Abstract
Since the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999, East Timor’s capital Dili has experienced a continuous rural–urban influx. This urban population growth has been concentrated in clusters of crowded and socially fragmented new squatter settlements, posing profound challenges for informal social control and community cohesion. Such neighbourhoods have continued to suffer from endemic communal tensions and gang violence. Using a case study of an urban squatter settlement in Dili, this paper makes two arguments. First, it is argued that, to engage with these communities and address conflict within them, it is imperative to understand the intricate and dynamic linkages between rural–urban migration, urban settlement patterns and communal violence. Secondly, it is argued here that the profuse variety of non-state groups inhabiting such settlements should be viewed from the context of the migrant experience, as unique forms of community resilience to this challenging environment.
Introduction
The thatched wooden hut on stilts known as an uma lulik, or ‘sacred house’, is perhaps the most iconic image of East Timor. These sacred houses represent the ancestral foundation of a family, governing kinship lines, landholdings, complex systems of reciprocal obligation and hierarchies of traditional authority. While one uma lulik may encompass a number of aldeias or villages (for the sake of simplicity, aldeias will be henceforth referred to as villages), 1 each village is more or less one extended family unit. The kinship system, as embodied by the extended family, is the cornerstone of the East Timorese social order and traditional leaders at the head of such families are still the main source of mediation and local justice in East Timor (Everett, 2008). 2 But while these uma luliks are a familiar sight in the rural hinterland, they are a rare sight, if one exists at all, in the capital Dili. A continuous post-Indonesian occupation stream of rural–urban migration has created a now largely migrant population, who, as noted by Hohe (2002), maintain the roots and symbols of traditional and ancestral authority in their rural villages of origin. This little acknowledged social phenomenon has major significance for social cohesion, informal social control and consequently, peace and stability.
East Timor sits at a geographical juncture between Asia and Melanesia, sharing a number of the cultural and political traits of its neighbouring countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and, also, many of their problems. Rural–urban migration, and an attendant growth in informal settlements, is a rapidly growing phenomenon throughout this region. The UN estimates that people living in informal settlements account for 59 per cent of the urban population of southern Asia (UN-HABITAT, 2007b). In Melanesia, 3 at current rates, urban populations are set to double in the next 25 years and much of this recent urban growth has been in informal settlements (Haberkorn, 2008). In Papua New Guinea, for example, it has been estimated that, by 2030, the urban population will comprise 35 per cent of the national population (Storey, 2010) and much of the recent urban migrant population has become concentrated in peri-urban fringe settlements. In East Timor, the population of Dili has more than doubled in the past decade, primarily through rural–urban migration. Figures from the most recent census (Democratic Republic of East Timor, 2010) indicate that as much as 50 per cent of Dili’s population may actually reside in these informal settlements.
Such settlements are commonly portrayed in government, development and security discourse as random and amorphous aggregations of displaced poor people and hotbeds of crime and violence, subject to periodic evictions and police repression as a consequence (UN-HABITAT/UNESCAP, 2009). Certainly, in East Timor and region-wide, vacuums in governance, service provision and policing in these settlements and urban centres in general have produced a range of informal parallel authority and security structures. In donor discourse, perhaps guided by assumptions more appropriate to industrialised nations, the groups that have emerged from these conditions, such as raskol gangs in Papua New Guinea, or the martial arts groups of East Timor, tend to be portrayed as either symptoms of youth alienation, poverty, unemployment and insecurity (for example, Focus, 2008; World Bank, 2007) or of state ineffectiveness, prompting a range of generic policy prescriptions such as improved employment and education opportunities, or more effective policing (Baker and Scheye, 2007).
In a society like East Timor, however, where the majority of the population live in rural areas engaged in subsistence agriculture, the relevance of linkages between ‘high’ unemployment, poverty and crime is questionable. Many gang leaders, for example, have jobs–even high-ranking political posts—and live in middle-class suburbs. Also, given the nature of East Timor’s kinship-based society, gang membership often has deeper cultural origins and significance. Nonetheless, such assumptions have consistently guided policy responses, with predictably poor outcomes.
As Brown (2007) notes, too narrow a focus on problems and their causes can ignore sources of community resilience—the community-driven creative responses and capacities for endurance to such difficult environments. Closer examination reveals that, in the case of East Timor, and as may be the case elsewhere, rather than being ‘slums of despair’ (Eckstein, 1990), these settlements consist of highly dynamic and fluid communities, with complex sets of social relations and intricate, on-going linkages with rural villages of origin. Very little is understood, however, about the nature of these communities. In East Timor itself, there is no published material on either rural–urban migration or squatter settlements. Indeed, it has only been in the past two years, in the wake of a series of evictions, that these settlements have been referred to as such; previous discussion had mainly been couched in terms of land disputes.
