sam would probably have sufficed to deter him from barging into East Timor.

The past may be another country, but it is hardly surprising that the fragile shoulders of a very young nation are weighed down by the burden. Instead of demanding any sort of compensation or reparations from Indonesia, the East Timorese leadership has made every effort to be accommodating: Xanana Gusmao, the popular and charismatic president of East Timor, who once led Fretilin’s armed wing, Falintil, and spent several years in an Indonesian prison, went as far as to publicly embrace TNI chief General Wiranto. Under Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia has made some effort to try a few of those held responsible for the most egregious human rights abuses in East Timor, but hardly any convictions have been secured.

It is also important to remember that Fretilin had no experience of governance when it was thrust into that role: as many countries have discovered, there’s a vast difference between leading an independence movement and running a country.

Furthermore, there are — perhaps inevitably — factions within Fretilin, and in the opinion of some observers the present unrest is driven more by political differences than by ethnic divisions. Jose Ramos Horta, the foreign minister, hasn’t been particularly adept at disguising his prime ministerial ambitions. The incumbent prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, is frequently described in western news reports as aloof and unpopular.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Ramos Horta lived in Australia and the US during the years of Indonesian occupation; Alkatiri spent his years of exile in Mozambique. Ramos Horta has been as gung-ho as George W. Bush or John Howard about the war against Iraq. Alkatiri, reportedly a practising Muslim (his ancestors were Yemeni traders), has been labelled a communist keen on emulating the Cuban model.

Australia — whose intervention force is to be supplemented by smaller contingents from New Zealand, Portugal and Malaysia — has formally adopted a politically neutral stance, but there is little doubt it would prefer to see Ramos Horta in the hot seat in place of Alkatiri — whose days, at the time of writing, appeared to be numbered.

Dili continued to burn after last week’s Australian deployment, with large numbers of residents fleeing the capital for safer ground. It can only be hoped that the reintroduced crutches will help East Timor stand on its own feet, rather than reinforce its status as a dependency. But that will require a concerted effort on the part of the East Timorese to demonstrate that they are decidedly not a latter-day manifestation of what was once condescendingly known as the white man’s burden.

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