Timor-Leste

The 2006 crisis in Timor-Leste saw close to 15 per cent of the population displaced from their homes, threatening to sink the country into protracted instability and violence. Remarkably, less than five years later, the country looks to be back on track, with the internal displacement file largely resolved. This study looks at the National Recovery Strategy (NRS) adopted by the government to resolve internal displacement in Timor-Leste, from the viewpoint of a participant in the policy development and implementation process. Particular attention will be paid to the cash grant component of the NRS, as well as the accompanying dialogue processes. After discussing the move towards a cash grant-based programme and looking at some of the implementation challenges the government faced, this study will try to ascertain whether or not the NRS can be qualified as a full-fledged reparations effort. It concludes that while the NRS had some important characteristics that are usually associated with (administrative) reparations programmes, including a clear reparative effect for a defined category of victims, a number of factors stand in the way of wholeheartedly qualifying it as a reparations effort. Nevertheless, the experience of Timor-Leste contains a number of important lessons for reparations efforts in respect of displaced populations elsewhere, which will be highlighted in the conclusion.

Right up until the start of the crisis in April 2006, Timor-Leste was widely lauded as a United Nations nation-building success story. Many commentators believed that, this time, the international community had gotten things largely right, not in the least by providing both the funds and the peacekeeping troops necessary for the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) to fulfil its ambitious mandate of readying Timor-Leste for full independence. Soon, so it was thought, the ongoing political mission of the United Nations would give way to a much smaller United Nations office that would largely focus on developing a “sustainable development assistance framework” for the new country. United Nations peacekeepers had left the country in 2005, so when violence broke out in the capital city of Dili on 28 April 2006, security was entirely in the hands of the Timorese police and army, both of which would be at the heart of a political crisis that would threaten to rip the young nation apart. To situate the 2006 crisis, it is necessary to briefly go back in time and point out some key moments in Timor-Leste’s history.

Crisis-related internal displacement continues to be a phenomenon of significant scale. In its latest global overview on internal displacement, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reports that, at the end of 2010, “the number of people internally displaced across the world by armed conflict, generalized violence and human rights violations reached 27.5 million”. Also in 2010, an estimated 42 million people were forced to flee due to disasters triggered by sudden-onset natural hazards, with the large majority remaining internally displaced.

The NRS was a remarkably efficient and effective way of ending a displacement crisis in, what so far at least appears to be, a durable manner. It allowed a humanitarian problem that had increasingly started to look like intractable and long-term – that is, the existence of camps all over the capital city of Dili – to disappear completely in a matter of months, rather than years or decades as many had predicted. The resolution of the IDP crisis also allowed the government and the country itself to start focusing on economic development and the much needed improvement of the daily lives of the Timorese population. While the government’s deliberate political choice to avoid the reparations terminology altogether cannot be ignored in terms of qualifying the NRS as a reparations programme, it remains the case that the Strategy was arguably “something in addition to” an instance of successful humanitarian or post-crisis policymaking. Clear acknowledgement on the part of the government of the failure of the state to protect IDPs; official recognition of IDPs as victims of human rights violations and hence their right to receive a remedy; and the explicit connection between the cash grants provided by the Timorese state and the losses suffered by the IDPs arguably place the NRS somewhere in between reparations and the adoption of durable solutions for internally displaced populations.

In a post-conflict country such as Timor-Leste, the trust of people in government depends on the government’s ability to maintain security and stability in the country. Furthermore, people’s trust in the government is determined by the extent of their confidence in the functioning of the various state institutions in delivering public services and in maintaining the transparency and accountability of governmental operations, the protection of human rights, and the rule of law. This chapter discusses how the United Nations helped, first, to establish and strengthen the capacity of a national law enforcement agency, Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL); secondly, to deliver public services during the initial postconflict period and build institutional capacity; and, thirdly, to establish national institutions concerned with transparency and accountability, i.e. the Offices of the Inspector General, the Prosecutor General, and the Ombudsman (Provedor) for Human Rights and Justice, as well as the Courts, so that they can function effectively to discharge their responsibilities.