Latest news with #EastTimor
Telegraph
a day ago
- Business
- Telegraph
The tiny Pacific nation evading China's grip
Avenida de Hudi-Laran is one of the busiest roads in Dili, the capital of East Timor. On any given day, motorbikes, cramped minibuses and yellow taxis speed past restaurants, spas and furniture supply stores. But instead of the usual Portuguese or Tetum – the country's two official languages – many of the establishments boast Chinese names. The expansion of Chinese-owned businesses has grown to such an extent that most people refer to Hudi-Laran, meaning 'banana complex', as 'China-Laran' now. It's a sign of Beijing's increasing investment in the small country, but its level of influence appears to have its limits. At a time when more and more Asian countries are falling into debilitating debt traps that grant China sweeping leverage, East Timor is resisting – for now. It is one of the world's youngest countries, having gained independence in 2002 after hundreds of years as a Portuguese colony and more than two decades under Indonesian occupation. The nation, located around 430 miles north-west of Australia, makes up the eastern half of the island of Timor, sharing the land with Indonesia. Its strategic position in the contested Indo-Pacific and nearby shipping lanes make the country ripe for Chinese influence. 'We do not view China as a threat, least of all as an enemy,' José Ramos-Horta, East Timor's president, told The Telegraph, insisting his country remains neutral in the battle for control of the Pacific. East Timor sits crucially near the Second Island Chain, a series of islands stretching from Japan through Guam – a US territory with a key military base – to Indonesia's eastern islands. Although further from China than the First Island Chain, which includes Taiwan and the Philippines, the second chain is widely viewed as an emerging battleground of influence. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said in April that the US would be boosting investment in the outlying chain of islands. East Timor is also situated near the Ombai-Wetar Strait, a deep-water passage that's critical for movement between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Given its placement, China has attempted to increase its military presence on the island, proposing the construction of a radar facility in 2007, which it claimed would only be used to detect illegal fishing. However, a leaked US diplomatic cable revealed that the site would've allowed China to collect intelligence on American and Taiwanese military activity in the South China Sea, where Beijing has expanded its presence in recent years. The government in Dili rejected the proposal. East Timor relies mostly on security agreements with its neighbours: Australia and Indonesia. While open to participating in joint military drills with China, Mr Ramos-Horta said there was only so much East Timor could offer a country such as China when it comes to defence. 'It's a bit like an elephant inviting a mosquito for joint military exercises. The Chinese will take cruise missiles, we will take slingshots,' he said. The bulk of East Timor's relationship with China is economic, but it has opted for a different route to many other countries. Chinese aid has funded East Timor's presidential palace, foreign ministry and military headquarters, and Chinese state-owned companies built and currently control the national power grid and its major port. The country upgraded its ties with China in 2023 to a comprehensive strategic partnership, which opened the door to 'unlimited' economic cooperation, one expert told The Telegraph. Despite Beijing's economic involvement in such infrastructure projects prompting concern, East Timor has avoided the 'debt trap' that has destabilised so many others. China has a history of lending billions to vulnerable governments that struggle to repay the loans and eventually fall under its thumb. Such has happened in Sri Lanka, which owed China nearly $25 billion (£19.5 billion) before it defaulted and fell into its worst financial crisis in decades. But while Chinese firms have built key infrastructure in East Timor, the projects have been through private tenders. The south-east Asian country has never taken a loan from China, meaning its influence there 'remains limited', according to Loro Horta, East Timor's ambassador to China. In 2012, it came close to accepting a $50 million loan from China to upgrade its drainage system, but Dili rejected the proposal because it gave Beijing disproportionate control over which company would carry out the project. Instead, East Timor took out grants from partners such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, where there are fewer strings attached. The nation also follows a 'friends to all' policy, under which it receives foreign aid and investment from a wide range of partners – including Australia and the US – so it isn't entirely dependent on any one actor. China's grip looms Part of East Timor's ability to resist China's pull stems from its oil and gas revenue, but experts have said this could soon change. Despite being one of the poorest countries in the region by GDP per capita, it earns close to half a billion dollars in petroleum revenue annually, which funds nearly 90 per cent of its state budget. However, its main oil fields are predicted to be fully depleted within the next decade, meaning the country could be left bankrupt, according to Damien Kingsbury, a professor emeritus at Deakin University in Australia. The government is optimistic that more oil will be uncovered before it's too late, but others are worried that the impending economic crisis could push East Timor down the slippery slope towards greater dependency on China. 