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Independence is like an egg, (once you drop it, you can never pick it up again): Matthew Libbis reports on continuing violence in East Timor.

Article Excerpt
The Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT) is holding its national congress on the beach in Dili, opposite the offices of the party's leader, Francisco Xavier do Amaral. Men beat syncopated rhythms on drums, women bang gongs. They wear feathers, gold head dress, breastplates and woven tais. International forces appear intermittently, wary of men brandishing swords. But these people are intent on celebration, not trouble. The troubles are outside the makeshift camps that have been home to tens of thousands for the last five months.

Stone throwing and smashed windscreens occur daily in Dili. Gangs swell and then dissipate into the camps or surrounding streets before the police arrive. Violence then flares up at another Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp. In one audacious attack, youths attacked the camp opposite the military barracks.

Almost a thousand houses in areas where people from the east and west once lived have been reduced to blackened shells, as their neighbours bear tags of the gangs responsible for the burnings. People will not return to a property that has been burnt. Others seek shelter from the violence; but they shelter in camps that lie in the same town as the brutality from which they flee has occurred.

Tension is rife in the camps where 60,000 people live under the ubiquitous United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) tents and tarpaulins in the Dili district. As one man put it: 'If I wake up with my wife, I'm happy; if I wake up with a thousand others who are unhappy, I'm also unhappy'.

Eighty thousand people fled Dili. Those left in the camps are a mix of easterners, many of whom have jobs and businesses, westerners too afraid of the violence to return to their homes, and people from the east who have lived here for a generation or more. Some may have been involved in activities in their hometowns that makes it unviable to return. In some camps, only young men from the east remain; they have unfinished business in Dili. Rumours that people are coming from the east to take revenge for attacks on the camps send people fleeing to the hills.

At night, youths from the camps retaliate against the onslaught from their assailants, coming out of...

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