East Timor looks to tourists

Press, 1 September 1986, Page 20

East Timor looks to tourists

By

BILL TARRANT,

Indonesia’s youngest province is dreaming of a future in tourism as it struggles to wipe out poverty and rebels fighting for independence.

Under cafe umbrellas at Hotel Turismo, guests down cans of cheap duty-free beer from Singapore while Timorese waiters serve Portuguese food. The hotel manager, Arsenio Ramos Horta, is buying rounds'to celebrate the birth of his first son who has been named Renaldo Suharto, after Indonesia’s president. Arsenio, a former prisoner of Fretilin, the Leftist Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, owns a seaside hotel which is expanding to accommodate more visitors, and he talks of a tourist boom as Indonesia slowly opens the door to East Timor.

Tourism must wait until safety is assured in the province where even Mr Horta’s elder brother is his enemy. Jose Ramos Horta is the United Nations envoy for

Fretilin, who have been fighting in East Timor for the. last 10 years. /

Small bands of desperate Fretilin guerrillas still hide in the arid hills that cover two-thirds of East Timor. East Timor’s Governor Carrascalao, related by marriage to the Horta brothers, says another problem is protecting the Timorese from bewildering outside influences.

Outside Dili, village life is primitive. Most people live in huts with thatched roofs and palm frond walls. The’plough is not used and slash-and-burn agriculture is widely practised. War and famine wiped out nearly all the once abundant buffalo and horses. Tractors were introduced, and farmers made a dizzying leap from neolithic farming to modem agriculture.

The population adopted a semi-nomadic way of life in response to the capricious weather and topography which

have caused drought and famine for centuries.

They moved to the hills to tend coffee plots during the monsoon, came down to plant maize in the dry season, and migrated to new fields when the soil was exhausted or incorporated into a shifting river. Their lives were left largely untouched under 400 years of Portuguese rule until civil war broke out in 1975.

The wiry Timorese hill tribesmen, predominantly Roman Cathdlic Melanesians, were once known as “the black Portuguese” because of their reputation as fierce fighters during the wars between Portugal and the Netherlands over the Spice Islands.

Portuguese is widely spoken among older people and Dili’s streets have Portuguese names. There is even a statue commemorating the 500th birthday of a Portuguese navigator in a Dili public square. “This is part of our history,” said Carrascalao, whose father was a journalist, deported to Portugal’s penal colony in East

Timor for writing articles critical of the Lisbon regime in the 19205.

Portuguese - educated Carrascalao grew up a strong Timorese nationalist. When the Portuguese colonial Government fled to neighbouring Atauro Island after civil war broke out, he led one of the three parties vying for postcolonial power.

Indonesian troops landed on Dili’s beaches in December, 1975, after the Marxist Fretilin began to control the country.

The-two sides, fought. fierce street battles with mortars and tanks. Six months later, in July, 1976, Dili became the capital of Indonesia’s 27th province. The city has few battle scars. Old Portuguese buildings with terracotta tiled roofs and white stucco walls overlook Dili Bay,and the craggy peaks of Atauro island.

Mini-shopping plazas are replacing Chinese shops. A fleet of 500 mostly new American-made taxis cruise Dili’s clean, wide streets, the shady squares and beach promenades. In 1975, Dili was a sleepy town

of 20,000. Australian. tourists stayed in dollar-a-day grass beach huts when Dili was part of the backpacker’s trail across the eastern string of islands, in the archipelago. ; ' .. At least half of the Chinese population of some 6000 in Dili left the island with the Portuguese. About 20 Portuguese families still live in the city and some work for the ilndonesian administration. ■ The biggest change is the small army of Indonesian administrators, consultants, •businessmen and technicians who now live in the capital. Their new houses of concrete and stucco with tin roofs share neighbourhoods with Timorese huts.

Carrascalao hopes to turn the troubled territory into a Bal-inese-style holiday resort some day. ■ ;

“I see Dili as a base for tourism,” he says. “I think the Portuguese will come one day. The Australians are sure to come. Today, everybody in theworld knows the name of East Timor, even if the things written about us now are not so good.”

of Reuter, in Dili, East Timor