Timor ba nafatin

Second impression on last Friday's seminar
"CRISIS IN TIMOR-LESTE: options for future stability"
held at the ANU, Canberra

During last Friday’s seminar I saw the usual struggle between a few who believe they have the answers (and in some cases, unfortunately, the means to implement them), and those who believe in mutual understanding and in a local, step-by-step approach. I definitively belong with the later.One of the key concepts when trying to understand what is currently happening in East Timor seems to be time. Traditions in East Timor have always been oral. These pass from generation to generation, kept and transmitted by the elders who are both a repository of memories and the central element to preserve order. This does not mean things do not change in these societies, but they certainly change at a rhythm different from the one we would like them to.

A fundamental aspect in any communication is understanding. I believe one needs not to be an Archaeologist or an Anthropologist to understand but it probably takes much more than that to both accept and respect. There is a visible lack of communication between most Western-type institutions, including those created locally, and a considerable part of the East Timorese society.

As seen from the interview below, published last week in daily Portuguese newspaper "Publico", Paulo Castro Seixas, a Portuguese anthropologist also believes East Timor is a huge puzzle that cannot be addressed in one single way. Is this too simplistic, a bit too naïve? Are there hidden agendas, both locally and outside the country? This is all possibly true but there seems to be a huge lack of common sense. Let us hope we can help overcome the current crisis and that this time, time itself is in favour of the East Timorese.


"Timor lives, perhaps, its first post-colonial war”
Paulo Castro Seixas interviewd by Adelino Gomes
Público

The transition in Timor is a case of success. But the connection between modern Western institutions with the local culture has been forgotten. The anthropologist Paulo Castro Seixas thinks the country will enter a critical phase and regrets that the Portuguese cooperation is unaware of the crisis’ deepest reasons. The translation of Timorese traditions, claims, must me declared “World’s Intangible Heritage”.

PÚBLICO: You teach urban anthropology and health anthropological sociology, and you have completed a PhD on islands and new condominiums in Porto. How do you go from urban sociology to a completely rural society, deeply merging into its Malaysian and Austronesian roots?

PAULO CASTRO SEIXAS: I was born in Angola and completed first class in Timor, son of a justice clerk and a teacher. I guess that influenced my career in Anthropology. My first anthropological work, as an undergraduate, was on Timorese refugees in a small community living in a building in Cacém [Lisbon’s suburbs]. On the other hand, in 1999 Timor gave me the chance to analyse the rebuilt of a capital city in a post-colonial situation. My project was accepted by FCT [Science and Technology Foundation, Ministry of Science], which allowed me to go to Timor 5 times, between 2000 and 2004. I went back again last February. I am meanwhile working with Médicos do Mundo [Doctors of the World], being responsible for these NGO’s projects in Timor.

P: What kind of projects do you coordinate?

PCS: I am responsible for a “waiting room” – a house for mothers we have in Lospalos, in the Eastern End, together with a health communitarian intervention, with a mobile clinic working in the district.

P: The ethnicity issue came then by chance?

PCS: No, I would not say so. My main interest was Dili. But on the several occasions I was in Timor I realized that to understand the social reconstruction of the city I had to understand the relations of the Timorese who live there with “the mountains”, as they put it – a ritual relation that is part of their identity. To be understood, the apparent modernity of Dili requires focusing in what is happening in the mountains.

P: To the surprise of many, the Timorese crisis of the past weeks has brought to the attention of the media an alleged dispute between people from the East and people from the West. Does that issue have any legitimacy?

PCS: I guess so. Societies have cultural divisions. It is evident that in this transition, coordinated by the UN and supported by NGO’s, what was done was the transnationalization [sic] of modernity through a Western package that includes the importance of human rights, free market, multiparty elections and the importance of civil society. People’s cultural background was very little taken into consideration. We should not forget that today’s political “class” [ruling East Timor], that went through Manatuto´s political corrector, where the Jesuit college of Soibada used to work, is a colonial generation class, urban and Creole.

P: The “Western package” was part of the struggle and integrates the resistance’s heritage. This “class”, that you critically characterize, is the same that organized the struggle and the resistance, I mean, was able to identify itself with what we can call national identity. Are you suggesting that when this class got to the power it betrayed the people?

