Smiles return to once battered East Timor town

By GREG ANSLEY

BALIBO - Life has come back to Balibo, the stricken border town that first saw invading Indonesian troops in 1975 and which was laid waste again last year after East Timor's independence vote.

The house in which five journalists died during the 1975 invasion - among them a New Zealander - remains empty, as do many other scenes of carnage.

The militia are also here, moving through the hills above the nearby Maliana Plain and across the border at Atambua, just over the valley to the west.

This is the area in which militiamen last month launched two grenade attacks on Australian soldiers. The militia still move among the villages here, with their usual threats of violence and increasingly hollow promises to kill all United Nation peacekeepers.

As they have to the south where New Zealanders patrol, the villagers have responded by reporting militia movements to the soldiers.

Last September, Balibo was little more than a collection of charred ruins and empty streets devoid even of cats, dogs and chickens.

Only two people were found here: an old woman speaking no known dialect who refused to leave her shelter, and an aged man.

Now the cries and laughter of children ring across a town alive with movement, rebuilding, and the comfort of domestic chores. Some homes have been repaired, and new thatched huts have appeared.

Other houses have been roofed in the ubiquitous blue tarpaulins given by the UN to the refugees returning from the west.

Many of the people here are only using Balibo as a way-station before moving on to their own villages. Encouraged by Indonesian authorities anxious to end the trauma, and West Timorese journalists who have toured the area, more will follow.

About 60,000 of the estimated 100,000 East Timorese still living in camps in the west are expected to return as the wet season ends. They will find a very different society to the one they fled.

In the region around Balibo are about 800 Australian troops. In the town, the first UN civilian police station outside the major centre of Maliana is now officially open.

West Australian police Sergeant Rocky Scully, supported by Namibian, Bosnian and Samoan colleagues, is already piling up a daunting case load.

Much of his work relates to the atrocities of militia carnage and continuing discoveries of its gruesome aftermath, but a normal workload of petty crime and domestic disputes is also mounting. Scully is acutely aware of Timor's previous experience with police and believes mediation and negotiation will be as important as traditional investigation.

Gaining the confidence of Balibo's shaken population will be the key not only to his success, but also for the Timorese police force that will take his place.

At first, people were afraid to talk to him. When they did begin to talk, they refused to go through the door.

Putting Balibo - and the rest of East Timor - back together again will be a more difficult task.

Systems of politics, government, law, policing, administration and the other fundamental building blocks of a democratic state are still being devised by UN and Timorese leaders in Dili.

In Balibo, and through much of the border area, this remains in the hands of UN peacekeepers, police and administrators, with increasing input from the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT), the political wing of the revolutionary movement that fought Indonesia for 25 years. Its guerrilla army, Falantil, is now confined to a cantonment east of Dili, but has liaison officers working with New Zealand and Australian forces in the west.

Around Balibo the politics are confused and potentially volatile, made more complex by the previous strength of the militia in the region and the return of many of their former members. The CNRT itself is beginning to face opposition from within the pro-independence movement, with the emergence of a rival party in western villages. Reconstruction is also starting to show the first signs of strain, with workers employed by UN contractors at Maliana coming close to mob violence after a misunderstanding over wages.

Australia's civilian-military liaison unit in Balibo and aid agencies are now trying to extend their work beyond humanitarian relief to longer-term self-help programmes designed to encourage the Timorese to rebuild their own country.

While medical aid, food distribution and temporary make-work schemes continue, emphasis is swinging towards small-scale local programmes.

These include Timor Aid's housing programme, which provides concrete for a slab, wood for a small basic frame, and roofing iron. Villagers do the building, and clad the walls with the spines of palm fronds.

In Balibo, Major Andrew Garrad, head of the Australian civilian military liaison unit, has just put a proposal to the AusAid agency for basic tools to establish village vocational training centres.

"We're not mandated for this, but it's the old hearts and mind thing - win the hearts, win the people."