Greg Ansley: Where the machete rules

There are two things to fear greatly in Dili - machetes and taxi drivers. If one does not kill you the other almost certainly will, in a mad, slow-motion waltz through traffic lights and intersections populated by pigs, goats, dogs and very large Australian tanks.

This is a city that lives on a cusp not only between cultures, but on a tectonic technological faultline and the realities of an existence that challenge the comfortable morality of the First World.

It is a traumatic atmosphere in which to work: the vast scale of individual suffering, the deaths and displacement of so many people, the eyes of children who face such a hard future, and the despairing poverty that confronts you at every turn.

There is also the incomprehension of the insanity that drives these usually gentle, smiling people to commit atrocities of such appalling nature with such callousness - the readiness to settle matters with a hack of a machete or an axe.

One young girl is said to have had her hand chopped from her arm by her brother.

Seven years ago, the Indonesians left, taking with them almost everything of value that could be moved, stripping the new nation of most of the machinery of society, destroying 80 per cent of its infrastructure, leaving it without essential knowledge and skills, and leaving behind several generations of brutalised Timorese. Now the past is back - with a vengeance.

As in 1999, the smell of smoke defines each afternoon, the streets made gap-toothed by burned-out homes and businesses.

Children so thin that they look like stick figures, first flee from their homes in incomprehensible terror then watch from makeshift refugee camps as giants from another land force big brothers, fathers, uncles, to the ground with guns.

The streets are frightening and potentially deadly. A wrong turn can put you in a maelstrom of fury.

So, for the Timorese, can a wrong place of birth, or the wrong political leaning.

It is even perilous to look for food in a city that has almost none outside the grainstores or at the hotels that house the waves of aid workers, journalists and officials descending on Dili.

One man searching for something to eat was nearly beaten to death by a mob looking for a victim.

He was saved by passing Radio NZ reporter Eric Frykberg and New Zealand Press Association photographer Wayne Draught.

But when the assignment ends, the reporters will go home. In Timor, the pain will go on.