PCS: I would not say that. We tend to focus in the resistance period. As the Timorese say, regardless of their cultural identifications, there was at the time a common enemy. Once settled that issue, there is – I would say naturally – a tendency for ancient differences prior to that existence of a common enemy to come up again, which may be more or less conflictive.

P: Those ethnical divisions were not very clear during the 400 years of Portuguese presence in the island. Or were they?

PCS: I believe so. What happened during colonial times was a double discourse, which pretended that the Portuguese Orient was more or less uniform – a way for us to understand our own colonial Umpire, from Minho to Timor. Portuguese Orient was Insulindic (sic): India was the centre and the other elements of the umpire had similarities and varieties. However, in its 1500 pages on the History of Timor, Luna de Oliveira [Timor na História de Portugal, 2004, Fundação Oriente/IPAD] refers that in the famous “pacifying wars”, of Celestino da Silva´s governor, the people from the East were used to fight the rebellion of the people from the West.

P: What characteristics they possess that allowed the Portuguese to use them?

PCS: The Portuguese were always in small numbers. Actually when it started, the “Portuguese” presence (I do not mean colonization, as this has no more than 60/70 years) was formed by topazes, or black Portuguese, mixed with women from Solor and Malaysians from different parts.

P: There was the administration, never the less.

PCS: From a certain time there was. The Portuguese used the tactic of dividing to rule [sic in Portuguese], using some kingdoms against others.

P: It is a typical colonial strategy. What divided the Timorese, from an ethnical perspective?

PCS: Already in 1864, Afonso de Castro writes in his book “As Possessões Portuguezas da Oceânia” [1867, Imprensa Nacional, Lisboa], that the struggle between Timorese kingdoms was endemic.

P: José Ramos-Horta said a few days ago to Público that the people from the East has never fought the people from the West.

PCS: Well, see the pacifying campaigns and the Manufai war, in 1912.

P: That is the use, by the Portuguese, of the East against the West, not a direct confrontation.

PCS: There are in fact no references to autonomous struggle. But again there is no History of Timor. Geoffrey Gunn, for example, uses [Samuel] Hutington´s expression “civilization clash” to describe the clash between the Malaysian and the Austronesian civilizations, the Southern islands, Indonesians, and the Papuan populations, Melanesians, that is, from the “Niger’s islands”.

P: Which one was there before?

PCS: Most authors say the Melanesians – populations of Papuan origins such as the Makasai, the Fataluko, and the Makalere.

P: How do you explain the two expressions that have been referred to recently within the crisis – firaku and kaladi?

PCS: There are several versions. A fundamental word in Timor is actually “depende” [sic in Portuguese, “it depends”]. The most repeated version says the Portuguese created the terms. When these arrived in Dili they presented themselves and people were “caladas” [sic in Portuguese, “remained in silence”]. When they went to the Easter End of the island, people turned their backs on them. The first remained the “calados” – keladi; the later, turned their asses – firaku [from the Portuguese “vira-cu”]. What matters here is not whether the story is true or not. When the Timorese tell this story they automatically associate physical and psychological characteristics to each one of them.

P: Which?

PCS: The firaku are more emotive, more scoundrel, more traders, and physically taller; the kaladi are more consensual, more hard workers, more reserved, and shorter.

P: Is there an erudite version of this story?

PCS: Not that I know. The word firaku exists in Makasai. It means: friends; us, comrades; ours. It would be rather strange that a Portuguese expression “vira-cu” derivates in a corrupted word in Tetum originating a word already existing in Makasai. What I assume is that the word is older than the Portuguese expression.

P: And kaladi, does it also exist?

PCS: No. There is a population group - Kaladis – from where the word may have originated. The cultural divisions and the way the Timorese manage them – through multiple mediations – show that those auto-denominations are transformed into hetero-denominations in which the meaning itself has been modified. For example, Tetum [speakers] from Viqueque started calling firaku to Makasai but firaku means “mountain people”, “rude people”. This way of using languages strategically is very Timorese. Translate to another language certain designations with other meanings, sometimes ironically and others aggressively, is a typical Timorese game. What I suggest is that were Tetum [speakers] themselves (Tetum comes from tetuk, “people from the plains”, the place of trade) who used those terms before the Portuguese, to disqualify the two big ethnic groups in Timor: the Makasai (the so called firaku) and the mambai (the kaladi).

P: What is the meaning of the terms lorosae/loromonu used in the current crisis?