By contrast, internationally, particularly in Latin America, where expanding urbanisation, ‘land invasions’, squatter communities, gangs and related law and order issues have attracted considerable academic interest (see for example, Rodgers, 2006; Moser and McIlwaine, 2006), there is a rich literature on the process of rural–urban migration and migrant adaptation, especially on informal migrant associations. As Abu-Lughod (1961) observes, informal social institutions provide a highly useful tool for understanding patterns of migrant adjustment. Some squatter communities, as described by Peattle (1990) or Burt and Espejo (1995), for example, have shown extraordinary resilience in the face of repression and civil conflict by attempting to transform their environment through voluntary associations such as the ‘clean-up committees’ and neighbourhood watch groups of the Villa El Salvador squatter community in Peru. In Africa, Fall (1998) has described the intricate and enduring links between rural–urban migrants in Dakar, Senegal, and their places of origin; how migrants draw on kinship and ethnic networks built around the same regional, socio-cultural area of origin to access housing and employment in the formal or informal economy. Other studies have examined the way migrants attempt to “produce locality” (Bruner, 1999, p. 472) or ples (Ward, 2000) by replicating their original rural societies in an urban setting. A study by Bruner (1999), for example, describes how the Toba Batak ethnic group of North Sumatra ‘produce locality’, maintaining their cultural identity in the city through forming kinship-based associations, retaining their language, clan names, ritual practices and regularly returning to their villages for important ceremonies.
As will be described here, East Timor’s patterns of rural–urban migration over the past three decades have produced diverse hybrid micro societies, in that they maintain aspects of traditional village systems such as clusters of kinship groups and vestiges of traditional authority, but in abbreviated form, sharing space with other kinship groups in highly heterogeneous societies reminiscent of more established urban and industrialised societies. Squatter communities are the latest of these hybrids and, as they evolve, they offer a unique window into how migrant communities adapt, survive, organise social structures and maintain their social identity. This paper will also explore the implications of the fragmented nature of traditional authority in these urban settlements for informal social control. A consequent vacuum in authority, combined with the absence of the state, has produced a diverse range of often-competing parallel structures and groups which have at times posed considerable challenges for security, policing and peace-building efforts.
This paper will make two main arguments. First, that patterns of migration have formed specific configurations in settlement patterns in these squatter communities, that there is a logic to where people live and what affiliations they form and, therefore, also a certain logic to crime and communal conflict. Secondly, it is argued here that the existence of such groups and conflict between them can be viewed not just as a product of such an unstable and insecure environment, but also as a form of resilience or adaptation to the challenges of rural–urban migration. This paper will examine how the many different types of informal groups in these settlements have demonstrated such a capacity for resilience by seeking, in both violent and non-violent ways, to enhance their environment, their security, maintain their cultural identity and ‘produce locality’ (Bruner, 1999, p. 472).
The research for this case study is drawn from interviews, focus groups and participant observation conducted incrementally over a five-year period dating from 2006 to 2011, principally from research projects conducted in this area by the author for the Australian aid agency AusAID, field-based reports for the New York Social Science Research Council and a World Bank project (in partnership with the Geneva Small Arms Survey and ActionAid) in 2009. The insights and support of a local youth group, BURADO, especially their women’s division, were of vital importance to this research and they are gratefully acknowledged here. The author also lived in East Timor for four years and lived in this case study neighbourhood for two years.
After a brief background, this paper will proceed with a case study, with first a description of the demographic make-up of the case study area, including the spatial distribution of ethnic enclaves and the implications of this for social cohesion, then a discussion of the different gangs, martial arts groups (MAGs) and youth groups that inhabit this area before proceeding to a discussion of how these groups correlate to kinship configurations and patterns of communal conflict. The paper will conclude with a discussion of a range of constructive non-violent responses to this environment.
Background
Like many capital cities around the world following post-conflict phases or decolonisation, when colonial restrictions on population movements were removed, Dili has experienced a massive rural–urban influx. Wartime displacement and post-war rural–urban migration has boosted Dili’s population from a pre-war figure of 30 000 by more than eight times. 4 While there have been a number of waves of migration over the past three decades, most of that growth has been since independence and Dili’s population has more than doubled since 1999 (Democratic Republic of East Timor, 2010). This population movement, especially of rural youth moving to the city, is continuous; a 2009 International Organisation for Migration survey described an influx of almost 700 youth into the west of the city between December 2008 and February 2009 (IOM, 2009).
