Quotes of the Day

Abile Mosoco likes to drink coffee while he's fighting. Sip, snipe, sip, snipe. Sometimes the rebel commander reaches for the .22 rifle with telescopic sight that lies next to him as he sits behind a low masonry wall. Sometimes he unslings the Steyr assault rifle from his shoulder and just blasts away. His targets —soldiers of the East Timorese Army, the FDTL—scurry about 200 m below. Every so often a bullet whines overhead, but from his hillside position on the edge of a small plateau near the capital Dili's television tower, Mosoco is a difficult target. "He has killed five or six," says one of his men, who are a mixture of unemployed youngsters and police officers. The police are well armed and in uniform, but the youths carry only knives, slingshot darts and the occasional Glock semiautomatic pistol. Each time Mosoco shoots, the young men murmur in satisfaction. Mosoco's victims will be added to some two dozen killed in violence last week stemming from the dismissal in March of almost half the East Timorese defense force. The 591 soldiers, most of whom come from the western part of the country, had been led on strike by Lieutenant Gastão Salsinha, claiming they'd been passed over for promotion and unjustly accused of having mounted only half-hearted resistance to Indonesia's 24-year occupation of the former Portuguese colony, which ended in 1999. For four days in late April they demonstrated in Dili. Then, on April 28, Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri ordered the army to break up the protest, which it did with stunning brutality, leaving at least five dead and many more wounded. That worsened longstanding tensions within the Army and police, triggering open rebellion.

The split within the security forces deepened on May 22, when rebel soldiers in the hills above Dili were joined by the head of the military police, Lieutenant Commander Alfredo Reinado, and 28 of his men. Reinado tells Time that the second in command of the nation's armed forces, Colonel Lere Anan Timur, summoned Reinado to his headquarters at Tasi Tolu, on the city's western outskirts. The two men traveled to the airport, where a tense meeting took place with Defense Minister Roques Rodrigues. "I heard the Colonel say: "I can destroy them all and rebuild again tomorrow,'' Reinado says. The Minister refused to give his approval, saying such an order would have to come from the Prime Minister. He then drove Lere to Alkatiri's residence, where a lengthy meeting took place. Afterward, Lere saw Reinado at Tasi Tolu. "He told me he has approval to take action," Reinado recalls. "I said, 'You do it without any written order or justification.'" He says Lere was not using official procedures, instead issuing commands in his eastern dialect: "I just sit and watch how they do it. Everything is out of control. They are using the guerrilla system of giving orders," Reindado says. "The intention is to go there to shoot to kill. To kill them all if they can. They give ammunition to the soldiers, who take six or seven magazines.'' Reinado says the strike force comprised 170 soldiers from Metinaro and the First Battalion.

Then, says Reinado, "they start the shooting. Chasing people, do whatever they like until the morning. On the 29th they go with the same mission: they are still shooting. It is no more demonstration. Everybody has run away." And with good reason: "They were using grenade launchers against the riot," he says. "I can't believe it."

The government's purpose, according to Reinado, was simple: "They want to destroy all the petitioners." So disgusted was he by such misuse of the Army that he led his men into the hills. Alkatiri and Lere have both rejected Reinado's account of events; both men refused to speak to Time.

Reinado's decision took the fighting to a new and bloodier level. By then some 20,000 residents had fled Dili, fearing a repeat of the carnage that left 1,500 dead following East Timor's vote for independence seven years ago. The rebels refused government demands to surrender, calling instead for the Army itself to disarm, and for an investigation into their grievances. As street gangs fought running battles over east-west island rivalries through the suburbs of Becora and Fatuahi, the rebels launched attacks against the military headquarters at Tasi Tolu, 6 km from Dili. The civilian government seemed paralyzed, with rumors of dissension between the unpopular Alkatiri and President Xanana Gusmão, a resistance hero.

By May 24, security had collapsed so completely that Foreign Minister José Ramos-Horta went on Australian TV, asking for troops "to prevent the country sliding into further chaos." The first Australian forces arrived at the end of last week. The fresh need for foreign troops just a year after the departure of the last international peacekeepers raises doubts about the long-term prospects of the world's youngest nation. East Timor suffers not just from ethnic violence but from chronic crime, severe poverty and unemployment. "The way in which the country has been governed in the last few years has left a lot to be desired," said Australian Prime Minister John Howard. "They got their independence perhaps earlier than they were ready."