PCS: The terms firaku and keladi adopted a synecdoche perspective, this is, they represent today all from the East and all from the West.

P: Evoking the old ethnic tension?

PCS: Which has in itself other tensions. In the Eastern End, for example, there is some [tension] between the Makua and the Fataluko…

P: Who to some, however, are not firaku…

PCS: If you ask the people from the East who the firaku are they may give you two answers: that those are mainly the ones from Baucau (the most rioters, the most emotional) or that they are only the ones from Lautem. The most common version identifies them with the East. From Manatuto to the East, they are firaku; to the West they are keladi. Manatuto is “land in between”, but if it is something it is firaku.

P: Complicating further more: immediately after the 25th of April Fretilin has came up with the idea (which was genius from the perspective of political mobilization) of the Maubere people, a pejorative expression from Portuguese times that designated the barefooted, the nobodies. Then and for many years, it seemed to symbolize the Timorese soul. The ideology has in that sense sublimated the ethnical divisions. Do you agree?

PCS: It worked for a while. That term, as far as I know, was created by Ramos-Horta. It was abandoned in 1998 when the T for Timor replaced the M for Maubere, transformed the CNRM in CNRT…

P: And in that way guaranteeing to the rest of the people and in particular to the local bourgeoisie (which always hated the term) a place in the struggle for independence…

PCS: But there was possibly something hidden there. Maubere is a Mambai term, originated in Aileu.

P: The geographical origin of the “Lusitans” [supposed “ethnical” group where the Portuguese are said to descend from] is the Estrela mountains [“Serra da Estrela”, highest mountains in central Portugal] and every Portuguese relates to that. For more than 20 years thousands and thousands of Timorese have resisted the [Indonesian] occupation under the Maubere flag. Dos it not mean that the term tried to convey a unitary pulse?

PCS: It worked, in fact. As it works in Timor the inversion: Maubere is a colonial term, pejorative, whose meaning was revolutionized. But why did they get the term from Aileu and not from somewhere else?

P: In 1975 Aileu was considered the heart of the resistance.

PCS: But why? And why did Falintil have its barracks there between 1999 and 2001? And why do we now have again negotiations in Aileu [between José Ramos-Horta and the rioting military]?

P: Is it the geographic situation, on the way to Ramelau, the heart of Timor?

PCS: Well that is precisely it. And it is not just the geographic centre, in a Western perspective. To the Timorese, according to the symbolism of the crocodile, every land has a head – which is in Tutuala; a centre – which is Aileu (with the Portuguese it moved to Dili); and it has an end – which with the Portuguese and Dutch occupation moved to Bobonaro. The term maubere hipper-valorises the nativism that is essential in periods of crisis, as it was during the war against [the Indonesian] occupation. In a similar sense, I do not think that these negotiations happened in Aileu by chance. All this relates very directly to the mythical symbolism of the territory. Although there is perhaps no complete awareness of that by the politicians, these pacifying rituals are occurring in something we might call the first post-colonial war in Timor. As Geoffrey Gunn explains, war in Timor was often ritual: they fired muskets from a distance; when they killed someone they stopped the war, had the funeral, etc. Other times war consisted in hunting half a dozen heads, followed by ritual. The present situation has various elements of a ritual war. For example, people fled to the mountains following a rumour. What is said to be real becomes real in its consequences, in a country where people live still pretty much in an oral world…

P: And mediated now, as we hear, by SMS…

PCS: That only means they quickly get use to modernity.

P: When leadership does not consider the East/West tension is it not, on the contrary, acting ahead and with ability, trying to preserve what unites the Timorese, instead of what separates them?

PCS: Leadership is acting within the way possible. In interviews I did in 2004 to several figures of the political elite, the answer always addressed a kind of an agreement that had been made during the resistance, consisting in the following: from the Eastern end to the extreme West “one single people, one single nation”. But the fact itself that this agreement has been made reveals that it was necessary, that there were divisions. There are reports on the internal divisions within Falintil.

P: The irony now is that those who showed a bigger predisposition to accept the occupation, the kaladi, are now challenging the guerrilla commanders, of firaku origins, who won the war…

PCS: This cultural division is very political. It is used constantly, I believe now too.

P: Do you believe that hidden agendas exist in this conflict?

