Mountain biking in East Timor

East Timor’s tourist agency is trying hard to market the country as a haven for mountain bikers, and doing a pretty good job of it. This year’s Tour de Timor was a resounding success, and hopefully the event will get bigger and better in years to come. I only wish I had arrived here a few months earlier so I could have participated!

I’ve only been here a few weeks but have already managed to borrow a bike from my boss Dinesh and have done a few rides with him. He’s been here for five years so knows some excellent routes. The country is pretty hilly, so most routes involve cycling up a long steep road being overtaken by crammed mikrolets (minibuses), then coming back down a rocky off-road track at high speed.

I hope to do a lot more riding, but it’s going to get harder and harder as the annual rains intensify over the next few weeks. This tends to destroy a lot of the roads, and turn the tracks into mudbaths. Anyway, here are a few photos of rides so far…

Brief history of East Timor

The Wikipedia page on the history of East Timor is good, but here’s my own potted history of this small, beautiful country. So as to fit the history of a very complicated nation into a single blog post, I have cut many corners, for which I apologise. However, I have included the things which I think are most important.

Five hundred years of Portuguse colonialism ended abruptly in 1975 when, after a revolution in Portgual, the colonisers left in a hurry. Neighbouring Indonesia (which itself had gained independence from the Netherlands only a few decades earlier) was already making plans to “integrate” East Timor.

After a brief period of declared independence, Indonesia invaded at the end of 1975. The Timorese put up resistance, but it was no contest. So, between 1975-99 the country was officially part of Indonesia. However, a committed and fairly effective resistance movement called Falintil continued to harass the Indonesian military with varying levels of success over that time.

The repression in Indonesia’s newest province was fairly brutal. Estimates vary, but there is general agreement that at least 100,000 people died as a result of the occupation, which is a huge number considering the population was 500,000 in 1980. The most famous atrocity is the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre of at least 250 people, which put East Timor in the headlines across the world.

After the Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, Timorese independence seemed a real possibility. Eventually, Indonesia agreed to a referendum in 1999.

What happened in the months before and after the referendum was a tragedy, and is extremely complex. Thousands of people were murdered and 200,000 people (a quarter of the population) displaced. I would suggest reading this part of the Wikipedia article on the occupation. For a full and gripping treatment of the period, I would recommend this book by Irena Cristalis.

Essentially, Indonesian-armed anti-independence militias rampaged through the country, intimidating, beating and killing people. There were actually militias on both sides, and Falintil’s record over its history is not spotless, but the general consensus is that Indonesia acted particularly monstrously during this time.

Indonesian intelligence had suggested that people would vote for “integration” but it was hopelessly wrong – the Timorese voted for independence in their droves, with the eventual result being around 80%. So the violence got worse. A particularly horrible incident happened in the southern town of Suai, when up to 200 people taking refuge in a church were murdered by a pro-integration militia.

Eventually, the UN had to step in with a peacekeeping force, and they ran the show from 1999 until the country received full independence in 2002. The UN still maintains a heavy presence here, and only now is it handing over control of the police force in parts of the country. The UN mandate expires in 2012.

After independence there has been further instability, but since 2006 things have been pretty good. East Timor’s status as “post-conflict” and a “fragile state” means that it has attracted a lot of attention and money from donor agencies and NGOs.

A post covering current political situation will follow soon.

(photo - Falintil in the 90s, credit: margheritatracanelli.com.au)

Why am I in East Timor?

In my last post I set out why WaterAid is working here. But why I am here, a foreigner with no experience of the country or region? Paradoxically, the reason is that WaterAid’s policy is to employ local staff as far as possible, to strengthen the capacity of the sector in the long term.

Policy and advocacy work demands certain skills which are hard to find here due to the history (more on that later). I've worked on policy and advocacy for WaterAid in the UK for three years, supporting many of our country programmes across Africa and Asia. So, I am here on a 6-month secondment to train up a promising Timorese graduate, pass on my knowledge and experience, and set them on the right path.

WaterAid’s programme work in East Timor (which I summarise as ‘taps and toilets’) has been moving from strength to strength over the last 5 years, but policy and advocacy work are increasingly been seen as a priority. This is both in terms of the national context and the overall direction of WaterAid’s new global strategy for 2009-15

So what is policy and advocacy work? I tend to characterise is as efforts to influence what others in the water and sanitation sector are doing, but also the government’s broader development strategies (e.g. in health or education). Put simply, it means (i) making sure that water and sanitation is given the priority it deserves, and (ii) all the money allocated to it is being spent well.

To put that in context, WaterAid spends about US$1m a year on ‘taps and toilets’ in East Timor, but in 2011 approximately $80m will be spent on water and sanitation here by the government and donors. That makes WaterAid’s a fairly small proportion of all the money being spent. It is therefore a good investment to spend time influencing the ‘sector’ to ensure that the other $79m is spent well.

There is a lot to be done. Recent surveys by Oxfam and Plan indicated that up to two-thirds of new water systems here may break down within a year, an atrociously high figure caused by a number of factors. Furthermore, rumour has it that the government is set to increase its budget for water and sanitation from $19m in 2010 to close to $60m in 2011. Let’s be clear, that is excellent. This government has truly prioritised water and sanitation, recognising the low levels of access as one of the biggest barriers to development. But it remains to be seen whether the sector has the capacity to scale up that quickly.

In summary, I’m here for the next 6 months to support José our budding Policy and Advocacy Officer. We’ll be working hard to ensure that WaterAid’s knowledge and experience, built up over nearly 30 years, can contribute to a vibrant water and sanitation sector here in East Timor.

Why does WaterAid work in East Timor?

East Timor is a very poor country. Rates of access to water and sanitation here are amongst the lowest in the world. Consequently, WaterAid has prioritised it, and money has been flowing into programmes from WaterAid Australia for about 5 years.

The country’s official name is “Timor-Leste” which is in Portuguese, the national language (more on the linguistic contortions here later), but I’ll use “East Timor” because it’s the name most commonly known in the English-speaking world. East Timor is one of the world’s youngest nations, having had a particularly traumatic birth in 2002 (more on that in another post), and is a very poor country. According to a UNDP report earlier in 2010, 53% of Timorese live on less than $1.25 a day (PPP). [1]

Take a moment to think about how little $1.25 actually is, then consider that half the people here live on even less than that. This is the highest poverty rate in South East Asia, and close to the highest in Asia (there is no data for Afghanistan and Burma). To put things in perspective, East Timor is lower in the Human Development Index (HDI) than Uganda, Malawi and Bangladesh. For more on the country and its history, there are good overviews from Wikipedia and the BBC.

Despite its traumatic birth and recent instability, the country seems to be on quite a firm footing these days. People are optimistic, and there has not been any widespread violence since 2006. The economy is picking up, buoyed by recent successful oil exploration, but the majority of people are still desperately poor. There will most likely be a need for support from donors and NGOs for some time to come.

So, that’s why WaterAid is here. Why I am here will be covered in the next post…

[1] UNDP (2010) Asia-Pacific Human Development Report 2010