The battle for the hearts and minds – and votes – of the East Timorese people will not lose its passion, writes Hamish McDonald from Dili, even after Monday's referendum.
Just after 6am, the camp of palm-leaf huts is barely astir. Smoke from fires drifts in the soft light across the looming walls of a half-built cathedral shrouded in bamboo scaffolds. A few figures, sarongs around their shoulders, survey the bare expanse of the churchyard to its iron-paling fence.
Yet the ramshackle old church is already full, men on the right, women on the left. Voices soar in sweet island harmonies. The white-clad priest intones the prayers in Tetum language, and 300 sets of knees go down on the bare concrete floor and 300 sets of palms are put together under 300 chins.
Father Domingos Soares begins his sermon, and there is silence broken only by coughing. On Monday comes a duty of voting which everyone has to accept with full responsibility, before their own conscience, their people, and before God, to choose what they think best for East Timor. We have suffered and waited a long time, he says. Now is the moment for us to speak.
Later, when the sun is burning hot, there is another gathering across the straggling township. Motorbikes rasp through the streets, pillion passengers waving red and white Indonesian flags, followed by dump-trucks and mini-buses crammed with young people.
In an open field where they all stop, police are blowing whistles. A burly young man takes the mike in front of a large speaker system and tries to lead everyone in a song that repeats the word "Otonomi" (autonomy). But the crowd is distracted: it mobs a truck from which a uniformed police sergeant is tossing T-shirts, caps and lettered headbands to a sea of raised hands. Across the field, a small crowd of housewives sit around a truck loaded with rice sacks.
These are the final days of campaigning before Monday's vote on the territory's future, a vote to stay with Indonesia with the promise of wider autonomy, or leave it – to strike out as South-East Asia's newest and perhaps most bizarrely configured nation.
The choice is quite sharply defined in the two cultures vying for the hearts and minds of this embattled town, Suai, in the far south-west corner of East Timor.
In the church compound are about 2,500 people identified as supporters of independence. Mostly not sophisticated people: men with beards and sun-darkened skin, women with betel-nut stained mouths, people who use the "Bon Dias" of the old Portuguese days, and raise the hand of a stranger to their lips.
They include Elisa du Redo, 22, who walked in from the outlying village of Fatuloro with her husband and their four young children two months ago after armed men drove everyone from their homes. Or Paulo Augustim, 36, who fled Taroman in May, after the same group came looking for enemies and shot one in front of the entire village.
Running that day's pro-autonomy meeting is the same armed group, a pro-Indonesian militia called Laksaur. It is said to be mild compared with the Mahidi, another militia largely responsible for the deaths of the 400 or so independence sympathisers the church estimates have been killed in the Suai-Same region since January.
The Laksaur operates from an annexe to the local traffic police office and its rally has every facility the government of surrounding Covalima regency can provide. Many of the attendees are younger than 17, the voting age for the United Nations-supervised ballot, suggesting local schoolchildren have been rounded up. The free T-shirts and caps, the rations of rice at one-third the market price – both are evidence of powerful backing.
By contrast, Elisa, Paulo and their fellow "internally displaced persons" – get nothing but harassment. Their rations come from private charity, chiefly CARE, Caritas and Yayasan Hak (Rights Foundation). Last week, the Laksaur prowled around one night, shooting guns in the air and throwing rocks. The bupati (head of the regency) turned off the water supply to the church, and only put it back on four days later when two American senators came and complained.
A week before campaigning was officially over, the Suai branch of the pro-independence movement, the National Committee of Timorese Resistance, or CNRT, closed its office in the town and moved into the church grounds, because of intimidation. It stopped holding rallies because people seen attending were later visited at home and threatened by militias. This week the house of an independence sympathiser was burnt. The bupati has just stopped the rice ration of one civil servant whose husband supports the CNRT.
Indonesian police, responsible for security of the UN plebiscite, lounge around near the Suai market, where pedlars lay out wizened vegetables and tiny eggs. "The police will disperse militias," says one of Suai's group of the 1,400 foreign observers monitoring the poll across Timor. "But they won't follow up complaints, and they won't step on the military's toes."
Like other church leaders and independent analysts, this observer has heard stories of special military groups – formed of serving or former members of the feared Kopassus or Special Forces unit which took a leading role in the brutal conquest of East Timor from 1974 onwards – leading the Laksaur and Mahidi in terror raids out of nearby West Timor.
