Daniel Nelson – After 25 years of brutal occupation, culminating in Indonesian-organized murder and mayhem against a referendum on independence, the world's newest country is turning the spotlight on home-grown violence by launching a campaign against wife-beating.

An anti-domestic violence campaign for the fledgling state of East Timor was launched at a news conference in the capital, Dili, last week and will be followed up by speeches, commercials, special training for police, debates, workshops, and action by support groups. A national conference on the issue is being organized.

Half of all incidents reported daily to East Timor's police force are related to domestic violence, estimates the territory's police chief, Peter Miller, who says combating the abuse is "our number one priority."

While accurate figures on the extent of the abuse are difficult to establish, the incidents made public have prompted widespread concern in the former Indonesian colony taken over by the international community in the bloody aftermath of the referendum in August 1999.

"It must stop!" said Sergio Viera de Mello, the Brazilian head of the United Nations' administration that is responsible for running the country until formal independence May 20. "I urge you as a society and individuals ... to commit yourselves to rid your homes and your communities of all forms of domestic abuse – the last vestige of violence remaining in East Timor," he said.

Viera de Mello said recently that through their "magnificent patience and restraint," the territory's 800,000 people had proved wrong those who were skeptical about the territory's future as an independent state. Violence in the home was a scar on this record, he said.

One newspaper report which helped to raise the profile of the problem focused on an employee of the government's information department who recounted an ordeal at the hands of her husband.

"There was my husband. He was throwing rocks at me," she was quoted as saying in the latest issue of government-run Tais Timor. "But, imagine, he's wearing one of those government-issued tee-shirts that says, 'End the violence now!'." She says she yelled at him, "Look at you! You have no right to wear that shirt."

The report says that the conservative and repressed nature of predominantly Catholic East Timor may have hidden decades of such abuse – both under Portuguese colonial rule and under the Indonesian administration that seized power in 1975 – and that the untreated traumas caused by the violence surrounding the 1999 referendum had probably made matters worse.

At the campaign launch last week Mario Zamorano, director of the information department, said that the success of a national anti-violence drive during last year's peaceful assembly election proved that East Timorese people had the character and strength to confront this last remaining vestige of violence.

Emphasizing that domestic violence was a worldwide problem, he said that as East Timor became the first new member of the UN in the new millennium, "it has the opportunity to set a world example, as it did during the election when it became a glowing global example for electoral non-violence."