'Small countries such as East Timor risk having large investors and donors such as China swamp their local economy and thus lose a capacity to make independent economic decisions,' said Prof Kingsbury. 'China could end up having an outsized influence in policy making.' This has happened to countries in the Pacific before. The Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Nauru have all switched recognition from Taiwan to China in the past decade after developing closer ties with Beijing. The Solomon Islands, historically one of the poorest countries in the Pacific, signed a security agreement with China in 2022, opening the door for Beijing to establish a military base in the region. However, East Timor's 'friends to all' policy could help it to avoid falling into a similar entanglement. 'I have no particular grounds for concern. China has a positive relationship with East Timor – it's significant but not one of the top donors by any means,' said Michael Leach, a professor at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. 'The Timorese leadership have always been careful to balance their relationships in sensitive ways,' he added. East Timor's bloody past The fact that East Timor has remained relatively unscathed when it comes to China is also a result of its recent bloody history. Indonesian forces occupied the country between 1975 and 1999, and killed around 200,000 people – of a population of only around 600,000. They tortured and slaughtered civilians and resistance forces, in what many scholars have labelled a genocide. 'Indonesia killed a lot of people, a lot of people suffered, and a lot of people sacrificed tremendously in order for it to be a sovereign nation and so they value that sovereignty,' said Charlie Scheiner, a long-time researcher at La'o Hamutuk, one of East Timor's oldest and largest human rights NGOs. No one understands this better than the president and prime minister, who both led the struggle. Mr Leach explained that Xanana Gusmão, the prime minister, spent years fighting and was later imprisoned 'in pursuit of the dream of self-determination and independence', which 'informs a lot of his outlook today on maintaining Timorese independence'. For Mr Ramos-Horta, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, his experience travelling the world and courting diplomatic support made him 'no stranger to the sort of traps that small countries can fall into with foreign policy if they're not careful', according to Mr Leach. Experts agree that East Timor's relationship with China is likely to expand – especially economically – but it will probably not reach a point where there would be a risk to its sovereignty or independence. 'Timor will always be a democracy. We can never be a dictatorship because we are so disorganised and undisciplined – it's impossible to have one country dominate Timor,' insisted Mr Loro. 'Many have tried. They usually fail,' he added jokingly.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry review
Richard Lloyd Parry, a longtime foreign correspondent whose experiences of war and regime change are recorded in his remarkable 2005 memoir In the Time of Madness, can be said to know whereof he speaks. Many of that book's issues, including the psychic damage he incurred from events he witnessed in Indonesia, East Timor and Afghanistan in the 1990s and early 2000s, are reinflected in this, his first novel. Kit and Lara live in a remote village in the deep rainforest. She works for a small, undependably financed NGO. He's a stay-at-home husband, living for their baby daughter Helen. While Lara presents as impulsive yet practical and barely able to contain her own energy, Kit is dreamy, internalised, exhibiting a calmness that falls easily into dissociation. 