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Session 200: The Discourse of Rights in East Timor
Organizer: Nancy M. Lutz, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
Chair: Andrea Molnar, Northern Illinois University
Discussant: James J. Fox, Australian National University
Keywords: East Timor, rights, political discourse.
East Timor, the first new nation of the 21st century, was colonized first by Portugal and then by Indonesia. Portuguese rule was established gradually, and while local groups offered intermittent resistance, they also drew on preexisting cultural forms to legitimize the foreign presence. The Indonesian occupation, by contrast, was rapidly and ruthlessly imposed. Intended to smash a nationalist movement that by 1975 had achieved wide support, the state-sponsored violence alienated a population who might (as many East Timorese concede) otherwise have come eventually to accept Indonesian rule. In the context of a twenty-four-year resistance struggle against an oppressive regime, local peoples came to imagine themselves as national subjects. That they had certain rights, both as citizens and as human beings, was vividly articulated for them through the massive violations they experienced, and confirmed when the international community belatedly came to their aid in 1999. By the time that official nationhood was achieved in May 2002, rights discourse was familiar not only to the educated elites who became state officials, but to the largely illiterate rural population. Rights discourse, however, has been indigenized in various ways, by local groups pursuing relatively traditional projects and by state officials claiming to represent the national interest. This panel investigates a variety of ongoing conflicts and negotiations between local and state agendas. The papers are based on field research conducted over the last four years, examining rights discourse in the contexts of natural resource usage and allocation, indigenous concepts of nationalism, and emerging constructs of constitutionalism.
Purchasing the Nation: Exchange and Popular Nationalism
Elizabeth Traube, Wesleyan University
In the new nation of East Timor, educated elites often speak disparagingly of "the (common) people" who naively expected independence to result automatically in prosperity. And indeed, a common sentiment among the poor, largely illiterate rural population is that they are owed their "livelihood" by the new state. But what elites depict as a mark of political immaturity is grounded in a moral economy of exchange that both shaped and was shaped by the nationalist struggle. Such is the case in the Mambai district of Aileu, where an intricate system of exchange practices traditionally regulated social relations. Exchange was represented as an agonistic process in which suffering life-givers are repaid for their "fatigue," and this idiom became a cultural resource for nationalist imagination. Whereas the position of a suffering source had traditionally belonged to status superiors—the gods and the ritual leaders who were their human counterparts—it came to characterize the ordinary people who participated in the resistance struggle. It is today a commonplace notion that the nation was "purchased with the blood of the people," and those who suffered for the nation are entitled to recompense. Popular nationalism, this paper argues, is based in a relational logic that takes exchange obligations, rather than the rights-bearing citizen, as the ground for claims on the state.
The Constitutional Discourse of Rights in East Timor
Nancy M. Lutz, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
The language, or discourse, of rights has been a contentious issue in U.S. and Western socio-legal scholarship. Critics have argued that the language of rights protects majority rights and marginalizes minority populations; supporters assert that rights discourse is essential in order to ensure the protection and legal empowerment of ethnic, linguistic, religious, gender, etc. minorities. Increasingly, as national constitutions are crafted to include international covenants or statements such as the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights, national laws and constitutions include definitions and discussions of ‘rights’ that may differ from indigenous conceptions or debates. This paper examines the constitutional debates surrounding the inclusion of human rights provisions in the East Timorese Constitution. The paper focuses specifically on discussions of women’s and gender rights, but within the larger contexts of discussions of human rights and of rights discourse more generally. Attention is also given to local discussions of ‘rights,’ as presented in popular consultations on the draft constitution, and to how local issues and definitions differed from both the constitutional debates at the national level and the universalist statements of the United Nations.
Strategies for Land and Forest Control in Oecusse Enclave, East Timor
Laura Meitzner Yoder, Yale University
The newly-established government of East Timor is seeking assistance from traditional leaders in state efforts at forest control by sponsoring ceremonies that reinstate ritual authorities and restore seasonal prohibitions abandoned during the Indonesian occupation. In return, traditional leaders use the ceremonies in efforts to gain (unwitting) state support for their sides in inter-village land disputes. Village authorities also expect that participating in these ceremonies will strengthen their claims as legitimate political entities with rights to control land and forests within a defined domain. This paper discusses the contemporary interaction of state and ritual authorities regarding forest control in Oecusse enclave district.