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Give Peace a Chance
Now independent and arms-free, East Timor is emerging as Southeast Asia's new jewel
By Stewart Taggart


	Spoils of Détente: diving among staghorn coral (Bret Gilliam)

As I walk into the Timorese surf, Wayne Lovell checks my scuba gear one last time before we drop down to the coral reefs 40 feet below. If any sharks are around, I'll follow his lead. Lovell, a former war-zone television cameraman for Reuters, has been to hellholes like Bosnia, Somalia, and Zaire. No mere shark is likely to rattle this rough-cut Brit. And if sharks underwater don't scare him, neither do conditions elsewhere in East Timor. Lovell runs a dive shop in the capital, Dili, population 50,000. He thinks East Timor is paradise found. For the rest of us, it's more like paradise with an asterisk.

After 400 years of Portuguese rule, 24 years of Indonesian military occupation, and two and a half years of bumbling United Nations administration, East Timor finally emerged as the world's newest country on May 20, 2002. Ten degrees south of the equator, in the Lesser Sunda island chain between Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, the mountainous, reef-fringed nation (population 800,000) occupies the eastern half of the 13,094-square-mile island of Timor, the western half of which is Indonesia. With an economy based on subsistence fishing and agriculture—supplemented by a good deal of international aid—nearly half the country's residents live on less than 55 cents a day, ranking them among the world's poorest. Tourism was stifled between 1975 and 1999, when Indonesia largely banned foreigners in order to have a freer hand to fight independence guerrillas. Today, those former guerrillas run the show, and they're eager to make up for lost time, hoping that peace will lure travelers to this place Lovell calls home.

But even to rough-and-ready tourists like me, the country's war wounds are evident. Many of East Timor's buildings are gutted and roofless. Electricity is sporadic, and the tap water undrinkable. The only real hotels are in Dili, and they range from converted shipping containers to old hotel properties being refurbished by Portuguese investors. Outside Dili, the few existing guest houses generally offer plywood beds with a little padding and a mosquito net. There's always camping, but it's necessary to negotiate with a village leader before your tent is staked, since intricate local property rights vary.

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