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By Belinda Lopez, Agence France-Presses
JAKARTA: The attempted assassination of East
Timor’s president has exposed the fledgling nation’s inherent
instability but may also simplify the difficult task of trying to
bring lasting unity, analysts say.
Rebel leader Alfredo Reinado—long a thorn in
the side of the government— was killed during during Monday’s
dawn attack on the home of President Jose Ramos-Horta.
The president was shot three times but survived
and was rushed to Australia for treatment, while Prime Minister
Xanana Gusmao also came under ambush.
But it is Reinado’s death that may effectively
clear a major roadblock to stability in the nation, which only
gained independence in 2002.
The armed forces major had been in conflict with
the government since 2006, when the sacking of 600 military
deserters triggered violence between military and police factions as
well as gang clashes, leaving at least 37 dead.
Reinado threw in his lot with the rebellion of
soldiers, who mostly hailed from East Timor’s western districts
and had complained of being discriminated against by their eastern
bosses, and became their self-styled leader.
Holed up in East Timor’s rugged hills, they
conducted a number of raids and were pursued by foreign forces until
Ramos-Horta called off the manhunt last year to pursue face-to-face
negotiations.
“Now he’s been deleted from the equation, it
simplifies matters quite considerably,” Damien Kingsbury, an East
Timor expert at the Australian National University (ANU), told AFP.
“It clearly resolves a major problem in East
Timorese politics.”
Another ANU East Timor specialist, George Quinn,
said Reinado’s death in the “magnificently bungled” attack was
“a good thing for East Timor.”
“One doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead,
but he was a maverick and a spoiler and he was definitely bad news
for the development of stability in East Timor,” Quinn said.
Sophia Cason, of the International Crisis Group
think-tank, cautioned that though Reinado’s death simplified the
equation, it may cause a spike in unrest in the short term.
“He was certainly a thorn in the
government’s side and seemed unlikely ever to actually participate
in dialogue,” she told AFP.
“Reinado’s support base had been dwindling.
But it is likely to increase, if only out of sympathy, as news of
his death breaks out.”
His supporters were mostly people from the west
in Dili, and in the western districts, many of whom are
disenfranchised youth to whom Reinado was a symbol of defiance, she
said.
Longer-term challenges for the government
remain, notably deciding what to do about the rebels who fled the
incidents, and other so-called petitioners—soldiers who
deserted—who are waiting for dialogue.
A planned meeting with those petitioners may
have led Reinado to believe he was losing his clout, encouraging him
to launch the attack.
The government, too, is “going to have to make
some hard decisions about reform of their security forces,” Cason
said, echoing an ICG report released last month which warned
violence could erupt again in the absence of reform.
John Miller, a campaigner for East Timor and
Indonesia Action Network, a pressure group, said Reinado’s rebels
had kept the country in a state of perpetual instability and “the
government should have gone after him.”
Following his demise, East Timor would need to
focus on longer term issues such as poverty and rampant unemployment
as it struggles to overcome the legacy of Indonesian rule, he said.
A former Portuguese colony, East Timor was
invaded by Indonesia in 1975 and suffered occupation for more than
two decades, during which more than 200,000 people died due to
violence and other preventable causes.
A languishing court system and lack of respect
for the rule of law meant politics could still stir violence, Miller
said.
“You see that in East Timor, whatever real and
perceived problems, they take it into their own hands. You know:
‘It’s still how we do politics, through arms.’”
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