In 2006, a mere seven years after the overwhelming vote in opposition to Indonesia’s
final offer of ‘broad autonomy’ and only four years after the restoration
of independence, massive communal violence erupted in Dili, the capital
of East Timor. One of the least understood aspects of this crisis is the use of
labels for the people from the eastern and the western districts. East Timorese
refer to the three easternmost districts as Lorosae – the land of the rising sun
– and the population is known collectively as Firaku. The western districts are
referred to as Loromonu – the land of the setting sun – and the population is
known collectively as Kaladi. When communal violence erupted in May 2006
these labels were bastardized: Firaku was shortened to ‘Iraq’, implying terrorist
and intended as an attack on Prime Minister Alkatiri, who is of Yemeni
descent. The term Kaladi was at times replaced by the supposed antithesis
of Iraq – ‘Amerika’. In the Indonesian-era housing complexes of Dili, where
communal violence was particularly severe, the words ‘Firaku’ and ‘Iraq’, ‘Kaladi’
and ‘Amerika’ were scrawled on houses and businesses. There was also
more hate-filled graffiti: ‘Firaku are terrorists’, ‘Firaku are hypocrites’, and
‘Firaku are thieves. Long live Loromonu’. How, one wonders, so soon after
the achievement of what Nobel Peace laureates José Ramos-Horta and Bishop
Belo once called ‘the impossible dream’,1
had some East Timorese come to
think of their new nation-state as a divided society? Why, furthermore, had
they come to think of their society as being analogous to the US invasions of
Kabul and Baghdad?