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It was one of those bits of luck that you come to rely on from time to time as a reporter in the field: you take a chance on a questionable story element, travel a distance to cover it with pretty low expectations and then you hit paydirt: it turns out to be one of the cornerstones of your work.
We'd been invited by the Australian-lead peacekeeping mission in East Timor - known as the International Stabilization Force (ISF) – to attend a shooting competition at an army base about an hour outside of the capital, Dili. We'd asked for a chance to film ISF operations in action, as their presence in East Timor is one of the main reasons many people had given us for the calm and stability you see on the streets today. The trouble was they didn't have many activities planned during our stay that would make for good TV visuals. The media folks working with the ISF, though eager to help, had thus far only come up with a cultural event where some of their soldiers from New Zealand were going to perform the "Hakka", a traditional Maori dance, at a local trade fair.
Then Major Kathryn Ames, the spokesperson for the ISF, brought up the shooting competition. She went right into management-expectation mode, explaining that it would just be a bunch of guys lying on the ground popping off a few rounds at distant targets, and that it would be very short. But we were thinking: guys in uniforms firing weapons? Better than a Hakka.
After picking up a reporter for Australian radio at a roadside cafe, we headed off in a small convoy to Metinaro, a scruffy village chosen to house the headquarters for East Timor's new army. Leaving Dili, we passed a UN police checkpoint staffed by three Pakistani officers so bored that they insisted we get down from our vehicles and have a photograph with them. The rest of the drive was gorgeous, passing coves of clear turquoise water and pasture filled with water buffalo.
When we arrived at Metinaro, the competition was already underway. My first impression was that there were many more soldiers there than expected, and the great majority of them were Timorese, not Australian. In fact, the Australians seemed to be only involved in a very superficial way, taking a few turns on the range with about 6-7 guys and then vanishing under a thick stand of trees to lounge in some camp chairs. By contrast there were about a hundred Timorese involved, waiting out their turns on the firing line in an open-sided shelter.
From a cameraman's perspective, it was excellent, one of those things that you know you may only need a few seconds of video of for the report, but you can't stop yourself shooting every possible angle. Each round, the Timorese soldiers lined up at the foot of a hill, crouched. On command they loaded their weapons and after a whistle they charged up the hill, hurled themselves to the ground and started blasting. The little tufts of dust that the bullets kicked up, way in the distance at the end of the range, made me wish I had a better zoom lens on the camera.
After a few of these rounds we began to notice that a good proportion of the Timorese participants were not actually clad in the Army green camouflage, but were in the pale blue used by police all around the world. On closer inspection their arm badges did, in fact, read PNTL (Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste). And this is when a great video opportunity turned in to a story element.
You see, back in 2006, East Timor came very close to a full-blown civil war. At the root of the conflict were tensions within the new national security forces, and especially between the army and the police. On May 25, 2006, the situation got so bad that renegade soldiers from the Timorese army massacred 12 unarmed police officers in broad daylight on a main street in downtown Dili, just steps away from a UN police base. Much was later written on how it had all gone so terribly wrong: Timorese political infighting carried much of the responsibility, but many also lay the blame on the first UN mission in East Timor, which wielded sovereign power for the country's first two years of independence and was responsible for setting up both the police and the army. On the army side, one clear issue was the mismanagement of the reintegration of East Timor's former guerilla forces: some were allowed into the new army but others were essentially discharged, and treating the heroes of the resistance in this way lead to lasting resentment. On the police side, there was a lack of effort to build a professional police force accountable to government. Analysts say the officers themselves were trained, but there was inadequate institutional oversight as to how to manage them.
Today, much concern remains about East Timor's security sector and especially a continued lack of clear distinction between what is army jurisdiction and what is police. This issue was to be one of the points of our report, and here we were, essentially stumbling onto what was a major exercise at getting these two forces to work with each other. Trust me, it's not often that you get such a compelling visual for what is a normally a somewhat wonky, even if vital, topic!
It wasn't clear, though, how well it was all going. In between rounds, the two forces didn't interact very much, though we did manage to get a few shots of some inter-force back slapping right after a turn on the range. Police commander Longinus Montero was there for the competition and we did manage to do a short interview with him on site. He spoke of the common interest of the police and army in helping build the nation and his hope to let the past be the past. But, as a former attorney general and recent political appointee to the police job, he wasn't the one that might need convincing. His army counterpart, Taur Matan Ruak, a hardened veteran of the struggle against the Indonesians, was absent from the exercise. Ruak, who like many FALINTIL guerilla veterans goes by his nom de guerre, which translates roughly as "two extra eyes", wields a lot more power and influence among Timor's political elite. A recent report by the International Crisis Group argues that one of the keys to future stability in East Timor's security sector is a transition from an army controlled by powerful and charismatic leaders like Ruak, to conventional civilian control based on rule of law. Until that process is complete, the report suggests, East Timor will remain fragile.