PCS: Yes and I believe we will know about them later. Unfortunately our [the Portuguese] cooperation in terms of language, legislation and army and police support is not following this situation with a cultural analysis. James Fox said in 2001 that we needed to be careful because the FDTL First Battalion was more firaku than keladi. In Portugal no one knew what these expressions mean. Dwight King studied the 2001 legislative and 2002 presidential elections and also noted the firaku/kaladi division.

P: In what sense?

PCS: He detected, for example, that Fretilin had 67% in the firaku area and only 46% in the kaladi area. We, the Portuguese, are the biggest donors, we have the myth of CPLP (Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries) but we do not follow culturally those countries we consider ourselves brothers of and therefore we do not understand a single thing. I find that tragic.

P: And the Timorese leadership, do you think they understand?

PCS: The term leadership is a very broad one. A colleague from Brasília University [in Brazil] Kelly Cristiano da Silva, has detected several divisions. One is evident: those from inside [who remained in the country during the Indonesian occupation] and the ones from outside [that lived in exile].

P: What sort of solutions does the leadership have to solve this specific crisis?

PCS: One solution is to hide, not to talk about it, and transform the issue in a taboo.

P: However it was Xanana who first brought the issue lorosae/loromonu for discussion.

PCS: He mentioned the issue, probably in extremis, as it was too evident. The second hypothesis is, when confronted with the issue, “folklore” it. This hypothesis did contaminate some Portuguese commentators: my colleague Pedro Bacelar de Vasconcelos considered this issue in an article in Jornal de Notícias [a Portuguese daily newspaper] as an anthropological curiosity. Yes, but when it triggers a conflict it becomes the cause for strong political divisions.

P: Although you could see it as both a cause and an effect of, for example, a manipulation.

PCS: I believe so. The third hypothesis is to look into these identities without any fears. The Timorese, I believe in Tokodede [one of the local languages] have the following saying: language has no bone. In order to do a barlaque, the wedding ritual, old people spend sometimes hours talking. In a wedding between unfamiliar clans that talking about each one’s identity is extremely important. Who are the kaladi and the firaku after all? And within the firaku how many are they? This identification has to be done. First of all by the Timorese own intellectuality. In 2004 I suggested a research project to FCT, unfortunately declined, entitled “Firaku, Kaladi, Kafir”. These tensions…

P: …What is Kafir by the way?

PCS: It is a mix of both Kaladi and Firaku. It is a term that some people in Manatuto use for themselves. It means the centre of earth in movement. Aileu was the centre of the earth, it still is; Dili was the centre of the earth in colonial times, it still is; but Manatuto is also the centre of the earth. There is a platform of three points there that are rai-klaran – “the centre of the earth”. When these negotiations [of the current conflict] are done in Aileu and not in Manatuto, despite Aileu’s history, we are probably forgetting that for the Timorese the difference East/West lately is in Manatuto. In that sense the option for Aileu represents the “mauberism” coming to life. Well the term “maubere people” was emptied in post-colonial times. Nowadays there is a search for new terms that sustain the Timorese nationalism. It is up to the politicians and eventually the Timorese intellectuality to create them.

P: The term Kafir fits in that search?

PCS: Yes but it had no future. Kafir has a meaning in about six languages. It means thug.

P: Even stronger than Maubere…

PCS: …but that points not to Aileu but Manatuto, the land of Xanana (who was born in Laleia). There are myths there that say that when Timor’s first liurai [local “king”] was born people came from both the East and the West to attend the funeral, and that in his will he left the gold to the West, the tais [Timorese hand-weaved cloth] to the East and the throne to Manatuto, that became rai-klaran. I heard this story again this year. This means the Timorese, such as the leadership, are looking for a new rai-klaran, which besides “land in the centre” also means “world”. They are searching for a new mauberism that may be more Unitarian, as the term maubere was to become associated with the kaladi. In the discussions for the Constituent it was even said that it enhanced tribal divisions.

P: Sometimes post-colonial researches seem to be hostages of the past, creating more problems than those they aim to solve. Is the leadership not taking the chance to go back to a time of tribal constraints and regionalism, by making concessions to rituals and to the different regions that dispute Timor’s centre? Is nation building not related instead with being able to create forms to overcome past divisions and regionalisms?