'This is your life,' she shouts at him shortly before they leave the UK, 'a day of your life, and it requires your presence.' He's struggling with the local language. His wife has neglected to tell him that he's speaking it in the female register, which is why the villagers are so amused by him. Beneath the trees, the light is 'filtered to a soupy dimness'. The villagers claim to be able to tell a child's fortune from its teeth. The baby, kept in a heavily air-conditioned pod in the space beneath their stilted house, has a rash. Her future, it seems, will feature a long journey: a prediction, Kit observes politely, that he recognises from fortune tellers in his own country. Though there are outright tensions between husband and wife, and a sense that neither of them is entirely connected with their situation, their life maintains a fractious stability until the arrival of English journalist Court Hardy. Hardy brings them up to date on the political context of their idyll, and warns them that they're now living in the middle of a war. Lara vanishes. After an attack on the village, Kit and his daughter are ejected into the rainforest, along with a villager called Obson, a handful of the village children, and the novel's MacGuffin – the memory card from Hardy's camera, which in the right hands will reveal direct superpower interference in the conflict. To say much more about the plot would be to spoil it. We are left to guess where these events occur. Lloyd Parry provides broad clues, but anyway it's in some sense less a nation than a fabular Everywhere, with the local language known only as 'the Tongue', the country always referred to as 'the Country'. The Country has been invaded by 'the Neighbour'. The nation financing the war is 'the Superpower' (or, as Lara formulates it, 'the Confederated States of Uncle Fuckface'). Meanwhile, where Kit and Lara are an easily recognisable contemporary couple, Hardy – stout, middle-aged and blustering, his dialogue cluttered with exclamations such as 'Fuckaroo' – strikes the reader as the comedy war correspondent of a previous generation. The cumulative effect is sometimes of a novel that can't quite decide whether to be closely observant or distanced to abstraction; realistic or rawly satirical. The reader, unsure how or in what direction to suspend disbelief, looks around furtively for authorial support. After this uneasy beginning, In the Green Heart settles to its real task. The forest quickly reveals itself as a central character. Despite his familiarity with its outskirts, Kit is 'unprepared for the experience of being enclosed' by it. The air feels 'thick and unstirring'. 'Time itself,' he muses, was 'muffled and distorted'. Obson and the good-natured children pluck 'dark festoons' of leeches from each other's bodies. Kit can't keep up with them. He feels like 'a man swimming in the shallows, who suddenly finds himself above a trench of ocean miles deep'. He's brought along a compass, but magnetic ores in the surrounding rock render it useless. 'It's OK, Mr Kristian,' Obson reassures him, 'I know a way.' But soon enough Obson seems lost, too. As agents of the Superpower close in, intent on retrieving the memory card, the forest becomes the centre of Kit's struggle against his own personality; only Helen's few remaining plastic-packaged nappies seem more symbolic. 'Crisp as wafers, the opposite of the forest with its wet and profusion, its endless ramifying life', they console him for his lost entitlement. 'The Green Heart' is a nicely ambiguous phrase, suggesting the heart of a forest, certainly; but equally a human heart under-tested by experience. Kit is lost and his core is green, too. All that connects him to his own experience is the relationship of care with his daughter, presented without distance and in constant wonder. We feel it even more powerfully than we feel his glassy, self-protective dissociation, or his furtive admiration for the forest dwellers who keep him and his daughter alive if not entirely 'safe'. Helen is an 'immense gamble with his own happiness'. His love for her is 'helpless, without walls or will'. By the end of the nightmare – and it is a nightmare, determinedly evoked – the war and its politics, particularly in the interplay between global and national, have supplanted both meanings of the title. In a tour-de-force final dialogue between Kit and the recently deposed president of the Country, Lloyd Parry explores the foetid jungle of relationships between local power and superpower. In the Green Heart is a strange tale: a little awkward, intensely political, designed to lay bare the fictions of a contemporary colonialism yet inseparable from the closeup portrait of a man attempting to both shelter in and break out of an internal psychic trap. In short, very contemporary. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry review
Richard Lloyd Parry, a longtime foreign correspondent whose experiences of war and regime change are recorded in his remarkable 2005 memoir In the Time of Madness, can be said to know whereof he speaks. Many of that book's issues, including the psychic damage he incurred from events he witnessed in Indonesia, East Timor and Afghanistan in the 1990s and early 2000s, are reinflected in this, his first novel. Kit and Lara live in a remote village in the deep rainforest. She works for a small, undependably financed NGO. He's a stay-at-home husband, living for their baby daughter Helen. While Lara presents as impulsive yet practical and barely able to contain her own energy, Kit is dreamy, internalised, exhibiting a calmness that falls easily into dissociation. 