East Timor's administrative teething troubles

I wasn't really surprised to see news footage recently of a fairly agitated demonstration outside the government precinct in downtown Dili. The world's newest nation is by some counts the fifth poorest on earth on a per capita basis, and there are few jobs available, especially as UN staff leave taking all their lavish spending with them.

Moreover, the Indonesians didn't exactly leave a lot of infrastructure behind them. In another sense, however, East Timor's wealth is enormous. It can be measured in the joy of liberation from Indonesia's murderous rule, still palpable in the streets, three years after it occurred.

But liberation from tyranny was only the beginning, as was the UN-administered rebuilding program. It has largely succeeded in erasing the worst physical scars from the streets and buildings of East Timor's major towns, but the UN's efforts at building national institutions and effective governance have been much less successful (to put it gently).

My dealings with UN officials, as a lawyer for various East Timorese organisations, taught me that its humanitarian objectives are too often frustrated by an almost unbelievably inept, cumbersome and somewhat self-serving bureaucracy.

Almost all UN staff are employed on short-term contracts. They spend the first 12 months of any posting learning the ropes and currying favour with superiors, and the last year lobbying and intriguing with increasing desperation for a new contract. The result is that much less ends up being achieved than one would expect from the sheer size and extravagant cost of the East Timor relief operation.

I recently returned from a week in East Timor assisting a group of Timorese and Australians who are trying to set up a major commercial joint venture there, in a key infrastructure sector. The exercise gave me an opportunity to observe the workings (or rather non-workings) of the new East Timorese administrative machinery at close quarters.

The picture was a fairly depressing one. Despite the fact that my clients are well-connected in East Timor, we spent much of our time wandering around government departments on a mostly futile quest for basic information on some key questions.

What do the tax laws provide, and are there any proposals for change? What laws exist or are proposed for corporations and other essential commercial questions? There is certainly no effective land tenure law, something we already knew, and land ownership disputes are common.

Most of the government offices we visited were characterised by a remarkable combination of lethargy and confusion. Cynics may suggest that this differs little from Australia, but in reality the contrast is stark. No-one seemed to know clearly what their own job entailed, or have any clear idea of overall administrative structures or responsibilities.

After I returned to Darwin I discovered at least one reason why this was so. UNTAET had devoted a lot of resources to the process of developing a constitution and a parliamentary, court and policing system, but put almost no effort into developing the administrative skills and structures necessary to run the country on a day to day basis once the UN administration withdrew (as it now largely has).

NTU political scientist Dr. Dennis Shoesmith tells me that he assisted in presenting a one week induction program for East Timorese public servants dealing with basic principles of public administration. However, as far as he is aware, that was the extent of training public servants received. No wonder they are confused.

A deficient grasp of fairly basic matters is not confined to the ordinary ranks of the public service. When I was there, the court system was in gridlock because the Justice Minister had been absent on an overseas fact-finding mission since shortly after the May independence celebrations (some customs are learned quicker than others), but had failed to sign delegations authorising anyone else to extend or renew judges' commissions, many of which are now expiring. The lack of interpreters is also a serious problem.

When the UNTAET administration left Dili immediately after the May independence celebrations, the handover was anything but smoothly co-ordinated. UNTAET removed virtually all computers and cabling from the government buildings. In the entire parliamentary office complex there is now only a single computer with an Internet connection.

UNTAET also removed its large printing presses when it left. This makes it difficult to print legislation and government documents. East Timorese citizens travelling overseas have to make do with a laminated card as a temporary passport, because the facilities to create proper passports just don't exist.

However, not all the problems have been created by an inept UN administration. The political leaders of the dominant Fretilin party are mostly upper-class Timorese, who had the resources to flee when Indonesia invaded, and spent the entire 25 years of Indonesian occupation in Portugal or various Portuguese-speaking ex-colonies like Mozambique.

