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Oan Kiak: women and independence in Timor-Leste: in the most isolated areas of Timor-Leste, women are providing a powerful counterpoint to the apparent failure of independence.

Article Excerpt
Men are so often identified as the dominant agents in the process of nation formation, not least through their relationship to public performances of violence in moments of war and revolt. This pattern appears to have continued in what is so often referred to as 'the world's newest nation', Timor-Leste, which has over recent times experienced a tremendous level of political and violent turmoil. To a world watching via a globalised media, the images of clashes in the masculinised domain of the urban street and the gun battles by military and police serve to typify the kind of nation Timor-Leste is becoming: a violent and unpredictable place where women are shown only as victims or with their agency limited to their role as carers.

The relationship between nation formation and gender is, of course, a complex one, and certainly much more so than that suggested when images of a divided military apparatus act as a reductive framing of Timor-Leste as a whole. In narrow coverage of spectacular violence these narratives only speak in one way of what has been happening in Timor-Leste since the Indonesian withdrawal in 1999. To denounce Timor-Leste's attempts at national independence on the basis of volatile state institutions overlooks many narratives of successful transformative processes, not least the agency shown by many women to ensure that national independence has also meant an opportunity to address patriarchal structures in society.

Few who have not visited Timor-Leste itself would realise the considerable activity of women's organising. While of course, constrained by patriarchal structures, East Timorese women, from the political elite in Dili to rural women in the most remote areas, have found ways to foment change. In Timor-Leste, a striking level of public campaigning, policy development and activism has been taking place on the subject of gender; seemingly a far greater importance is attached to the subject in East Timorese public discourse than is the...

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