According to Ranck (1977), Dili was a migrant city even before the Indonesian invasion in 1975, with as much as 75 per cent of the population composed of rural migrants. Today, less than half of Dili’s population is native to the city (Democratic Republic of East Timor 2010). Even then, many of those who do list themselves as Dili-born have parents or grandparents from the rural districts and therefore still maintain landholdings, dwellings and allegiances to kinship networks and traditional authorities there, rather than in Dili. Then there is circular migration which, as will be described in more detail later, considerably swells the population of Dili in regular annual cycles, with attendant conflict cycles; just as circular migration connects families in rural areas with their relatives in the capital, it also connects conflicts.
Migration patterns to Dili follow global chain migration patterns, whereby one family establishes a base and then ‘sponsors’ others from the extended family and home village (Choldin, 1973), acting as a sort of ‘communication outpost’ for those remaining in the village of origin (Litwak; cited in Choldin, 1973). This means that truncated enclaves of the village of origin are established alongside enclaves of other migrant groups, creating a patchwork of different and often competing kinship units. Therefore, many villages established in Portuguese or Indonesian times may have quite substantial extended family units living in close proximity, although they are considerably reduced versions of their rural branches. In rural areas, as stated, a village is essentially a family unit, but this principle largely holds true for established urban villages (although there is considerable variation), with one larger family dominating, but with a number of smaller enclaves of other families. As Abu-Lughod (1961) observed of Cairo migrant villages, an urban village is not one community, but many separate social communities.
Those neighbourhoods comprised of former Indonesian housing are different again. These were created almost overnight, when rural migrants rushed to occupy vacant Indonesian civil service and military housing, and housing left vacant by refugees fleeing the post-referendum violence, after the last Indonesian troops had left in 1999. This housing is putatively owned by the state and, while many households (until about 2009 at least) paid a token rent to the Department of Land and Property, these are essentially squatter settlements. The inhabitants of three such settlements have in fact recently been evicted to make way for government buildings, and a similar fate potentially faces all these settlements (Daily Media Monitoring Service, 2011).
As people later followed their relatives into Dili (and continue to do so) to seek education or to partake of the development bonanza created by the UN presence, they moved into already-crowded relatives’ houses or settled in areas close to them, forming even more truncated versions of traditional rural villages. The ethnic fragmentation that characterises these villages gives them a very different dynamic from the clan-centric traditional villages of the rural hinterland, or the still somewhat heterogeneous but older, more established, villages in Dili.
Unlike rural areas, these migrants soon found that they were sharing communal space with groups from other families and districts, with whom they had no kinship links or exchange relationships. Such proximity to different kinship groups created tension not only through competition for scarce resources such as spare land to cultivate kitchen gardens and access to water, but also through each group’s desire to bring their relatives into Dili to live near to the extended family unit. Recent studies have shown that disputes over such resources animate the majority of conflicts around Dili (CRS, 2010). Many families who had settled in Dili much earlier coveted this housing for their own relatives in the districts and resented these newcomers illegally squatting in this accommodation. Conflict between inhabitants of old and new settlements has been a pattern all over Dili.
Access to employment or livelihoods also created tension as each group tried to control access to markets for their own group, both in purchasing and transporting produce from their own rural districts and in allocation of market stalls and setting of produce prices. Markets, bus terminals and the clusters of Indonesian housing therefore became some of the worst conflict zones in the 2006 ethnic-based east–west violence (Scambary, 2009).
Most of the Indonesian-era housing is concentrated in the west of the city in the sukos (suburbs, for the sake of simplicity) of Comoro and Bairo Pite, which today continue to suffer sporadic outbursts of communal violence. Each of these areas is a sprawling suburb. The Bairo Pite suburb, for example, in which this case study is situated, is composed of over 34 villages, spreading from near the Dili Cathedral, near the centre of town, to the banks of the Comoro River in the west. Major population movements, especially in the post-1999 rural influx, have almost doubled its population, creating a potent legacy of overcrowding and contested property claims.