In the near-total absence of law and order, even military honor was rendered meaningless. On the morning of May 25, regular soldiers fired upon the police barracks in Dili for an hour or more, apparently in retaliation for what may have been an accidental shot from a policeman earlier in the day. The head of the U.N. mission in Dili, Sukehiro Hasegawa, says U.N. advisers negotiated a halt to the shooting, and the Army commander promised the policemen would not be harmed if they surrendered. "We then took these unarmed officers out of the compound and we moved on to the street," Hasegawa told Australia's ABC Radio. "Most unfortunately, about 200 m from the police headquarters there were three or four soldiers, and one of them started firing at this group of unarmed police officers." Twelve policemen were killed; more than 20 others were wounded, along with two U.N. police advisers. With its own security forces firing on one another, the Timorese government formally requested an international intervention force to help restore order; New Zealand, Malaysia and Portugal, as well as Australia, agreed to send troops. By the weekend, 150 Australian special-forces commandos, the vanguard of a 1,300-man deployment, had secured the Dili airstrip and occupied the police barracks in the city center; two Australian Navy ships lay at anchor in the harbor. But gangs of youths still rampaged through the streets, and, said officials of the relief group World Vision International, threatened to attack compounds housing refugees who had fled the fighting. On Saturday young men armed with machetes torched dozens of homes in Dili, causing women and children to flee screaming. Describing the local police as "ineffective," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the full deployment of troops would be accelerated.

Over coffee at his base in an old Portuguese-built inn in the beautiful mountain village of Maubisse, 45 km from the capital, Reinado says he welcomes the arrival of the troops and looks forward to negotiating with them: "I have a nice glass of wine here for them, and we will sit and talk this out." He and his followers fear that the Australians will want to disarm the rebels but not the Army. Given the bloody events at the police barracks, mutter Reinado's men, that could be a recipe for slaughter.

By Sunday, the rebels had lifted their siege and pulled back into the hills around the southern central town of Aileu while Reinado prepared to meet the Australian forces to discuss security arrangements. The Army had also left town, some troops withdrawing to the east, others returning to the headquarters at Tasi Tolu, on the city's western outskirts. They may leave the military compound only if they leave their weapons behind, says a military source. Many soldiers, anxious for the safety of their families in Dili, have changed into civilian clothes and headed into town. Some say they are unhappy they were not allowed to continue attacking the rebels.

As the tattered banner announcing the ruling Fretilin party's second annual conference flaps in the breeze above the picturesque road that snakes around the port of Dili, smoke rises from burning houses and clouds the hot morning sun. Black Hawk helicopters circle and swoop overhead; Australian Navy ships churn the harbor and the streets are prowled by packs of youths who throw rocks, wave knives and swords, and shake their fists at anyone who approaches.

Vigilantes block roads with burning tires and interrogate those trying to pass. Gangs of easterners at the Comoro markets overflow onto the airport road, led by a long-haired thug in sunglasses who brandishes a cutlass. The dull rumble of Australian armored cars sends the youths into sullen squatting positions on the street corners. All day Sunday, the stretched Australians soldiers rush from trouble spot to trouble spot. The flashpoints are the streets and alleys where residents from the east of the country bump up against their western counterparts. Plumes of smoke alert the soldiers, but by the time their trucks arrive, the houses are ablaze.

While the violence and the fires might appear random, that is not always the case. A shop owned by the Alkatiri family is doused with petrol and burned in Talilaran subdistrict. The day before, a house belonging to Fernando Lasama, an Opposition member of parliament, went up in flames. In Becora, westerners torch an easterner's property in revenge for the murder of a woman and her four children last week in Delta Comoro subdistrict. The woman's crime was to be a relative of Interior Minister Rogerio Labato. As Australian troops maintain an awkward standoff between two groups of fighters in Becora, a government car arrives and a ministerial adviser steps outside, speaking on his mobile phone. At the other end is Foreign Minister José Ramos-Horta. "Sir, I think it would be good if you could come here. It would be good to have you here to speak to people,'' says the adviser. When Ramos-Horta arrives, it is with a bodyguard of six Australian soldiers. He is whisked to where the westerners are gathered, and they cheer when he arrives. But it's too late for easterner Apoli Juan, who arrives just in time to see his family home disappear in an inferno. "The Australians should be arresting these people," he says, "taking their weapons from them.''

At the Dili police barracks, blood from the policemen murdered three days earlier still stains the ground; small bouquets of flowers mark where they fell. Inside, the place is being torn to pieces. Young children stumble out of the gates wearing soldiers' boots, their arms loaded with a booty of riot batons and police helmets. On the floor are grenade and ammunition boxes; their contents are missing, in unknown hands. It seems to be East Timor's fate that the potential for tragedy is never far away.

• Rory Callinan
• New divisions—between Army and police, easterners and westerners—threaten to splinter a young nation already riven by decades of conflict