The problem and politics of language

East Timor has many languages, both local and externally imposed. As described in my history post, East Timor was colonised by the Portuguese about 500 years ago. Consequently the “official” language (meaning the language of law and educated people) was Portuguese. The Indonesian invasion changed everything – the speaking of Bahasa Indonesia was enforced in schools and official business. Consequently, most people now speak it.

In practice however, the Timorese have always spoken their own languages amongst themselves the whole time, and the lingua franca is arguably Tetun rather than Bahasa. Tetun is essentially a creole of various local languages with many words borrowed from Portuguese. Everyone in Dili speaks Tetun, but the further away you go, the more local languages become the mother tongue. There are in fact more than 30 languages in the various districts (see map above). Less educated people will only be able to speak their local language, and will not even understand much Tetun.

All this makes things extremely complicated, not to mention political. After independence from Indonesia, Portuguese was chosen as the official language, a controversial decision for many. After all, what’s the point in choosing a language which only educated people over 50 can speak? One might note that the political elite at the time was composed of these people. Many exiled independence leaders spent the 80s and 90s overseas in Portugal or Mozambique.

Even the most optimistic lusophile would admit that less than 5% of the population speak Portuguese. To be fair however, what was the alternative? Bahasa is widely spoken, but to choose it would have been politically unpalatable. Some people say “why not English?” but even fewer people speak English than Portuguese.

Why not Tetun, then? Put simply, it does not have enough words. Written Tetun (which has no agreed form, by the way) borrows huge numbers of words from either Portuguese or Bahasa. It would be impossible to draft complicated laws in Tetun. It is also not used anywhere else in the world, so would not be great for business, whereas Portuguese is at least spoken in a large number of countries, including emerging global power Brazil.

So in the end, they chose Portuguese, for better or for worse. This is already bringing serious complications – MPs are legally obliged to speak Portuguese in parliament but most cannot. I personally haven’t heard a single Timorese speaking it. In theory, Portuguese has been the language used in schools since independence, but in practice very few teachers can speak it well. So, lots of kids are learning in bad Portuguese. Their parents can’t speak it, so kids can’t get help with their homework. As the children who started school since 1999 get older, it will become even more complicated. University-level books are mostly in Bahasa, and all the lecturers are used to teaching in Bahasa. The list of problems goes on. It’s an educational nightmare, and it will take a long time to sort it out.

(I’m extremely glad that I did a beginners course in Tetun at the Dili Institute of Technology, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone coming here, by the way. Tetun is a really interesting language and, thankfully, it’s incredibly simple. I’ll do it proper justice in a full post sometime soon.)

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)