The socially fragmented nature of these urban migrant villages means that authority is also fragmented. In rural villages, traditional elders mediate conflict through their political and sacred authority as ancestral descendants, whereas in these urban migrant villages, authority is highly contested. Traditional leadership must also compete with forms of non-traditional authority such as martial arts group (MAG) wargas (masters) and ‘big men’. There are more than 15 martial arts groups in East Timor, many of them introduced by the Indonesian military during the Indonesian occupation. Estimates of their membership vary between 45 000 and 90 000 and the biggest groups may command over 10 000 members each (Ostergaard, 2005). Some MAGs demand blind obedience to such wargas and there are many accounts of such wargas’ authority usurping that of even senior family members. The authority of ‘big men’ is also derived from their ability to deliver patronage such as small cash loans, cigarettes, alcohol and even jobs. It is very difficult for traditional leaders to compete with such figures. In a rural setting, their sacred authority, as vested in them by their ancestral lineage, enables traditional leaders to allocate resources such as housing and land, and to enforce traditional law. In these hybrid urban settlements, without access to such resources, they seldom exert influence very far beyond their own immediate and extended family. Constant circular and permanent rural–urban migration also creates highly fluid, often unstable social structures so that any authority that does exist, that might play a mediating role in conflict or exercise some measure of social control, is far from static.
A constant inflow of young, unemployed, itinerant rural males into this tense, unstable social setting makes this a highly volatile environment. A profusion of self-styled youth groups, gangs and MAGs inhabits these neighbourhoods, posing considerable challenges to community cohesion and to attempts at both formal and informal social control. However, as the case study will demonstrate, these communities have shown remarkable resilience and adaptability, responding to this environment in a variety of both violent and non-violent ways.
The Case Study
The main area chosen for this case study, Perumnas, was a former Indonesian-built housing complex for Indonesian civil servants. Its name is a compound of the Bahasa words Perumahan Dinas (civil servants’ house). According to locals, until the Indonesians built housing complexes there around 1992, it was mostly just farmland. It was only occupied by East Timorese after the Indonesians left in 1999, so it is a very recent settlement. Now it is a cluster of three villages: Avanca, Rio de Janeiro and Moris Ba Dame in the suburb of Bairo Pite (see Figure 1).
Street map of the case study area, based on a drawing by a local youth group. Please note that the scale is approximate; these boundaries are nominal aldeia or village boundaries.
The adjacent village ‘THT’ has also been included in this study, as it comprises an important element of the conflict dynamics in this area. Separated from this complex by a main road, unlike Perumnas, THT is composed of primarily Portuguese era housing and the families living there have been largely established since 1975.
The population of Perumnas reflects the wider East Timorese urban population in terms of age, with more than 50 per cent of inhabitants aged 24 or under. Most houses have only three rooms, with an average of seven people per house, making for crowded living conditions. Over 40 per cent of the population in this neighbourhood self-identify as unemployed, reflecting a wider pattern in Dili as a whole. A further 25.8 per cent identify as self-employed, more than likely providing itinerant labour in the informal economy. Only 14.8 per cent had stable employment (World Bank, 2010).
Like the sub-district of which it is a part, where more than 75 per cent of the population come from outside Dili (Neupert and Lopes, 2006), Perumnas is a migrant neighbourhood. There is considerable diversity in the variety of linguistic groups settled here, with all 13 districts of East Timor represented (World Bank, 2010). According to local people, however, the dominant groups are Bunak and Kemak speakers from the mountainous western districts of Bobonaro and Ainaro and Makassae speakers from the eastern districts of Baucau and Viqueque, an estimation reflected in the statistical data. Only 13 per cent of the population claim to be Dili-born (World Bank, 2010). Even these statistics do not tell the complete story. Given the nature of chain migration, where family members from rural districts follow other family members who have already established themselves in the city, many of these groups come from particular villages in these districts. Those from Bobonaro District, for example, nearly all originate from four neighbouring villages, from the same extended family. 5
In terms of settlement patterns of different ethnic groups, predictably, given the random, free-for-all nature of first occupation, while there are some blocs of dominant groups in certain areas, there are also mixed areas and numerous smaller enclaves. A community of Lospalos 6 people, for example, occupies one side of an entire street, at the boundary of two villages. According to one of the Lospalos inhabitants, there are also numerous Lospalos enclaves or single households dotted throughout Perumnas. 7
Circular Migration
These populations are, however, by no means static. Different events over time have also changed configurations; in the violence of 2006, many Baucau and Viqueque families were forced out of Avanca and Moris ba Dame villages and, in the violence of 2007, an enclave of Ainaro people in Avanca village were forced out into THT. 8 There are also five to six significant cyclical, circular population movements per year in East Timor, as described by Perumnas residents. 9 On 1–2 November, for example, Dili residents travel to their home districts to commemorate Loron Matebian (also known as All Souls Day). Then there are public holidays when people travel back to the districts such as Christmas, New Year and Easter. In August and September, students arrive in Dili from the districts to register for school and university, or travel back to the districts for schoolholidays. July to September is also the dry season and therefore a time when people go back to the rural districts to hold weddings or for traditional ceremonies such as repairing uma luliks or kor metan. 10 There are other seasonal movements too, such as people coming in to Dili to sell agricultural produce (many do this on a daily basis) or collect and spend their profits from the sale of their coffee. These population movements also coincide with peaks and troughs in conflict. Then there is the constant inflow of rural youth to the city looking for work; many Dili residents tell of unexpected relatives from the districts that they often never knew they had, who simply arrive on their doorstep. The transitory nature of the Perumnas population is reflected in the statistic that at least 36 per cent of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood have been there five years or less and about 18 per cent have been there two years or less (World Bank, 2010). Certainly, nobody has lived there for more than 10 years.
