ABSTRACT
In early 2006, tensions within the East Timorese armed forces resulted in nearly 600 soldiers-around one-third of the military-abandoning their barracks over accusations of discrimination. They claimed that the military was dominated by the Lorosa’e, a name used to describe those from the three eastern-most districts of Timor-Leste, who were said to be discriminating against Loromonu: namely those from the 10 western districts.2
The government responded by dismissing the soldiers who had left their barracks. A protest by the sacked soldiers at the end of April turned violent, and over the following month the security apparatus of the state fractured into complex sets of groupings and alliances. Violence occurred between the two factions of the military: soldiers massacred police, military police ambushed soldiers, civilian groups armed by Members of Parliament attacked both military headquarters and homes, and the houses of parliamentarians were burnt and members of their families killed. In the vacuum created by the collapse of the security apparatus, the intra-
state violence was accompanied by widespread gang violence across Dili. To a significant degree gang-related violence mirrored the ethnic-territorial dimensions of the Lorosa’e and Loromonu division in the military, but it was also shaped by the interests of political parties and the control of local urban territories by the gangs themselves. By mid-year the state was largely paralyzed, many tens of thousands of people were living in refugee camps, a large number of houses had been destroyed, and an international military and police force were required to stabilize the security environment. The “success story” of post-conflict Timor-Leste had become suddenly
and disastrously undone. With hooded youths and the use of darts, arrows, and other home-made weapons, and factions based on ethnic and familial lines, it would not be difficult to read the crisis into the kinds of tribalizing violence that many writers suggest have come to dominate conflicts around the world. At its broadest level, this chapter is underpinned by an argument that such violence is not adequately described as a “retreat into savagery from below,” and is better understood as a response to a kind of disjuncture created between the two modernizing processes of nation-formation and state-building. More particularly, I will take what might appear to be a
counter-intuitive path by using a discussion of the often-positive nationbuilding effects of the Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Reception (CAVR) as a way into discussing the implications of the inter-state violence of the 2006 crisis. By examining the uneven integrative effects that a body such as CAVR has on a new national community, it becomes possible to understand how violence can emerge as a nation is brought into being-and while the state remains relatively distanced from the various developments that are unevenly drawing together that nation. This kind of dual development could be described in terms of a relatively unembedded state presiding over a fragile nation-in-formation. For all the literature on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions very little
is framed by debates of either security or nationalism studies. The first might seem the most obvious gap in the existing literature given that such bodies are designed to break cycles of violence and ensure longer-term forms of security. Similarly, while nationalist rhetoric commonly frames the work of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, including CAVR, the vast array of literature rarely crosses explicitly into the domain of nationalism studies. The aim of this chapter is to draw arguments around Truth and Reconciliation Commissions into a broad discussion around security through an understanding of how such bodies work to integrate peoples into a national community. In order to do this it is important to tap into key discourses in nationalism studies, notably the work of Benedict Anderson. This is in part so as to argue that, well beyond the particular community reconciliation and truth-seeking programs, a body such as CAVR can have integrative effects through, for instance, the production and distribution of textual material. Using Anderson’s arguments concerning the link between the temporal and the textual, I go on to argue that in post-conflict and agriculturally dominant societies the abstract nation can be constituted through a process that significantly includes embodied interaction. These arguments are not meant to suggest that the process of nation-for-
mation does not give rise to other forms of violence, but it is to argue that the integration of people into a community through a subjective self-orienting identification is typically a necessity in preventing future violence over a given territorial form. However, as evidenced by the violence in 2006 and 2007, this is not enough to ensure a post-conflict peace, in that violence can emanate from other struggles and from other quarters. This, as is argued at the conclusion of the chapter, can occur for instance when the state has yet to be embedded sufficiently within a given territorial setting.
