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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Time gentleman please – East Timor 15th February 2008
The state of emergency and subsequent curfew has been extended until the 20th of February. I popped into Fat Boys after work yesterday, the place was packed and everyone was eating. I joked with Fat Boy himself that he was getting the whole nights business in two hours and by 8 o’clock he can sit back and relax. Closer to home at the Dili Club at five to eight, it was like drinking up time in a bar in the UK, except the landlord didn’t need to call time, the government did. The only time I’ve seen a pub clear so quick is when ‘Time’ is called Christmas Day lunchtime. The journey home was eerie, not a car or person on the street.
The curfew is having a bad financial effect for many businesses such as restaurants and nightclubs that only open in the evening. The other business is Tiger Fuels, the country’s only 24 hour garage and convenience store, which is now 14 hours. Much of their business is done at night when people pop in for pizzas and petrol, or emergency supplies such toothpaste, nappies, toilet roll, water or dog food. If you get caught short now, you need to make sure it’s before 8 p.m.
Other businesses however are making a financial killing again. What with the attempted assassinations on Monday, the funeral of Alfredo yesterday and the arrival of the Australian PM Kevin Rudd today, the journalists have flocked back into Dili filling the hotels and renting all the available cars.
Whenever you ask an East Timorese ‘Where are you from?’ the answer is never Dili, this always puzzled me. I had it explained by one taxi driver recently. When the Portuguese came to East Timor, Dili was a small village, the Portuguese developed it into a port and city and the East Timorese came to Dili for work. But generations later, their loyalty is with their village or town that their family came from. For births, deaths and religious ceremonies the Dili residents return to their home towns.
Here when someone dies, their body is laid out in the family home for family and friends to pay their respects and grieve. From friends’ accounts, the women wail in grief and the whole process is very vocal, quite different from the sedate affair we are used to in the UK. Alfredo’s body was laid out in his stepfather’s house just down the road from work. I can’t imaging he would have been a pretty sight given the wounds he received. Hundreds of East Timorese were at the house to pay their respects along with a very visual display of military and police. He was buried in the garden rather than being transported back to his home town of Maubisse breaking with tradition, because it was too much of a risk to move the body with all the road blocks and security.
The city seems relatively calm but wary. The daily rain is putting a dampener on things (excuse the pun!) and the nightly curfew means that any activities on the street are highly visible. Ramos Horta in the mean time is reported to be stable which is a relief.
One thing I did notice this morning is the taxis; gone are the sun strips that cover half the windscreen, gone are the blackened out windows and the taxi drivers are driving around with their windows open. I don’t think this has anything to do with the overcast weather more to do with being visible at road blocks.
The curfew is having a bad financial effect for many businesses such as restaurants and nightclubs that only open in the evening. The other business is Tiger Fuels, the country’s only 24 hour garage and convenience store, which is now 14 hours. Much of their business is done at night when people pop in for pizzas and petrol, or emergency supplies such toothpaste, nappies, toilet roll, water or dog food. If you get caught short now, you need to make sure it’s before 8 p.m.
Other businesses however are making a financial killing again. What with the attempted assassinations on Monday, the funeral of Alfredo yesterday and the arrival of the Australian PM Kevin Rudd today, the journalists have flocked back into Dili filling the hotels and renting all the available cars.
Whenever you ask an East Timorese ‘Where are you from?’ the answer is never Dili, this always puzzled me. I had it explained by one taxi driver recently. When the Portuguese came to East Timor, Dili was a small village, the Portuguese developed it into a port and city and the East Timorese came to Dili for work. But generations later, their loyalty is with their village or town that their family came from. For births, deaths and religious ceremonies the Dili residents return to their home towns.
Here when someone dies, their body is laid out in the family home for family and friends to pay their respects and grieve. From friends’ accounts, the women wail in grief and the whole process is very vocal, quite different from the sedate affair we are used to in the UK. Alfredo’s body was laid out in his stepfather’s house just down the road from work. I can’t imaging he would have been a pretty sight given the wounds he received. Hundreds of East Timorese were at the house to pay their respects along with a very visual display of military and police. He was buried in the garden rather than being transported back to his home town of Maubisse breaking with tradition, because it was too much of a risk to move the body with all the road blocks and security.
The city seems relatively calm but wary. The daily rain is putting a dampener on things (excuse the pun!) and the nightly curfew means that any activities on the street are highly visible. Ramos Horta in the mean time is reported to be stable which is a relief.
One thing I did notice this morning is the taxis; gone are the sun strips that cover half the windscreen, gone are the blackened out windows and the taxi drivers are driving around with their windows open. I don’t think this has anything to do with the overcast weather more to do with being visible at road blocks.
Monday, February 11, 2008
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!
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!
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