PCS: That was attempted. The transition in Timor is presented as a success case. But it is notable now that there were (maybe some knew it already) some fragilities in the state apparatus that was being created. What I think is that this “post-colonial ritual war” is calling on the leadership’s attention to the ways in which it is building the nation and the State’s institutions. Declarations on the need to reformulate the army and the police point to that. We are entering a critical stage which will extend until the next legislative and presidential elections, in 2007.

P: What about Fretilin’s congress on the weekend?

PCS: It is beyond that. There may have been manipulations but there were former indications that alerted for the firaku-kaladi problem. Actually, a complaint for discrimination was delivered at the National Parliament, regarding the demobilization of several tens of military in 2001 and 2003. If problems come up several times during the years it is a sign that cultural divisions exist.

P: Do you see any way out?

PCS: I believe some mediations should me made. The Western political package should be combined with other elements in order to [obtain] an alternative modernity.

P: What do you mean by alternative modernity?

PCS: That countries should connect modern Western institutions to their own specific culture. A council of wise men that integrated traditional authorities used in a counselling process could prevent cases such as these. Parties should, for example, take into consideration regional quota. That could prevent the existence in the next elections of a hetero-denominated party of, for example, kaladi or firaku. I believe the Estate is still not noted in the interior [of the country]. Fretilin is sometimes noted but not for the best reasons.

P: Luís Filipe Thomaz [a Portuguese historian] said in last Wednesday’s Público that there could be simply a “distance preconception”. Are we not after all exaggerating a problem that can be detected in every country, even those such as Portugal that have many centuries of nation and state building?

PCS: What I am saying is that there are cultural divisions and they should be taken into consideration. But surely they can and should be minimized, mediated and melted. The colonizers did it. In Timor through the Soibada College, that prepared local public servants. It was the “Creolelization”.

P: The Creole is often seen as somehow hybrid. However in Timor Xanana, a typical result of “Creolelization” was elevated to the category of national hero by his co-citizens.

PCS: The malai [foreigners] in Timor are also pertinent in terms of mediation. It is not by chance, for example, that the GNR [the Portuguese police] and some Portuguese are wanted. Mari Alkatiri, from a Yemenite family, is also seen as a malai and in this sense it also represented his role.

P: I insist in the former question: Xanana, Horta and Alkatiri represented a step ahead towards independence. Is the return to cultural anthropological constraints that could also be called old demons, not a step behind?

PCS: I am more in favour of trying to understand these differences. They should be seen as relative but not ignored. On the other hand and talking from a political advisory perspective I would say there is no way of minimizing them but describing. There are many Timorese that are interested in this analysis, even done by foreigners. I was invited to go to rituals for the first time. This culture is completely hidden even to some of the urban leaders.

P: How can the international community help them?

PCS: By making themselves available to turn this heritage into a written one. With Thomas Engelenhoven, a colleague who is a linguist at the University of Leiden, I would even like to suggest that this translation becomes intangible world heritage in Timor.

P: Can you “translate” the meaning of such proposal?

PCS: The most fantastic element in Timor is the translation of traditions. When we ask a Timorese for the history of a region he answers that it is needed to get the elders from several districts and each will tell his own story – in Fataluko, in Makalere, in Makasai [different East Timor languages]. Each one is only able to tell his clan’s story until a certain point in time. There is thus the need for a translation of traditions and a translation of languages. They want the modernization of culture and not just of the Estate. How can we build the nation without keeping up with the culture? The biggest challenge in development is culture. This is achieved by writing down traditions and languages. The dangers of fossilization and distortion do exist but the advantages are enormous especially in the democratization of culture (which is today held by the elders, even for simpler things such as weddings or the job nominations). The Timorese are afraid of the Timorese. They do not know each other. These differences are not just between those from the East and those from the West. Even in a small region the clans do not know each other. And the youngsters only get to know the history of their clan as they grow up. There is thus the need for multiple mediations. And that Estate institutions conciliate in some aspects with important cultural elements.

P: For example?

PCS: To create one or more than one rai-klaran and make them national heritage. Regions where people flock twice or three times a year. Without those nationality rituals it will be more difficult to adequately built the nation.

P: What kind of help should Portugal in particular give?

PCS: I believe we, Portuguese, can be interpreters in globalizations. Between the globalization through English-speaking and the access to Europe through the Portuguese language, they have chose the later. In a very conscious way. The Portuguese language can therefore work as a kind of highway for globalization in Timor.