Abstract
This excellent study of local politics in East Timor across three centuries makes contributions to the study of violence, inter-familial relations and local politics, and colonialism, and in the process provides a novel means of considering the role of trading networks and the interplay of oral histories with the written record.
The book begins with the ‘puzzle’ of murders in the same area of Maubara, an area of East Timor’s north coast, 24 years apart, in 1975 and 1999. These years are transitional moments in East Timor’s history, marking the Indonesian invasion and departure, respectively. To explain the violent murders that accompanied these historical junctures, scholars, international institutions charged with their investigation, and the East Timorese themselves have often turned to victims’ political allegiances.
By contrast, Kammen is not interested in such uniform explanations. He points out that these all-too-accessible categories of ‘pro-integration’ with Indonesia or pro-independence are of relatively recent origin. Moreover, they belie the fact that violence has repeatedly occurred in the same locations, over a period of several centuries. It has clearly been tempting for scholars, international and East Timorese alike, to seek explanations for violence in political transitions, as if violence suddenly occurs without warning before just as quickly disappearing. The inadequacies of this perspective have crystallised, for Kammen, in three areas of scholarship. Nationalism in East Timor is a little more than 40 years old, but this has not stopped scholars and politicians romanticising a unified East Timorese struggle against colonial oppression, despite only rudimentary forms of technologies of communication and knowledge across most of the 20th century, much less any earlier.
Meanwhile, other scholars have analysed transitional justice since 1999, an ‘identikit’ approach to understanding the past that is hamstrung by pre-conceived categories and which almost invariably has not probed with the kind of historical depth required to produce meaningful answers. Yet another group of scholars and ‘practitioners’ have paid great attention to the United Nations and associated aid agencies’ work in the same post-independence period, focussing on the idea that East Timor was to be a ‘blank slate’. Yet even those that critiqued this idea, wittingly or not, ended up relying on perfunctory caricatures of history, often relegated to a relatively short ‘lead in’ in studies that effectively dismissed its explanatory power.
Kammen directs our attention instead towards why the murders do not make sense to the victims’ families, and those who knew them well. To explore this lacuna, the reader is brought back three centuries to Maubara in 1712, an area then under nominal Dutch sovereignty and connected to long-distance networks of Dutch, Portuguese and Chinese trade via its access to the sea. These early chapters describe how access to this trade and interactions with foreigners conferred symbols of social prestige – regalia, titles, heirlooms – on local families. The Dutch and other foreigners, with their infrequent visits, did not determine how local politics played out. Rather, competition for ascendancy between local families led to a complex series of alliances and feuds, the outcomes of which were often decided on by violence. In piecing together documents which are thin on the ground, and combining this with oral histories, Kammen shows how stories about descent from foreigners – for example adopted names and titles of traders – provided a ‘useful embellishment in the making of purely local claims’ (p. 40). This notion echoes one of the book’s overarching themes, that relations with foreigners provided useful symbolic scaffolding for local politics.
Yet relations between local families or with their foreigner interlocutors – traders, militaries, missionaries – were not entirely decided by such symbolic dispensations. One of the hallmarks of Maubara’s passing from Dutch to Portuguese ‘control’ after 1859 was Portuguese demands for tributary relations with Maubara’s families. This move was vigorously resisted, and cack-handed Portuguese attempts to bestow patronage on multiple families provided more fuel for local grievances and violence. The Portuguese applied a system of indirect rule in this period, which had never previously seen colonial authority stretch much beyond a modest coastal fort. They also superimposed ‘rather grand Iberian notions of…absolute rulers (regulos)’ on rival claimants who ‘…lived within walking distance of one another’ (p. 77). These factors, and competition for control of a burgeoning coffee industry, precipitated yet more violent competition among families.
It was only in the last decade of the 19th century that Portuguese sovereignty was more directly and violently established, dealt with in Chapters 4 and 5. What was at stake for the Portuguese authorities was the control of coffee – to which Maubara’s topography and climate was ideally suited – and the collection of taxes. Sovereignty was extended through colonial massacres, land occupations, but also the extension of ‘basic infrastructure’ over the period 1893 to 1912. The latter date, which saw an anti-tax revolt originating outside Maubara, saw more colonial interference in local power relations through the displacement of powerful local families in favour of appointees without ‘real social prestige’ (p. 102).
