ETAN Volunteers Support Timor-Leste Groups Electoral Work

Dili, July 3, 2012 – Tomorrow is the last day of campaigning for Timor-Leste’s Parliamentary Election. The vote will be held on Saturday, July 7, and, by law, campaigning ceases for two full days before voters go to the polls.

It’s been a noisy day in the office of La’o Hamutuk (“Walking Together,” Timor-Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Research), where an ETAN volunteer is preparing to accompany one of the group's staff as she returns to her home district to vote over the weekend, as well as to observe the election in that district. La’o Hamutuk is on a main Dili thoroughfare, and banner-covered trucks filled with chanting party members and sympathizers, roaring motorcycle caravans, cars with amplified music and loudspeaker campaign slogans, and police vehicles with sirens blaring have passed by regularly throughout the day.

La’o Hamutuk offered a briefing this morning for international media and election observers, to provide background on key development and other issues that the new government will face in the next five years, Presenters had to stop speaking periodically, until a noisy campaign parade had passed.

Conflict seems less on people’s minds than the real issues of survival: employment, sustainable development, education, health care, land rights.  Whether and how the next government will move forward on these fronts seem a far more immediate and substantial matters than whether the elections will be marred by mayhem.

In addition to La’o Hamutuk, ETAN volunteers are assisting the electoral work of two other local NGOs: Fundasaun Mahein (monitoring, research and advocacy on the security sector) and Asosiasaun HAK (Association for Law, Human Rights, Justice). Hailing from Australia, France, Uganda and the U.S., the volunteers are attending and reporting on campaign events, receiving briefings on electoral monitoring from STAE (the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration), and will join NGO staff as they observe voting and counting throughout the country, bringing the particular questions and objectives of each organization to the observation process.

From this observer’s perspective, it’s been a “quiet” campaign thus far (notwithstanding the street noise!). While the public media report how well-prepared the country’s police and security forces are to confront and contain any conflict, the people of Timor-Leste do not appear poised for violence. We are regularly reminded here that the United Nations security force will be withdrawing from Timor-Leste at the end of the year - if this election goes well, that is, without significant conflict. Yet conflict seems less on people’s minds than the real issues of survival: employment, sustainable development, education, health care, land rights. Whether and how the next government will move forward on these fronts seem a far more immediate and substantial matters than whether the elections will be marred by mayhem.

La’o Hamutuk reminded us this morning that an election is more than the mechanics of voting, and democracy does not lie only in a free, fare and transparent ballot. Rather, the election is the people’s opportunity to choose the leaders who will determine the direction the country takes over the next five years: whose leadership will – or will not – respond to the Timorese people’s aspirations to vastly improve their lives.

-- Elice Higginbotham

see also

ETAN Volunteers Observe Timor-Leste Parliamentary Election 2012 (observations and reflections)

Letters of Support: H.E. President Dr. José Ramos-Horta; H.E. Ambassador Constâncio Pinto