Such frequent population movements make this a highly fluid social environment. As Barber contends, in describing similar dynamics in a Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, squatter settlement, this requires us to view such a neighbourhood not as a set of built structures, but rather, as a set of social relations (Barber; cited in Goddard, 2004).
Contested Authority
The fragmented nature of settlement patterns has a number of implications for community cohesion and conflict resolution. In addition to extended family groups, there are more than 35 language-groups. While these language-groups may share many traits in common with other groups, they also differ in some important respects. As Hohe (2003) points out, there are a variety of complex traditional dispute resolution and justice mechanisms in East Timor, varying with each linguistic group and with the nature of the dispute or crime. The common aspect of all these systems, however, is the involvement of respected traditional leaders from a common ancestral lineage.
However, as a World Bank survey of Perumnas found (World Bank, 2010), while traditional authorities were the main sources of security (there were generally withering assessments of police effectiveness), there were often highly ambivalent attitudes towards such authority, varying considerably with each village, and there are a number of reasons for this.
During the communal violence of 2006–07, in many cases, village chiefs alienated sections of their community through sectarian behaviour such as involvement in or endorsement of arson, looting and intimidation (there are numerous cases around Dili and nationally of traditional leaders also being MAG or gang leaders). Conversely, traditional leaders have sometimes gained respect across kinship and linguistic boundaries, either through neutrality, protecting victims, or through playing a mediation role.
Another reason, however, is that, as settlement patterns in Perumnas and other hybrid urban neighbourhoods are highly fragmented, so, therefore, is traditional leadership. Given that traditional authority stems from family lineage, the ad hoc, patchwork nature of these neighbourhoods makes it highly unlikely that any of the village chiefs represent their whole village in the way that they would in a conventional, rural village. Even when a leader comes from the same district and speaks the same language as their community, this does not guarantee authority.
As stated, cyclical and permanent rural–urban migration can also change the demographic status over time, so that one group may decline in number while another grows, which may lead to the further undermining of a village chief’s authority. A common complaint too is that many rural youth newly arriving in a village do not recognise the authority of traditional leaders, as they do not come from the same rural village or extended family (such newcomers are commonly referred to as ema tasak—literally, ‘raw people’).
Perumnas is a migrant neighbourhood and so, for most people, traditional authority resides in their district and village of origin. As described earlier, people are constantly returning to their village of origin for traditional ceremonies and rebuilding their uma luliks. This is where their communal landholdings and family networks are located and these must be constantly maintained, and so this is where people’s primary loyalties lie. Accordingly, many people keep a dual residency in both Dili and the districts. Therefore, given the recent nature of settlement, it is hardly surprising that there are few traditional elders who have the authority for performing the necessary rituals for the tara bandu 11 ceremonies now becoming in vogue in government or in NGO-sponsored community mediation ceremonies. One witness described a peace ceremony in another migrant suburb where only one of the protagonist groups appeared at the mediation ceremony, as they were the only group to have a traditional authority present in Dili. 12
In some instances, families from particular districts may be more scattered than others and may have no formal or traditional leadership at all. One Lospalos resident of Perumnas reported that, because their community is scattered in pockets over four villages, they have never been involved in any peace process as they do not have a formal leader.
