by JOSEPH ISRAEL M. LABAN

DILI, EAST TIMOR — What has been described as East Timor’s leading independent daily operates out of four small rooms and has a budget that threatens to disappear altogether every day.

	TIMOR Post, Timor Leste's leading independent newspaper. [photo by Joseph Laban]

The Timor Post also has staff members who have been in constant fear for their lives since last year, when two of them were attacked and left for dead right outside their rundown office. Then again, other journalists in this young nation have had similar experiences. Last August, another major newspaper had its office windows smashed while one of its employees was struck repeatedly with rocks and sticks and his motorcycle trashed after he acknowledged that he worked for the paper.

Ideally, this should not be happening in the world’s youngest democracy, which at one point had also been called by then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as “a child of the international community.” But as the media in other Southeast Asian nations have found out, keeping the press free is a constant battle that is fought daily — even in a supposed democracy.

Just last week, for instance, about 50 journalists covering a coup attempt were handcuffed with plastic luggage fasteners and hauled off for questioning by Philippine authorities. As of June 2007, the Philippines has also seen some 90 media practitioners killed in the line of duty since democracy was restored in 1986, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP). Fifty-three of the killings, adds the NUJP, took place under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, 58 cases of violence against journalists were recorded between August 2006 to August 2007 by the Alliance of Independent Journalists. According to the body, “government apparatus” has become the new enemy of press freedom, since it is believed to have perpetrated 10 of the recorded assaults.

Indonesia had occupied East Timor in 1975 and ruled it mainly through its armed forces. In August 1999, however, the Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia. That change was recognized by the international community in May 2002.

For sure the media here had expected press freedom to come with democracy. Instead, local journalists seem to have been under siege since East Timor — now also known as Timor Leste — broke free from Indonesia, with the most serious setbacks to press freedom taking place during last year’s tumult that nearly split the country in half. (see sidebar)

Nobel Prize laureate and current Timor Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta maintains, “Timor Leste still has the freest media in Southeast Asia.” Indeed, East Timor has ratified the major international human-rights conventions that guarantee freedoms of speech and the press, and has even incorporated these rights into East Timorese jurisprudence.

Yet Virgilio da Silva Guterres, chairperson of the Timor Lorosa’e Journalists Association (AJTL), says that although there is no comprehensive survey yet of attacks on members of East Timor’s media, unverified reports of journalists being harassed or assaulted trickle in all the time. He cites the case of an attack on a journalist covering the campaign in the first round of presidential elections earlier this year, and notes, “He had to stay in the hospital for three days due the injuries he sustained.”

A NEED TO EXPLAIN THE MEDIA'S ROLE
AJTL estimates that there are about 200 media practitioners in Timor Leste today. There are three major dailies and two weeklies, along with two magazines, one of which caters mostly to the youth. About 80 percent of these publications are at least partially dependent on funding from international development agencies.

	VIRGILIO Da Silva Guterres, chairperson of the Timor Lorosa’e Journalists Association. [photo by Joseph Laban]

“The public is still not well-educated in the role of the media in the society, which is why support in the community remains weak,” says Guterres. He adds that there is a need for “extensive civic education” for the public so that people would realize “that their basic human rights include the right to information and that it is the duty of the media to inform.”

Guterres and the rest of the country’s media hope, though, that there would be no repeat of the events of 2006 that even led to the shutdown of the local papers for almost a month. In May last year, the home of Timor Post editor in chief Jose Ximenes was also burned to the ground, as were those of two Post reporters, Domingos Freitas and Mouzinho Lopes de Araujo. The incidents were among those that prompted the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to officially express its concern over how Timorese journalists were becoming internally displaced persons because their houses were being torched.

Freitas had the added misfortune of being one of the two Post employees who were beaten savagely right in front of the paper’s office a few weeks later. He had been on his way home to a refugee resettlement camp where he had taken his family after they lost their home.

De Araujo says the burning of their houses and the attacks on Post employees had something to do with articles they published that were critical to the government of then Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri. The former premier’s party is also being blamed for more recent attacks on journalists.

Last May, a few days after he was sworn in as East Timor’s new president, Ramos-Horta was asked by this writer about the kind of guarantees and protection he would be extending to local journalists. He replied, “Timor Leste will honor all conventions and international treaties it has signed.” He then went on to propose “government subsidies to privately owned newspapers,” although he said that this would “not be attached to preconditions that could affect the independence of the media.”

Ramos-Horta is widely respected in East Timor and in the international community. But his assurances about protecting the country’s media are apparently cold comfort to journalists here.

Freitas, for instance, has chosen not to file a court case against his attackers, believing that East Timor’s still frail judicial system will only let him down and expose him to more risks. “I do not think the Tribunal could resolve my problem,” he says. “I think it will only aggravate the situation. Filing a case would only encourage even more retaliation.”

Freitas may be thinking of his colleague who was attacked alongside him and later filed a case in court. Up to now, though, the case has not moved, even as Freitas’s co-worker receives anonymous threats against him and his family.

Freitas himself has opted to seek the help of a community elder to mediate between him and his attackers whom he says he can identify one by one. “I am not so sure about justice,” he says. “I only want an apology.”