Police gun down demonstrators in East Timor

Last Friday’s clashes are the product of months of steadily rising tensions. Close to 600 soldiers—more than a third of the army—walked out of their barracks on February 8 claiming they were poorly paid and being discriminated against by nepotistic commanders.

Most of the rebels, who call themselves the “petitioners”, are from Dili or the western districts of East Timor. The protest leaders are veterans of the guerilla war fought by the independence movement Fretilin against Indonesian rule from 1975 to 1999. They allege that the military hierarchy has favoured ex-fighters from the eastern region of East Timor for promotions at their expense. They also claim that the police force is riddled with their former enemies—officers who worked for the Indonesian security forces before independence.

The troops refused to comply with a government ultimatum to return to their duties and were dismissed en masse from the military on March 16. At the end of March, the sacked men protested and rioted in Dili before going into hiding in the shanties and villages surrounding the Timorese capital. Last week hundreds of them returned to the streets, with protests each day to demand that Timorese President Xanana Gusmao and the courts intervene to compel Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri to reverse the sackings and listen to their grievances.

April 28 was the deadline for Gusmao to act. The spokesman for the sacked soldiers, former junior officer Gastao Salsinha, demagogically told journalists that the petitioners were “ready to conduct a new guerilla war in East Timor if our formal leaders in this country have no political will to solve our problem”.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/timo-m03.shtml