They do not speak fluent Tetun (the principal language of the predominantly rural Timorese people) and never learned Bahasa Indonesia. On the other hand, everyone under 35 years old converses in Bahasa, and almost all ordinary dealings in the larger towns are conducted in that language. Eighty percent of Timorese under 35 do not speak Portuguese at all, and few of the remaining 20 per cent could be described as fluent speakers.

Despite this, upon their return after liberation, the ruling elite insisted that Portuguese must be the official language. I suppose reluctance to embrace the language of their oppressors is understandable, but a less charitable interpretation is that the ruling elite wanted to reinforce power by ensuring that official business was conducted in their native language rather than that of the people.

Younger Timorese mounted a passionate campaign against enshrining Portuguese as the official language, but only succeeded in extracting a compromise whereby section 13 of the Constitution now provides that both Tetun and Portuguese are the official languages. However, Tetun is an almost completely oral language with a limited, basic vocabulary. All written communications must take place in Portuguese, despite the fact that almost no-one speaks or understands it.

Nevertheless, the executive government aims to remedy this situation. It has employed at great expense dozens of Portuguese school teachers (mostly direct from Portugal), who are accommodated in great comfort so they can teach Timorese people to speak, read and write their new national language. High school students are already being required to sit all examinations in a language they do not speak or understand properly.

My clients and I eventually managed to arrange a meeting with senior public servants who were able to tell us the state of play with business and tax law. Everything that was said had to be translated into three other languages to allow everyone present to understand: English, Portuguese, Tetun and Bahasa Indonesia. There were only five people present. We discovered that there is no corporations law at all as yet. There is, however, a draft bill dealing with corporations and a wide range of other commercial law issues (in effect a commercial code), but it appears to have been copied verbatim from an archaic 19th century Portuguese precedent.

The tax laws, on the other hand, bear the unmistakable imprint of the mainly Australian advisers who drafted them under the UN administration. Section 165 of the Constitution continues existing Indonesian laws and UNTAET ordinances in force until the new National Parliament passes new.

The tax structure and rates are virtually identical to Australia, a convenient outcome for Australian bureaucrats who did not want to see another low tax haven in the region. Others might take the view that an opportunity has been lost to attract much-needed foreign investment with carefully designed concessional tax rates. As an essentially social democratic party, however, that appears not to be the Fretilin view.

Despite its pivotal role in organising the UNAMET peacekeeping force that went into East Timor at short notice to stop the Indonesians from slaughtering the population in the wake of the September 1999 independence vote, Australia is regarded with mixed feelings by the Timorese.

Timorese people haven't forgotten the complicity of the Whitlam government in Indonesia's invasion, nor successive Australian governments’ self-interested acquiescence in 25 years of Indonesian occupation. Educated Timorese are well aware that Australia was the only nation which gave de jure recognition to Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor. I met an Australian lawyer at Dili District Court, who told the story of appearing recently in front of a Timorese judge who, on learning his nationality, said: "Don't expect any favours, Mr X. Remember that the only people we dislike more than Australians are Indonesians."

Additional resentment towards Australia has been fanned more recently, as our diplomatic representatives play "hard ball" over maritime boundaries between Australia and East Timor. The Australian concession of 90 per cent of royalties from the Bayu Undan gas field in the Timor Sea, and 80 per cent from the much larger Sunrise field, may well sound generous until you realise that there is a respectable argument that both fields are entirely inside East Timor's exclusive economic zone under international law of the sea.

No doubt that is why Australia has announced that it will not submit to adjudication of the maritime boundary by the International Court of Justice. Despite this, East Timor’s political leadership seem prepared to take a realpolitik approach, accepting that royalties from the gas fields will be almost the only source of revenue for the next few years. Making concessions to Australia makes pragmatic sense if it avoids holding up development of Timor Sea gas.

For all those reasons, I wasn't really surprised by the recent demonstrations in Dili. But they looked to be fairly good-natured, and that still summarises the general attitude.

Happy just to be alive and free, however poor, and however muddled a government administrative structure they may be blessed with. At least it's their own dysfunctional bureaucracy, and a large step up from being ruled by a corrupt Javanese military empire.