Playing Battleships Again – East Timor 12th February 2008

In my new flat I have a TV, a receiver and a digi box. I have all this equipment with cables everywhere and I can only get one channel, the BBC World News! Watching my one and only channel yesterday morning I was updated about the news of Dili, but I had already been informed by the more reliable Dili grapevine. The president Jose Ramos Horta had been shot and was in a critical condition being treated in Darwin, the assassins also tried to shoot the Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, but he was unharmed and the leader of the rebels Alfredo was shot and killed.

Needless to say we were advised to restrict movements around town and there is a curfew for the next couple of days between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. The new PM of Australia, Kevin Rudd sent over a load more troops after a request from Xanana and declaring a state of emergency. So at the moment we have HMAS Perth strutting its stuff just off the waters of Dili, the waters of which at the moment are terrible with all the rain we have been having. It’s a feeling of Déjà Vu, we were having the same weather when the first battleship appeared in May 2006.

Obviously with such shocking news, people are worried about the repercussions, but it seems that Ramos Horta is pulling through and the International Security Force is trying to round up the remaining rebels. Without their leader, let’s hope that that faction will lose momentum. Apart from that, the city seems calm.

In other news, the rations given to the IDP’s has been halved, trying to persuade them to their homes. It was feared that there could have been a backlash but I’ve heard no reports of any troubles at the camps.

But the best snippet of this week is a European delegation that were invited to attend a meeting in East Timor’s capital, Dili. They were a little concerned when no-one was waiting for them at the airport, the telephone numbers they had been given didn’t work and no-one at the airport seemed to know anything about their arrival. It’s probably because they were waiting at Delhi airport, India!