'This is your life,' she shouts at him shortly before they leave the UK, 'a day of your life, and it requires your presence.' He's struggling with the local language. His wife has neglected to tell him that he's speaking it in the female register, which is why the villagers are so amused by him. Beneath the trees, the light is 'filtered to a soupy dimness'. The villagers claim to be able to tell a child's fortune from its teeth. The baby, kept in a heavily air-conditioned pod in the space beneath their stilted house, has a rash. Her future, it seems, will feature a long journey: a prediction, Kit observes politely, that he recognises from fortune tellers in his own country. Though there are outright tensions between husband and wife, and a sense that neither of them is entirely connected with their situation, their life maintains a fractious stability until the arrival of English journalist Court Hardy. Hardy brings them up to date on the political context of their idyll, and warns them that they're now living in the middle of a war. Lara vanishes. After an attack on the village, Kit and his daughter are ejected into the rainforest, along with a villager called Obson, a handful of the village children, and the novel's MacGuffin – the memory card from Hardy's camera, which in the right hands will reveal direct superpower interference in the conflict. To say much more about the plot would be to spoil it. We are left to guess where these events occur. Lloyd Parry provides broad clues, but anyway it's in some sense less a nation than a fabular Everywhere, with the local language known only as 'the Tongue', the country always referred to as 'the Country'. The Country has been invaded by 'the Neighbour'. The nation financing the war is 'the Superpower' (or, as Lara formulates it, 'the Confederated States of Uncle Fuckface'). Meanwhile, where Kit and Lara are an easily recognisable contemporary couple, Hardy – stout, middle-aged and blustering, his dialogue cluttered with exclamations such as 'Fuckaroo' – strikes the reader as the comedy war correspondent of a previous generation. The cumulative effect is sometimes of a novel that can't quite decide whether to be closely observant or distanced to abstraction; realistic or rawly satirical. The reader, unsure how or in what direction to suspend disbelief, looks around furtively for authorial support. After this uneasy beginning, In the Green Heart settles to its real task. The forest quickly reveals itself as a central character. Despite his familiarity with its outskirts, Kit is 'unprepared for the experience of being enclosed' by it. The air feels 'thick and unstirring'. 'Time itself,' he muses, was 'muffled and distorted'. Obson and the good-natured children pluck 'dark festoons' of leeches from each other's bodies. Kit can't keep up with them. He feels like 'a man swimming in the shallows, who suddenly finds himself above a trench of ocean miles deep'. He's brought along a compass, but magnetic ores in the surrounding rock render it useless. 'It's OK, Mr Kristian,' Obson reassures him, 'I know a way.' But soon enough Obson seems lost, too. As agents of the Superpower close in, intent on retrieving the memory card, the forest becomes the centre of Kit's struggle against his own personality; only Helen's few remaining plastic-packaged nappies seem more symbolic. 'Crisp as wafers, the opposite of the forest with its wet and profusion, its endless ramifying life', they console him for his lost entitlement. 'The Green Heart' is a nicely ambiguous phrase, suggesting the heart of a forest, certainly; but equally a human heart under-tested by experience. Kit is lost and his core is green, too. All that connects him to his own experience is the relationship of care with his daughter, presented without distance and in constant wonder. We feel it even more powerfully than we feel his glassy, self-protective dissociation, or his furtive admiration for the forest dwellers who keep him and his daughter alive if not entirely 'safe'. Helen is an 'immense gamble with his own happiness'. His love for her is 'helpless, without walls or will'. By the end of the nightmare – and it is a nightmare, determinedly evoked – the war and its politics, particularly in the interplay between global and national, have supplanted both meanings of the title. In a tour-de-force final dialogue between Kit and the recently deposed president of the Country, Lloyd Parry explores the foetid jungle of relationships between local power and superpower. In the Green Heart is a strange tale: a little awkward, intensely political, designed to lay bare the fictions of a contemporary colonialism yet inseparable from the closeup portrait of a man attempting to both shelter in and break out of an internal psychic trap. In short, very contemporary. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
South China Morning Post
08-07-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Will Myanmar block East Timor's Asean entry? Junta's NUG warning shot tests bloc's unity