It is in Chapter 5 that the full disenfranchisement of one of the key families in the story, the Doutels, brought about by Portuguese rule, is laid bare. Without recognition of their titles, intermarriage to Portuguese deportees and military officers, missionary education and associated privileges, they are frozen out of a circuitry of increasing colonial power, and left longing for the period of relative freedom to trade that they were permitted under Dutch ‘rule’.
Chapter 6 deals substantively with the murders in 1975 and 1999, and this should be of special interest to scholars who have already attempted to cover this period, and many more besides. By this point, we have repeatedly encountered an explanation for violence that makes the political allegiances of victims seem to be grossly inadequate. This explanation is, of course, that the murders can be made sense of in terms of inter- and intra-family competition for access to trade influence and social prestige. Supra-local factors, and foreign influence, also played a key, and often decisive role in the severity and nature of violence and its outcomes. The one element of local politics that distinguishes 1975 and 1999 from earlier periods is Indonesian rule, which saw an intensification of violence perpetrated by newly established military and paramilitary actors.
Otherwise, repeated incidences of violence are attributable to the same patterns of local and supra-local, intra- and inter-familial competition. Scholars of violence will recognise the work of Stathis Kalyvas and others who posit a ‘parochialisation’ of violence, whereby ‘national conflicts reverberated downwards and were endowed with local specificities’ (p. 12). At the other end of the scale, local actors effectively relegate their local identities to national ones, producing ‘the nationalization of local subjectivities’ (p. 12). Kammen finds neither explanation entirely satisfactory, and sees much variation along a ‘spectrum’ of parochialisation or nationalisation.
The final chapters also serve as a warning to international institutions for their handling of one of the 1999 murder cases at the heart of the study. There is a particularly withering account of the work of the UN’s Serious Crimes Unit, and to some extent, the Community Reconciliation Process of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). The former is charged with sloppy investigative work, a symptom of staff apparently uninterested or unmotivated to engage with the cases that they had been assigned, a high staff turnover and inadequate language skills. All the same, Kammen suggests that the work of these institutions did not constitute ‘failures’, but rather that its staff, structures and mandates were entirely unsuited to unearth accounts of ‘long-standing local narratives, allegiances, and rivalries’ (p. 168) that Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor provides in abundance.
If one had to find possible areas for further consideration that arise from this thought-provoking study, two points suggest themselves. Kammen argues that ‘no-one would dispute the centrality of violence in [the story of the island of Timor and present-day Timor-Leste]’ (p. 168). Indeed, Kammen gives us a coherent way to understand that story in a very different and compelling light. It is possible, of course, that colonial authorities tended to give us accounts of local politics whenever they faced resistance or sought to impose their will; this invariably involved violence. The impression is that Maubara’s was a very violent society. Yet given the often patchy quality of documentary evidence prior to the late-19th century (and even, after), we are left to ponder what alternative stories may have been told with more detailed documentation, the likes of which, perhaps, remain to be uncovered. Second, occasionally, the level of detail of families appears vastly complex. One also wonders if some simplification of the histories of landed families might have been in order, to allow easier comparison with other contexts, such as the Principales in the Philippines. The complexity of the study’s story is alleviated somewhat by a series of family trees as appendices, and the book glides very effectively between its micro-social analysis and broader questions that attend studies of violence.
Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor is a remarkable study that raises the bar considerably for studies that will seek to combine careful historical analyses with local research. It is relevant far beyond the study of East Timor, South East Asia and political science, with a cross-disciplinary sweep suggested by novel interpretations more commonly found in anthropological studies, and a deep and long-term engagement with the descendants of Maubara’s families in the present and recent past. It will also be equally useful in reminding scholars and staff of international institutions that their perceptions of violence will always require attentive consideration and reconsideration. East Timor’s recent past has reminded us of the place of violence in that history. Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor adopts history in the longue durée, showing the importance of family relations over centuries, rather than the decades-old nation, in explaining that violence.