The Groups of Perumnas
While multiple factors such as unemployment, ethnic tension, challenged masculinity and ineffective policing play a part, this leadership vacuum and lack of a coherent and cohesive social structure must be seen as a significant source of Perumnas’ unusually high concentration of gangs, MAGs, former clandestine groups and ‘youth groups’; there are over 20 groups in an area not much bigger than a one-hectare block. Graffiti painted on the wall of a disused basketball court in the Moris Ba Dame village, for example, proclaim an alliance of 10 different MAGs and former clandestine groups. 13
Members give a variety of reasons for joining a group, depending on the nature of the group, but a common justification was that it was a means of meeting other youth in their area from the same rural district or village, to give them a sense of family. Such group identification has also been observed of Papua New Guinea Highlands youth in the capital Port Moresby, who formed groups with kin or wantoks from their own rural village of origin as they try to establish a sense of ples or place, in a multi-ethnic urban setting (Ward, 2000).
All these groups claim to provide ‘security’ for their neighbourhoods, but in many cases are the chief source of insecurity. Many of them sustain themselves through ‘taxes’ on local businesses, a fact attested to by the statistic that close to 100 per cent of Perumnas businesses report experiences of extortion (World Bank, 2010). This group diversity has ensured that Perumnas is probably one of the most complex, unique and, at times, most violent neighbourhoods in the capital Dili.
While conflict between these groups often appears random to outsiders, there are some consistent patterns. Village and family membership, for example, often coincides with membership of MAGs and other groups. While this appears to be a more common feature of rural areas, especially those areas harbouring longstanding historical tensions like Atsabe in the west (Molnar, 2004) or Uatolari in the east (Gunter, 2007), such symmetries characterise a number of endemic communal conflicts in other areas in Dili.
MAG membership in the recently settled villages in Perumnas is predictably fragmented, with pockets of MAGs throughout the four villages there. The pattern tends to be though, that these groups are ethnically homogenous, reflecting their membership from the same village or district of origin, and dominate in the areas where they their extended family is most numerous. In Perumnas, KORK ( Kmanek Oan Rai Klaran or ‘Wise Children of the Hinterland’) members, for example, tend to originate from the natal area of their founder, Naimori, in Ainaro, although this MAG has extensive membership in the east and other areas of East Timor. THT is dominated by PSHT (Persaudaraan Setia Hati Terate or ‘Faithful Fraternity of the Lotus’), members from an extended family unit from the natal area of the ex-PSHT leader Jaime Lopes, also in Ainaro. While fighting between MAGs is often glossed as MAG competition, quite frequently it is between groups from the same district—for example, between Bobonaro families or between Ainaro families.
Gang and MAG Conflict
This phenomenon of family loyalties dovetailing with gang or MAG membership renders some conflicts particularly complex and sets up recurrent conflict patterns. A fight at a wedding party, for example, can become a MAG conflict, drawing in members from outside the village and sparking conflict in other villages, in turn escalating into a political and communal conflict.
This was the pattern for most of 2006 in Perumnas and the rest of the city. Mobs drawn from the ranks of PSHT, 7-7, a collection of western gangs and also opportunistic neighbours from all over Perumnas and neighbouring villages, 14 attacked KORK members and eastern enclaves, which were conflated as being pro-FRETILIN. Whenever fighting abated, often after extensive mediation, it would then re-ignite, frequently sparked by petty social or personal disputes (Scambary, 2009). By the end of 2006, Perumnas was largely ethnically cleansed of easterners, except for a few who had intermarried with westerners or had ‘integrated’ with the community.
The second conflict to affect Perumnas, and almost the whole country, was very different in nature and locals are quick to point out that, while the issues of 2006 have been resolved, those of 2007 have not. 15 Beginning in November 2006, in the western district of Ermera, this conflict rapidly spread to a number of rural districts and then to Dili, leading to over 100 deaths between November 2006 and October 2007. 16 In Dili, this conflict played out almost entirely between western groups. Easterners, many still residing in internally displaced camps, were now largely spectators. Instead of the broad regional lines of 2006, this conflict pitted families against families and so was largely divided along village boundaries. As with Dili as a whole, in Perumnas, after PSHT murdered two popular community members in early 2007, people largely forgot about east and west and the majority of gangs and youth groups turned against PSHT and, in a combined assault (also involving outside communities), drove them from the neighbourhood.
