Protests began December 3 immediately after cops from the hated Special Police Unit went into a school and seized a student whom they accused of being involved in a stabbing incident. The cops cuffed him by one hand then, over the protests of his teacher and other students, threw the chain over a bar and hoisted him painfully off the ground. The teacher and several students were also beaten. Angry students hit the streets in protest.

"The police were uncontrolled," said Jose Agustino, the deputy director of the Student Solidarity Council. "We reject that kind of attitude."

The following morning about 500 high school and university students as well as others gathered outside the national parliament in Dili, and then marched on the police headquarters two blocks away, to demand the arrested youth’s release. East Timorese police fired on the crowd, which had swelled to 1,000, hitting 18 people. Honorio Ximenes, 14, was killed instantly. Manuel da Silva, 18, died in hospital the following day.

Numerous buildings, including the national parliament, were reported attacked in the ensuing upsurge of protests. A number of Australian-owned businesses such as the ANZ Bank, the Hello Mister supermarket, and Chubb security were gutted. New Zealand-owned businesses were also attacked.

Three houses owned by the family of East Timor’s Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, were burned, including the Prime Minister’s residence, as well as a house leased to an ANZ Bank manager. A Dili mosque was also attacked that day, with eight houses in its compound burned.

Hundreds of foreign troops and police stationed in East Timor under the auspices of the United Nations Mission in Support of East Timor were deployed to quell the rebellion. Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta thanked the Portuguese government in particular for its rapid response, which he lauded for "saving the situation" December 4. An overnight curfew was imposed, and high schools and the university campus shut for two days, as the imperialist-led troops threw up roadblocks and guarded key buildings. Around 80 people were reported arrested, mainly on charges of "looting," with 10 held beyond the legal 72-hour period for awaiting court appearances. A small student protest was reportedly dispersed on December 5.  
 
Imperialist occupation force
An Australian-led military intervention began in East Timor under the UN flag in 1999. Today a foreign force of 4,500 troops, 750 police and 460 advisors and staff remains deployed there. The imperialist government of Australia provides the largest contingent, with 1,100 soldiers along with 55 federal and state cops.

The UN administration imposed by the 1999 intervention handed government authority over to the Alkatiri administration at independence celebrations on May 20. Fretilin (Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), led by Alkatiri, had won 57 percent of the vote in August 2001 elections to a Constituent Assembly. In presidential elections held last April, Xanana Gusmao, a central leader of East Timor’s national liberation struggle since the early 1980s, won over 80 percent of the vote.

The December 3–5 struggles are the sharpest expressions of social tension to date as the East Timorese people confront the tasks of building a new nation saddled with imperialist domination and a legacy of colonial pillage.

East Timor, a semicolonial nation of 800,000 inhabitants located east of Indonesia, is one of the most impoverished countries in the world. The big majority of the population lives in the countryside as subsistence farmers. Paid employment is extremely scarce, with estimates of unemployment ranging from 65 percent to 90 percent.

Portugal was the colonial power in East Timor for several centuries, until a new, popular, government led by Fretilin declared independence in 1975. At the end of that year, with the backing of the U.S. and Australian governments, Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship invaded East Timor and imposed an occupation regime, but was unable to break Timorese resistance to its brutal rule.

After Suharto was forced to resign in 1998 in face of massive protests by Indonesian students, workers and peasants against the U.S.-backed regime, an upsurge in the Timorese independence struggle forced the Indonesian government to concede a referendum in that colony. In the referendum, held in August 1999 under UN sponsorship, almost 80 percent of the Timorese voted to reject autonomy within Indonesia, instead favoring independence.

The Australian and other imperialist powers feared that the deepening East Timorese mobilizations for self-determination in 1998 would further destabilize Indonesia. They decided to reverse their policy of backing Indonesian rule over the territory in favor of attempting to place their own stamp on East Timor’s development, while maintaining good relations with the Indonesian rulers.

Under pressure from Washington, the Indonesian government agreed to hand over East Timor to a UN administration following the 1999 referendum. This imperialist intervention was supported almost universally by the different political forces in the independence movement. Portuguese imperialism, one of the occupying forces, had long posed as a defender of the East Timorese struggle against Indonesian rule with the aim of reestablishing its influence there.

Throughout 1999 the Indonesian military carried out a brutal assault on the independence struggle in East Timor in the hope of blocking a pro-independence vote, while the independence movement increasingly demobilized in favor of UN intervention, including acceptance of the imperialist demand for "cantonment" of its guerrilla fighters.

The repression by the Indonesian military culminated in a "scorched earth" rampage following the August 1999 referendum. According to UN estimates, more than 1,000 people were killed, 70 percent of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed, and around 250,000 of the population of 800,000 were corralled into refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.

An Australian-led intervention force landed in East Timor in September 1999 as the Indonesian military withdrew, and imposed the UN occupation. Among the measures adopted during this occupation, with the support of the East Timorese leaders incorporated into its leading councils, were the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency and the adoption of Portuguese, spoken by only 5 percent of the population, as the national language along with Tetum, East Timor’s lingua franca. Indonesian and English are recognized as "working languages." Hundreds of millions of dollars pledged in "aid" to the new country is being held in trust funds by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  
 
Cops from colonial regime
One of the sharpest controversies in East Timor has been the incorporation into the new police force of a number of cops from the time of the Indonesian occupation regime, including current police chief Paulo Martins. While former pro-independence guerrilla fighters were also selected for the new police and armed forces established by the UN administration, many demobilized resistance fighters remain unemployed and face abysmal living conditions.

Organizations of these veterans have staged several large protests in recent months, including a November 28 action of 3,000 in Dili--a city of 100,000--and a November 26 demonstration in Baucau, east of Dili, where cops killed one protester.

"We have had reports of [police] violence against the prisoners" arrested in Dili, Jose Luis Oliveira, of the East Timor-based Association for Law, Human Rights, and Justice, told the Melbourne Age. He explained that the police had refused to allow a representative of the association to visit the prisoners.

"Our police are ignorant on human rights and are repeating what the Indonesians did," Oliveira said, adding that the association sees the United Nations as having final responsibility. "It was they who trained them."  
 
 
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