As East Timor edges closer to joining Asean , Myanmar's military rulers are seeking to block its entry, in a warning to it – and governments everywhere – against engaging with the war-torn country's opposition forces. Last week, sources cited by public broadcaster Thai PBS revealed that Myanmar 's military regime had formally notified Malaysia , the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of its intent to withhold support for East Timor's membership when the bloc convenes in October. Naypyidaw's objection centres on accusations that East Timor has breached Asean's foundational principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, as enshrined in the bloc's charter. The junta has called on East Timor's government in Dili to 'refrain' from any dealings with the National Unity Government (NUG) – a group of elected lawmakers ousted by the 2021 coup – and other resistance groups fighting military rule in Myanmar. A soldier from the Kachin Independence Army, an ethnic armed group in Myanmar, puts on his shoes as he and his comrade cross a stream. Photo: Reuters In a letter, the junta warned that if Dili continued to openly violate the non-interference principle when it came to Myanmar's internal affairs, then 'we must firmly reject any consideration of granting Asean membership' to East Timor. It was reportedly signed by Myanmar official Han Win Aung, the bloc's director general for Asean-Myanmar affairs and an alternate leader of its Senior Officials' Meeting.
The Independent
29-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
East Timor deports an ex-Filipino congressman accused of masterminding a governor's murder
East Timor on Thursday deported a former Filipino congressman charged with multiple murders in the Philippines, saying that he was a national security threat whose presence could damage the country's image before its entry to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Ex-Rep. Arnolfo Teves Jr. was arrested in East Timor's capital of Dili on Wednesday by immigration authorities and would immediately be deported to the Philippines for staying without a visa and after his passport was cancelled by Manila's Department of Foreign Affairs, the East Timor government said in a statement. Teves was seen in handcuffs being escorted by East Timor police officers to an awaiting Philippine air force plane. The plane left Dili on Thursday afternoon. Teves had been in Dili for more than two years as he tried to seek asylum, straining relations between the two Southeast Asian democracies. The Philippines has been calling on East Timor to send Teves back to face trial. The Department of Justice in Manila on Thursday welcomed East Timor's decision and said it has designated a team of justice and immigration officials to help repatriate Teves. East Timor said in a statement that Teves' presence in the country was 'unacceptable' and his stay for more than two years 'poses a disruptive factor in bilateral relations between the two states and establishes a serious precedent with potential implications for internal security.' 'The perception that Timor-Leste might be viewed as a refuge for individuals fleeing international justice undermines the integrity of our borders and our shared efforts to combat transnational crime,' East Timor said, using the country's formal name. 'The imminent full accession of Timor-Leste to ASEAN, scheduled for October this year, further reinforces the responsibility of the Timorese state to actively collaborate with its regional partners in upholding justice, legality, and stability in the region,' according to East Timor. East Timor President José Ramos-Horta told The Associated Press in an interview in Dili in September that there was 'no possibility, under the law' that Teves would be able to remain in East Timor and that he would likely be sent back to the Philippines after his appeal to gain asylum had been exhausted. Teves has been sought by the Philippine government in connection with the March 2023 killings of Negros Oriental Gov. Roel Degamo and several other people, including impoverished villagers seeking medical aid from him, by men in military camouflage and body armor who barged into his central Philippine home with assault rifles. At least 17 others were wounded in the brazen attack, which was captured on security cameras. Teves has denied involvement in the killings, which President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who was backed by Degamo, then called 'purely political.' East Timor, Asia's youngest country, is in the process of joining the Philippines and nine other countries in the ASEAN, a regional grouping which espouses the rule of law and good governance. It currently has observer status in the regional bloc. Teves' initial request to seek asylum in East Timor was rejected, a decision which he appealed. In March 2024, police arrested Teves while he was playing at a golf driving range in Dili and it's not immediately clear how he managed to regain liberty before bring put into custody by immigration authorities on Wednesday. __ Associated Press writers Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.