Today, a host of old and new issues animates hostilities in the neighbourhood. Most fighting today now takes place, as mentioned earlier, between members of an extended family from Bobonaro; one faction lives in THT, who are members of PSHT, and another, who are Kera Sakti MAG members, who live in a Perumnas village. Locals claim that the tensions between them originate in a land dispute between their villages in Bobonaro District itself, which dates back to Indonesian times. Youth from these two villages have been known to travel back to Bobonaro to join in attacks on each other (which is not an uncommon occurrence in MAG disputes in Dili). 17 While this is predominantly a rurally based family dispute, kept alive by family members travelling to and from the city to Bobonaro District, it has since acquired the label of a gang conflict, of PSHT versus Kera Sakti and associated political and historical narratives. Disputes over protection rackets also feed into this conflict dynamic.
Youth Groups
In addition to these MAGs and former resistance groups is an unusual proliferation of more than a dozen self-styled ‘youth groups’. While in some cases the gang appellation would seem more appropriate due to some groups’ predation on local businesses, as a whole, these groups exhibit widely differing levels of involvement in crime from group to group, with some having no involvement in crime or violence at all. These groups are only found in particular blocks or street corners, with highly defined territories.
Given their highly localised character and largely contemporary provenance, these groups exhibit characteristics at considerable variance from MAGs and clandestine groups. While members of MAGs and other such groups emphasise security and self-defence as their major activities, youth group members (who are frequently also members of MAGs—such multiple identities are common) emphasise more socially oriented activities such as painting, music and helping the community.
While they might self-identify as youth groups (groups rarely identify as gangs in East Timor—there is still extreme sensitivity around this word), it is more useful to view them as social networks. Cattell (2001), in describing the social groups that formed on poor housing estates in London, UK, formulated five types of networks. One such group, which she termed the ‘homogeneous network’, is most apt for these Perumnas youth groups. The ‘homogeneous network’, in Cattell’s (2001) typology, is predominantly comprised of an extended family, plus a smaller number of friends and neighbours. Most of these street-corner groups found in the Perumnas area would fall into this category. While a few friends and neighbours might join, they are generally composed of one extended family from a rural district.
While still sometimes conflict-prone and, in some cases, criminally oriented to a degree, most members of these groups (as with the rural youth who populate the MAGs and former clandestine groups), are mostly average youth, preoccupied with such everyday pursuits as socialising, going to school, finding work or getting married.
The largest Perumnas youth group, BURADO (recently defunct but continuing as a social network), like most groups in the neighbourhood, was a mixture of social and anti-social (although predominantly social) elements, with a number of former militia members and involvement by some of its members in local protection rackets. However, unlike such groups in other countries, such as the Chilean pandillas or Costa Rican chapulines (see Strocka, 2006), for example, it has organised a variety of civic-minded community activities including sporting competitions, radio journalism training (one of their leaders works at the national broadcasting service) street cleaning, tree replanting and sewing classes. Founded by a self-confessed former ‘hard man’, who now works as an outreach worker for an international NGO, BURADO also had a number of strong women leaders and a women’s division who have in the past helped disadvantaged members of the community to hold funeral ceremonies (running for sometimes a week or more, these can be injuriously expensive and result in enduring debt) by collecting money from the community, borrowing furniture and helping with the cooking and cleaning. As the BURADO women members claimed, they formed their group as a way of coping with conflict and adversity, ‘to bring people together’ when the conflict of 2006 engulfed their neighbourhood. BURADO have also played a key role in mediation, assisting the return of displaced residents to their homes. While its members claim that it was almost entirely composed of one extended family from Maliana, it grew to over 100 members and a considerably more diverse membership.
Another group to have transformed itself is JOCAR, its name an abbreviation of its founder Joao Carau (one of the two people murdered by PSHT in 2007), a former member of the notorious Timorese underworld figure Rosario Marcal's (aka Hercules’) gang, which ran extortion, gambling and prostitution rackets in Tana Abang, Jakarta (Wilson, 2006). Mostly drawn from migrant youth from Bobonaro District, this group had a fierce reputation, evicting eastern families from their houses, and constantly fought with neighbouring gangs and MAGs, including BURADO, who killed a JOCAR member in 2005. With the help of BURADO and donations from the local community, JOCAR have since transformed themselves into a boxing club, which has applied to join East Timor’s fledgling National Boxing Federation. Using the tradition of ‘tough love’ from their former leader Joao Carau, this group have, according to local inhabitants, hitherto kept their village ‘Avanca’ largely free of crime.
These youth groups are, however, by no means static, having shown, over time, like JOCAR, an ability to evolve and adapt to a changing environment. Some groups have disappeared, while new ones have appeared on a regular basis. BURADO, a largely socially oriented group replaced Gangtitis-Gangtilis, an anti social group. They began life as an impromptu social club of migrant youth from Maliana but, seeing that they could attract funding and donor support, BURADO developed a code of ethics, an organisational structure and opened a bank account. Through slow attrition due to leading members studying, getting married or getting jobs, BURADO has been replaced by a new group ‘Fitun’ (Star). While BURADO was largely composed of one extended family group and located in one village, Fitun has membership across a number of families, linguistic groups and areas of Dili.
