He went to East Timor to make sure that democratic elections were unhindered. What he didn’t expect was how this process would affect his emotions.

Night falls quickly over Maliana in the rugged hills near East Timor’s border with Indonesia. There are no street lights. A dense blackness wraps the small town. United Nations cars cruise the wide streets picking out in their headlights the diminutive shadows of the local people. The town and its surrounds still bear the scars of the Indonesian departure back in 1999. Seven years later the market building in the centre of town is still a shattered ruin. Many houses are no more than four charred walls. There is electricity from 6pm until midnight – just six hours a day – and even that is not very reliable. (George Quinn, 8 April 2007, East Timor)

George Quinn’s vigil that night was framed by darkness. As he describes in the diary note above, the streets of Maliana were unlit after sunset. At the stroke of 12 the electric lights in his accommodation would also be extinguished. This was a long way from the Hilton. Required to sleep on a hard tile floor and bathe in cold water from a plastic barrel, one could understand if Quinn’s outlook had been as gloomy as the night outside. So was he despondent? Surprisingly, he says no. He was excited, because the following day he would fulfil his ambition to see a nation putting its hard-won desire for democracy to the test.

Quinn was in East Timor in April as an international observer for the first stage of the nation’s second presidential election. It was a goal that the specialist in Indonesian and Javanese languages had held for some time. He’d been approached six years earlier to observe elections for the country’s constitutional assembly, but had been unable to take up the offer. “Now, six years later, I thought one way or the other, by hook or by crook, I wanted to go and have a direct look at a Timorese election,” Quinn says.

He’d been to East Timor many times as a researcher and was teaching a class on the future of the nation. What better way to convey the future of one of the world’s youngest democracies than witnessing the democratic process there firsthand? “I wanted to be able to report back to my students on what the election was like. This has been a year of elections, after all. We had the presidential elections, held in two stages, then at the end of June there were parliamentary elections.”

Acting on his wish, Quinn secured a spot as an observer with the Victorian Local Governance Association. This Melbourne-based group was one of the many engaged by the UN to make sure that the presidential elections were conducted in a fair way. On 9 April, when the first round of the voting was held, Quinn and his fellow observers moved from polling station to polling station. The relatively small number of international observers meant that it wasn’t possible for them to follow the ballot papers from voters through to the central tally office. Quinn recalls that the day itself seemed to pass in a blur of ballot boxes. In an ideal situation, the observers would have been able to track the progress of each vote to ensure the absolute integrity of the system. But despite the harried pace, he said the democratic process seemed to be carried out without corruption.

“We were talking to the staff in the polling stations, talking to the voters, observing from outside and inside the polling station, and then compiling reports. All I came up with in the end were little blemishes. I went to these polling stations and thought, ‘OK, I’m an election observer. If there is something wrong here I’ve got to write it down’. The things I recorded in my report are actually quite small. For example, the police should have been a full 25 metres from each polling station. But in one place there was no shade further out, so they moved to a shady spot inside the 25 metre perimeter to be cool.”

Other “blemishes” recorded by Quinn in his report included one polling centre opening 20 minutes late, and another where a staffer echoed the voting decision of a blind person loud enough for other people to hear. “Overall, there was nothing wrong with how the voting unfolded,” Quinn says. But he thinks there certainly was a lot that was right.

“Some of the people who came to the polling stations, especially the older people, really had no idea quite what to do,” Quinn says. “There was information posted outside the polling stations, and there was a kind of education program before the election, but many people would have found the rhetoric of it quite difficult to take in. A few came into the polling station and were completely confused as to what they were supposed to do. Fortunately, the polling station staff that I observed showed extraordinary respect and care, especially for the older and less-educated people, and those with disabilities. Their care was really quite extraordinary to behold.”

The researcher was also interested to behold the influence that the Catholic Church wielded in the election process. Quinn has been investigating the role of Islam in Java, and was curious to observe the role of religion in East Timor where 95 per cent of the people are Catholic.

“One of the ways you can do this is to look at how the rhetoric of Christianity is used in campaigning – what kinds of interventions there are from the Church, if any.

“I observed strong support from the Catholic institutions for Jose Ramos Horta, who won in the second round. The Church was not exactly hostile to his opponent, Fretlin candidate Lu Olo, but they had previously indicated their dislike.

“The Catholic Church was suspicious of Fretlin because the party had Marxist connections and in 2005 had tried to remove religious education from schools. Perhaps the fact that former Fretilin PM Mari Alkatiri was a Muslim might have been a factor too. As a result, they gave quite a lot of subtle support to Ramos Horta.

“Ramos Horta reciprocated by pledging to allocate quite a large amount of the money to the Catholic Church should he win, which was interesting because the President doesn’t actually have the power to give that money.”

Much as he relished observing the interaction between politics and faith in East Timor, Quinn says the experience of witnessing a young democracy in action was incredibly moving. He recalls becoming quite emotional at several points during the day.

“These are people who are almost literally dirt poor. In fact, East Timor is one of the poorest countries in the world. They’re also dealing with the terrible damage to infrastructure inflicted by the Indonesians when they left in 1999. This is really terrible – I just didn’t quite realise how much damage had been done and how little had been repaired.

“In the midst of all this, the people had a kind of an ideal. They expressed that ideal through their determination to vote and to carry out their civic duty in a very strict fashion. The staff at the polling stations were very disciplined. Many voters turned up in their Sunday best. For them it was obviously a very important occasion that they’d been thinking about.

“The ballot papers were counted in public. Every paper was held up one by one, and every paper was greeted with applause. This is something that hit me in the heart. It took a trip to East Timor to remind me that exuberant, gut enthusiasm for democratic processes is something we seem to have lost in Australia.”

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ANU Reporter 
Winter 2007