(I spoke to Avelino Coelho in Dili over the phone.May 11.) See also Green Left Weekly this coming week.
As of Friday, May 11, the East Timorese National Commission of Elections announcements on the results of the East Timorese presidential elections recorded a 73% win for Jose Ramos Horta, standing as an independent candidate, and a 27% vote for Francisco “Lu’olo” Gutteres standing as the candidate of FRETILIN, the party which currently holds a majority in the parliament and the cabinet. With Luolo retaining his 27% vote from the first round, FRETILIN’s vote has collapsed from just over 60% in the last general elections in 2001.
The collapse in the vote, according to Avelino Coelho, General Secretary of the Socialist Party of Timor (PST), is connected to the failure of the FRETILIN government during its term of office since 2001 to deliver any progress in the socio-economic arena. “There has been a virtual ignoring of agriculture. The PST has had meetings with the government putting forward proposals that would advance production in agriculture. Our cooperatives, in the several villages where they are operating, are already doing that. The government just ignored all proposals. We are now more and more unnecessarily dependent on imports from Indonesia.” Coelho also emphasised the high unemployment rates as another major grievance.
“In the end, we decided to support Jose Ramos Horta in the second round of the Presidential elections. Of course, we were not giving unconditional support. We won agreement that we could read out our platform at some of Horta’s rallies and we had speaking rights at all rallies to put our own views. Horta stated his agreement with the calls we were making for more of Timor’s oil and gas income to spend on helping our farmers increase agricultural production, and on health and education. He stated publicly that he would be a President for the poor and ordinary people.”
Meanwhile, he said, FRETILIN defended its policy of minimising public spending, sticking to the IMF and World Bank’s recipe of investing most of the oil and gas money in a long-term investment fund.
Coelho went on to explain that once this round of elections were over, the PST would be concentrating on registering for the July parliamentary elections and campaigning behind its own programme. “We have not entered into any coalition with Horta. We will remain independent and continue to campaign for our program. We will be holding Horta to his promises, or we will be an opposition to him also. We received just over 2.5% of the vote in the Presidential election first round. We must achieve 3% of the vote to meet the new electoral threshold. If we get that 3% or a bit over we may have between 4 and 7 seats in the new parliament, rather than our current one seat. It will be important to have that platform so as to strengthen the struggle over the next period.”
Reaching out to the large number of people disaffected with FRETILIN and coming to hear Horta has resulted in new members for the PST, Coelho said. “In one of our base areas, Oesso”, he said, “We were able to read out our main demands and ideas before Horta spoke and he had to respond. But the next few days after, we had delegations coming to the PST office, supporting our platform, and asking to join the party. In the current climate, he said, it will not be easy to get from 2.5% to 3% or over but we were going all out.
Asked what were the factors working against this, he said the main dynamic now was a desertion of people who had voted for FRETILIN in the past to the new party being established by Xanana Gusmao, to be called the Council for the National Reconstruction of Timor (CNRT). (This is the same initials of the old national liberation organization, the Council for National Resistance of Timor, which Xanana headed.) “We don’t know yet exactly what kind of program CNRT will have – we have to wait and see”, Coelho told me.
“What is clear is that FRETILIN, lacks any vision of where they want to take the country”, Coelho added. “FRETILIN, which was a progressive and revolutionary force in 1975 has now become, under Alkatiri’s and Luolo’s leadership, a reactionary force. They seem to want the people to be dependent on them and their government, being uncaring about raising the incomes of the people. It has become a party of the elite.”
Coelho also criticised FRETILIN for turning to intimidation. “They went in and out of villages threatening people. The PST itself has experienced this in some areas. Yesterday in the village of Gariwai I saw FRETILIN activists yelling that if Luolo lost the election they would not allow any traffic to pass on the road between Dili and Viquique. They prefer to threaten the people rather than be concerned at raising the consciousness. They have turned to using gangster elements to terrorise the people.”
Worse, he said, their failure in government, both in the handling of the army in April 2006 and in the economic area, has deepened the country’s dependence on foreigners. “They have become the instruments of foreign interests, imperialist interests.” Coelho added that it had been Alkatiri and Luolo who were at the forefront of asking for Australian and international forces into East Timor – to get them out of the crisis that they had created. “They dominated the government then, and the parliament, nobody else.”
“Through the coming election campaign, and after, the PST must fight to win a hearing among the people and advance an independent program, emphasising the need to develop agriculture and industry, and to involve the people directly in the political and development process, especially through cooperatives.”
Ceolho commented that he thought that the international forces, including the Australian forces, had acted in a neutral way during the elections. Although, he said, one thing they didn’t do was try to stop the intimidation being carried out FRETILIN’s people. Regarding the current military operations against Major Alfredo Reinhado and FRETILIN’s criticism of a call by Horta during the campaign that the operation against Reinado should be stopped, Coelho explained, “For a while now it has been the position of the commission set up to handle security– with representatives from President of the parliament, the Prime Minister, President of East Timor, the UN and the international forces - that the operation should stop if Reinhado was willing to dialogue. I don’t see that Horta was doing anything more than repeating that. This is another case of FRETILIN’s deceit.”