Nothing can be confirmed but the fears are real and held by educated, informed people. And while much has changed in West Timor, some things haven't. Kupang, a wild mixing pot of the archipelago's ethnic groups, has luxury hotels and supermarkets, and a newspaper, Pos Kupang, that has taken political reform to heart and gives its readers an unrelenting diet of corruption and power-struggle stories.
But up the long twisting road out through the dry mountainous landscape, the island is closer to its violent, feudal past. Many of the dwellings are still thatch-roofed huts and people walk the roads barefooted, with machetes swinging at their belts. It is a land of feuds, of cattle raids, of fierce wars between warriors swinging cutlasses made of sharpened car springs. "They have high blood pressure," says a Balinese policeman in Atambua, the main town near the border. "Arguments shift easily to blows."
Early last week, Atambua was full of militia leaders from across the border-tough middle-aged men in black T-shirts, fatigue trousers, and military-style vests. They filled the central Intan Hotel, and ate a huge meal at the town's best restaurant, guarded by police. The deputy police chief of Nusa Tenggara Timur province (which includes West Timor) was also in town, and the next morning the panglima (regional military commander) arrived.
Since the Portuguese and Dutch set up rival empires more than 300 years ago, contending powers have never found any shortage of local recruits to fight and oppress fellow Timorese. "There is no other source of money in these villagers," says an observer. "If someone puts you on the payroll and gives you rice to turn up, you do it."
On Thursday, the militias came back to the capital, Dili. From mid-morning the town filled with hundreds of motorcycles and dozens of seized trucks and buses and other vehicles – even a fire engine. Late in the sultry, clouded day, clashes happened with watching independence supporters. Quickly the eastern sector of the town became a battleground, weapons were produced and fired, the CNRT headquarters wrecked. Gunshot victims trickled into the few clinics run by religious orders. Between three and 11 people were killed. No arrests were made by police, who themselves shot one of the victims – a young man trying to run away from militias.
An attempt to derail the vote, or just another case of "high blood pressure"? Most analysts here, including the United Nations Assistance Mission on East Timor (UNAMET), think something like the latter. Had the militias tried to seriously disrupt the vote, Dili would have been in flames and a lot more blood would have been running in the streets before the Indonesian garrison turned out.
So on Monday, it appears, the vote will go ahead. The Timorese will have to face down the ranks of militias who will prowl the streets of towns like Suai, and put their trust in the few UNAMET officials, unarmed foreign police and military liaison officers, plus the volunteer observers, a courageous group staying in isolated, uncomfortable posts for the past three weeks. Some will have to make the risky journey back from refugee camps like the Suai church ground to the villages where they are registered. The vote will be a battle between faith and fear.
Faith of people like Elisa du Rado and Paulo Augustim at Suai, who know little about the shape of an independent East Timor but are clear about what they want. "We don't know about these things because we are just small people," says Augustim, when asked what kind of government he expected. "But we don't like the Indonesians because they have their five principles [the state ideology of Pancasila] but their attitude is completely different."
And fear of militia leaders, like Eurico Guterres, leader of the Aitarak militia group active around Dili and Liquica, who openly threatens to seal off East Timor from outside contact after the vote and turn it into a "sea of flames".
It will also be a battle of magical beliefs. On the militia side the elaborate oath ceremonies with drinks of animal blood and liquor, and the planting of Indonesian flags in front of almost every household.
On the independence side, a sense of traditional lulik, or sacred duty, going back beyond the time when Dominican friars planted Christianity at Lifau in 1556, layered by membership of a church that has stayed with the people through all their hard times and, under Nobel laureate Bishop Carlos Belo, has put their rights before the world.
These mostly illiterate people will have to mark a ballot paper asking two quite complicated questions. But the observers have been impressed at the way 450,000 or so have registered, turning up with the required documentation even in remote locations. They know that the vote is the main test, but that many others will follow.
Father Hilario, the head priest in Suai, believes that Timorese will keep faith. Even the militias, he thinks. "They do what they are doing to save themselves," he says. "But in their hearts it does not correspond with what they feel."
And after the vote? "We are very afraid, and we pray to God to help us," Father Hilario says. "There are many rumours that after the vote they [the militias] will do something, that they will attack."
Watching a pro-autonomy rally, an observer makes the same point. "They know who to kill," he says. "If these people start to die, the international community will have a terrible responsibility. We will all get on a plane after the poll and leave. The polling staff will also leave. There will be just the UN police and military staff. The people here are very fearful."