Road Block Reprimand – East Timor 26th February 2008

The state of siege has been extended for another month. One good thing about it is the decent night’s sleep I’ve been getting as there is no one wandering about for the dogs to bark at and no passing cars, I even overslept one morning, the first time ever in East Timor in nearly two years. Peaceful sleep unfortunately alluded me last night when I had a couple of rogue mozzies in my usually mosquito free apartment, that ravaged my elbows of all places!

The curfew up until Saturday night was eight p.m. and the problem is for the restaurant owners themselves because if you are like me, you leave the restaurant at five or ten to eight with just enough time to get home by the curfew. The restaurant owners are still clearing up and shutting up shop at curfew time because their patrons have only just left. I know of one owner who was apprehended giving a lift to his staff to ensure they got home safely, so breaking the curfew himself.

In addition to the curfew, everyone has to carry I.D. because of the ‘State of Siege’. There are also road blocks and speed checks (a very good thing!). I had to go through a road block on my way to a dive at Dili Rock today and the whole thing was farcical. Firstly you are waved at, is that waving me over or waving me through? I wasn’t sure, so I pulled over. Then 3 or 4 people pointed at me, were they asking me to move the car, or carry on? I had no idea. Eventually a Chinese UNPol sauntered over and asked me to get out of the car, which I did. I was then scanned with a metal detector by a young Timorese lad with no uniform on. At this point my student who happened to also be UNPol piped up that ‘Language Assistants are not allowed to do the scan, it must be a police officer and they should be female’ the scanner was immediately given to a young female officer who duly scanned me and my staff member but not my student. None of us had been asked for I.D.

Next the policewoman searched my bag, but no other bags or the gear bags on the back of the truck. So if there were no weapons found in one bag, that obviously meant there were no weapons anywhere else on the truck. Wrong! I realised later I was inadvertently carrying a weapon in the form of my dive knife that was packed with my gear in the back of the truck, whoops! Then I was told that the blackening film on the windows was not allowed (the reason I was driving with all the windows fully down) and proceeded to try and pick it off with her fingernails. I started to envisage a long and hot few hours at that road block until my student informed the Chinese UNPol that it wasn’t mandated to remove the blackening only recommended and we would do it later.

If my student knew all this by reading the memos and documentation that is sent round to all the UN Police Officers, then why did the Chinese UNPol allow this situation to happen? Lack of keeping himself informed, lack of understanding or lack of authority amongst his colleagues?

On the subject of keeping informed, the ex-pat community all received text messages from our various embassies on Saturday saying the curfew had been extended from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. but will apply for another month. Unfortunately this information did not ripple down to the PNTL who apprehended a couple of girls on a motorbike returning home from work at 8.30 p.m. Scared, they phoned their boss who is a friend of mine, who went down to try and sort the situation out, taking along another friend who speaks Behasa. The PNTL boys weren’t having any of it and tried to resolve the situation with their fists. So representatives of East Timor’s National Police Force were trying to enforce an outdated restriction through ignorance, then assaulted an Australian and Indonesian National. And these guys are allowed to carry guns!

Ramos Horta is out of his coma and talking to his family which is great news.

I’ve managed a couple of dives over the past week but the temperature has dropped to what feels a freezing 26 degrees (down from the usual 28-30 degrees) and the visibility was awful. However, I took a guy out that had learnt to dive near San Francisco so he found the 10-12 metre visibility normal and the temperature was 14 degrees higher than he had been used to. He thought the dive was great, so did I because I saw my first ever blue ringed octopus.

I’ve also seen the Pope this week! Not the current one obviously. A huge statue of the previous Pope has been erected outside the new church on the hill at Tasi Tolu overlooking Dili. So we now have the Pope overlooking Dili from the West and Jesus overlooking Dili from the East. The strange thing about the Pope though is he has a huge body and a very small head.