Conclusion
This paper has illustrated the intricate links between rural and urban communities through the processes of migration; how rural–urban migration in East Timor has produced urban hybrids of traditional rural societies which, in an attempt to ‘produce locality’ by replicating their rural villages in an urban setting, have often replicated rural conflicts as a consequence. Factors such as poverty, overcrowding, ethnic heterogeneity and unstable social structures have clearly contributed to an environment of social tension and conflict. Circular and permanent migration have also mitigated against the application of informal social control, with traditional leaders struggling to exert authority beyond their own kin groups and in competition with alternative sources of authority.
These factors are not, however, sufficient in themselves to explain the roots of gang conflict in these settlements, or other parts of urban Dili. Gangs or MAGs clearly often serve as extensions of their communities or families in enacting vigilante or payback justice in communal disputes over resources, and perpetuate conflicts that are often rural in origin, and often of a longstanding, historical nature. They are very much part of their community and membership is tightly bound in a nexus of family, linguistic, rural and urban territorial identity.
As is also shown here, violence is not always the outcome of such a complex environment. In the absence of effective policing, service provision or traditional authority, many groups function as incipient community-based organisations, playing a constructive role in these neighbourhoods, providing a measure of security and informal social control, demonstrating the resilience of these communities in the face of considerable adversity.
As is illustrated here, current flawed assumptions of homogeneity and the efficacy of traditional authority do not fit the reality of these settlements. This case study indicates the need to take account of the complex, cosmopolitan nature of such settlements; that more nuanced, ethnographic approaches are required in designing both peace-building, urban planning and policing responses. Peace-building responses, for example, need to acknowledge the linkages between MAGs and gangs and their communities and include MAG or gang leaders in community dialogues (rather than deal with them in separate processes as is usually the case). In terms of policing, as Goldsmith (2009, p. 124) notes, during the 2006 violence, police were confused by the apparent random nature of conflicts and, when responding to urgent conflict reports, often did not know where to go. Also, casual conversations with a UNPOL community policing unit in Dili in 2009 revealed minimal knowledge of village or social structures. 18 These symmetries, as described here, between MAG and family affiliation and village boundaries offer a certain predictability in terms of where and why conflict occurs. Examination of 22 conflict maps, produced by communities in Dili as part of a Catholic Relief Services peace-building project, reveals similar symmetries (CRS, 2010). Knowledge of such conflict dynamics would therefore enable more effective and more intelligence-led approaches to future policing interventions.
Given the tenuous nature of tenancy in these settlements, there is also a manifest need to address tenancy rights through more formal leasehold arrangements. While the RDTL government has announced plans to build social housing, 19 it could certainly be argued that such settlements already constitute social housing. Formalising leasehold arrangements, with an attendant legal and maintenance regime, could give residents a measure of housing security and at the same time resolve tensions and social jealousy over ownership if temporary occupancy was officially acknowledged. A deeper understanding of the social organisation of these settlements and the societies and groupings within these settlements would also assist urban planning and social housing management regimes and offer entry points for community engagement.
On a broader level, as identified by the UN and other international agencies, there is a need for more community-based, innovative and multilayered approaches to enhancing urban safety and security, approaches that draw on the ability of individuals and communities themselves to respond to problems of crime and violence (UN-HABITAT/UNESCAP, 2009). Non-state actors are the main providers of justice and security for up to 80–90 per cent of the population in many fragile states and the OECD (2007) has stressed the need to engage positively with informal groups or non-state actors, who will, in reality, continue to fill a vacuum of security and service provision for many years to come.
While this case study concerns a small informal settlement in urban East Timor, there is no doubt that such complexities as described here could apply to many other such communities regionally and world-wide, underscoring the need for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of rural–urban migration and its implications for livelihoods, sustainability, urban planning, security and peace-building.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Gordon Peake, Hedda Haugen Askland, Klaus Neumann and the four anonymous referees for their helpful and constructive comments, and the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Multimedia Services for their work on the street map.
Funding Statement
This work was supported by the World Bank Social Development Department [2009 Dili Urban Violence Assessment]; AusAID [Dili Office Small Grants Fund]; and the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum of the New York Social Science Research Council.