Dili - it's no place to dally

By Greg Ansley

The latest rumour is that, two days after we leave, an enterprising Aussie with a container load of tinnies is going to open a bar in the otherwise dry but steaming capital of East Timor. Another rumour, of the first restaurant to reopen since the terror began, has journalists and aid workers searching the town.

Dili is long on rumour, short on substance. It is a city that, with the exception of a single working traffic light, a handful of buildings with electricity and an even smaller number with running water, has nothing. Most of the towns and villages outside the capital have even less.

This is not an easy place in which to work - not for journalists, aid workers or soldiers. All of us had to carry in everything we needed: food, water, tents, medical supplies, communications equipment and every other personal and professional necessity.

There are no shops here. The only way to get anything left behind in Darwin is to beg, borrow, plead, scrounge, or find in the rubble of the city.

Journalists from a dozen countries able to find space in the deserted convent on the Dili seafront are fortunate. Although ransacked it was not destroyed, and there are beds here, with primitive mattresses, desks, chairs and - most importantly - electricity and running water.

You cannot drink the water - as one journalist found after a spectacularly eruptive night - but bathing is possible using ladles and buckets and, later, through the ingenuity of New Zealand Press Association correspondent Ian Stewart, by a makeshift shower.

Later we learn that Army tests have shown the water to be thick with hepatitis B, but place our trust in vaccination and the fact that the doctors from Timor Aid next door continue to use our bathrooms.

Each night, empty water bottles are filled and treated to excess with purification tablets and iodine for drinking, cleaning teeth, and washing minor wounds.

There is also food here, helping to relieve the tedium of Army ration packs that stretch out the diminishing supplies bought from Darwin camping stores. A family of Timorese provides meals of rice and unidentifiable but tasty meats and vegetables, although many of us eye with suspicion the numerous cats and dogs wandering the convent.

Meat goes off many menus when Auckland reporter Patrick Smellie discovers the butchery outside his room: a sheet of salvaged corrugated iron in the dust.

Transport is rudimentary. You walk, ride on a growing fleet of motor scooters at a steadily inflationary price, buy or hire a truck at exorbitant rates, find yourself a place on the back of aid trucks, or hitch a ride with the Army.

There are no spare vehicles. Aid workers have brought in a fleet of hire scooters from Darwin, rounded up some local vehicles that somehow escaped the militia, or have managed to bring in some of their own on the chartered ships bringing in emergency supplies.

The Army has none to spare. It had commandeered the four-wheel drives left behind by Unamet at the height of the terror, hot-wiring them and relishing the only air-conditioning in town. Now Unamet has returned and demanding its vehicles back.

For soldiers outside Dili, life is even harder, lugging around leaden kit, living exclusively on ration packs and, in the west, not being able to even wash for the first two weeks.

Communications are a nightmare. The Indonesian-owned mobile network operates spasmodically for a while, cutting off in the middle of conversations and creating a unique Dili twitch among journalists and aid workers.

But the network dies completely when Indonesian soldiers still guarding the Dili telecommunications system refuse to let United Nations technicians inside, and everyone is back to satellite phones at $7 a minute.

Tracking down people and stories becomes a blend of luck and tenacity. There is one press conference a day, and very little chance of finding anyone on the phone.

You grab people where and when you can, argue with guards to let you pass into various compounds, create informal networks to bypass official barriers and to keep track of events rolling and changing at breakneck speed, and snatch at any chance of a ride out of town - only to sweat through the reporter's nightmare of being out of touch and in the wrong place.

Aid workers fume at the pace of Army progress, at its refusal to carry at least token bags of rice with its troops and at its inability to provide more logistical assistance.

The Army grinds its teeth at criticism of its operations, at "cowboy" aid convoys and journalists who rush into areas still to be made secure and at the makeshift logistics of aid workers trying to beat the monsoon.

Nothing comes easy in East Timor.