Editor’s Note
This article was written in December 1999 and reflects the author’s personal experiences in Dili during the immediate aftermath of the East Timor crisis. References to East Timor as an Indonesian province reflect the historical situation at the time of writing. Today, East Timor is the independent nation of Timor-Leste. This article is preserved as a first-hand account of life and work in a post-conflict environment and offers a unique perspective on the challenges faced by expatriate professionals involved in rebuilding essential infrastructure.
A Thousand Soldiers and an Engineer – You Don’t Need More to Fix East Timor’s Telephone System
“We are here to repair the telephone line”. So here I was, after a degree in engineering and almost 7 years of professional experience I was standing there with some basic tools and a linesman on my side, ready to do a simple repair job. I should have considered myself a huge failure in business had this been any other location in the world. But this was Bishop Belo’s burnt-down residence in Dili, East Timor in December 1999, about one month after the first international troops had arrived to drive the deadly pro-integration militia out.
With a Landcruiser we had made our way from the Telkom building through the almost completely destroyed town of Dili, past rattling Interfet armoured personnel carriers and UN 4WDs to the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s compound on the pretty beach road.
The residence was sheltered by vegetation around the perimeter. We could not see anybody, but we heard beautiful voices from a girl choir somewhere. I entered the burnt-down main building and went from room to room, which were all empty, until I came to the main room facing the sea. In the middle there was a smoke-blackened but largely intact stone statue of the Virgin Mary. The charred statue was the only thing left in the once grand Portuguese mansion. Standing in front of the statue with the voices from the choir being carried through the window openings was a rare moment of peace after the hectic days before.
I had arrived on Friday evening on the only service available into East Timor, a chartered twin-engine turboprop from Darwin. Dili Airport greeted the aeroplane in the same way it had greeted my Merpati flight four years earlier. The old Pertamina tank truck pulled up for refuelling and it still said “Bandar Udara Dili” and “Selamat Datang” on the signs. But sandbag barriers, machine-gun nests, Hercules transport planes and foreign soldiers were the first signs of the big change that had happened since my last stay.
Flying to East Timor from an immigration point of view means flying to nowhere. Australian immigration stamped a departure stamp into my passport, but no arrival stamp would document where I ended up, making me administratively speaking a disappeared person for the next week.
The passengers simply left the aircraft at Dili Airport and walked off across the tarmac. Everybody was happy that no time was wasted on stamping visas and checking passports. It would not be long, of course, until some bureaucrat felt the urge to create something expensive and useless and then Dili would have immigration queues.
I got a lift with some locals in the back of a lorry, where I learned the essentials from the other passengers. Indonesian was still the best language to speak with younger people, while with everybody my age (33) or older I was better off speaking Portuguese. Some children on the street had already replaced their “halo mister” with “bom dia”.
I found the Telkom building in quite a different state from my last visit. The then-busiest building in town was now empty and ransacked. Major John Wilson from Interfet found me in the EWSD room and told me what had happened. The Indonesian army had camped there at the height of the riots, which was why the militia had not burned the complex.
When some soldiers eventually started a fire, Interfet moved in, put the fire out and the Indonesian soldiers had to leave. In the soot-blackened MDF room I found that they had burned the least important equipment, one of the two access network racks. Not many subscribers were connected to it. The room was partly flooded because the pumps had stopped working. Bullet casings lay scattered near the entrance.
I started preparing the exchange for a restart. The user IDs and passwords were not known and we had no hope of obtaining them from Indonesian Telkom. I replaced the SJ.SECDATA file and then, on Sunday morning, 12 December 1999, the EWSD started up again. Dili had its telephone system back.
UNTAET, the interim United Nations administration, was, as I learned over lunch at the UN canteen, quite pleased. Australian telecommunications company Telstra, Siemens’ customer, would be the operator for the next six months.
Before continuing with the maintenance and repairs that were needed, I took a look around town.
East Timor was still considered a war zone, a fact that brought some odd contrasts:
Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets with ready-to-fire machine guns mounted while everybody else strolled lazily along the beachfront.
Young Australian men and women jogged in brightly coloured sportswear with olive-green assault rifles slung across their shoulders. We had a barbecue with some of them; they arrived in shorts and T-shirts, complete with dog tags and assault rifles.
I was lucky that Telstra had managed to book one of the very few remaining hotel rooms for me. I shared it with the air-conditioning technician and an army of cockroaches and mosquitoes. The militia had ransacked the hotel but forgotten to burn it.
The cockroaches, as I learned, were militia cockroaches. After a room referendum resulted in a vote for their expulsion via Baygon, they retaliated by storming out of their hiding places and taking over the room. They crawled everywhere. I was glad there were no matches lying around.
I had just been about to take a shower when it happened. I had to put my shoes back on simply to reach the dilapidated en-suite bathroom. There I stood, naked except for my shoes and armed with a can of Baygon, feeling only marginally less cool than my Interfet colleagues.
East Timor had its positive sides too. Since bureaucrats naturally don’t move into an area until useful people have restored the basic services, East Timor had become an oasis of efficiency. Immigration formalities were not yet established, and neither were car licensing systems, parking restrictions, building codes, safety regulations or quality plans.
The entire infrastructure had been rebuilt by a handful of bold engineers from around the world who thought ISO 9000 was a sports drink. Two engineers had restored electricity within days. A few technicians had restored running water in less than a week. Around five Telstra engineers had built a completely new mobile network in one week, while Siemens restored much of the terrestrial telephone network in only three days.
I discussed with one of the Telstra engineers how it was possible that in East Timor engineers and technicians could accomplish all this in a week when, under normal circumstances, it might take that long merely to write a mission statement. The only explanation, we concluded, was that all the occupational health and safety people, quality management teams, Y2K specialists, bureaucrats, managers and visionaries had been left at home, where they were too far away to cause much damage.
As the end of my week approached, most essential services were back in place. Fixing Bishop Belo’s telephone a week before Christmas seemed a fitting conclusion and one of my better moments with Siemens.
I left the main building and walked to the large patio surrounded by service buildings that had not been burned. In a chapel facing the main residence, a nun conducted the choir while a young man showed us to the telephone.
One problem was that, in the lead-up to the country’s destruction, somebody had entered an administrative block on his line at the EWSD exchange. I had already arranged for it to be removed, and after a minor adjustment his telephone was working again. Bishop Belo had his dial tone back.
To my disappointment, he was not at home. I would very much have liked to have met him.
At the end, things went wrong one final time in Dili.
I was at the airport hoping to board the plane home. The earthquake alone would have been manageable. We left the departure hall expecting the building to collapse behind us. Fortunately, it remained standing.
But then, just when we should have been boarding, the pilot took off without any of his passengers.
The Harvey World Travel dispatcher stood on the runway frantically waving at the departing aircraft while apparently trying to remember the international aviation signal for, “You forgot your passengers, you idiot.”
I returned to the departure hall, which was still somewhat empty following the earthquake, and sat down with my laptop to contemplate what might happen next.
During my week in East Timor I had experienced the effects of fire, flooding, earthquakes, insect invasions and human incompetence beyond repair.
I leaned back and smiled.
I was safe now.
Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
But it doesn’t say it will happen twice.
About the Author
Contributed by Marc Obrowski
Written in December 1999 while working in Dili as a telecommunications specialist assisting with the restoration of communications infrastructure following the East Timor crisis.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and reflect the circumstances and observations at the time of writing.
