*This unpublished essay was written amidst the various iruption of the crisis in Timor-Leste, which began in the early of 2021. We hope this intervention still, as in the beginning, informs the reader of the ongoing sequences of crisis.
Since 2017, Timor-Leste has faced a prolonged social regression and political crisis – the country has inaugurated two constitutional governments with largely unstable political coalitions. However, our dominant ideology tell us this is just a simply impasse on politico-juridical order of the country rather than an evolving organic social crisis of the entire social order, generated from the crisis of democratic capitalism or representative system as the dominant mode of governance in East Timor since the restoration of national independence in 2002. A recent development in Timor-Leste, from the sporadic social protest against the government and spontaneous workers strike against private companies in early 2021, to a suicide during the fence sanitary in March and the massive floods in April shown an explosion of disorder under the paradise of our capitalist democracy.
Dili and some parts of Timor has been imposed fence sanitary and confinement for almost two months since its first announcement in early March 2021. As a result, hunger and food inadequacies struck the lower class people, especially lower income workers, youth-students in a rent-house/room and the excluded people across the marginal area of Dili that has already lost the income during the twelve months of permanent state of emergency in 2020.
The city of Dili becomes an open prison where the people starve not because there is not enough food but there is abundant food confined by the big private retail anticipated for future private gains or profit. The protest, resentment and disobedience raised to demanded food supplies are coming from people living in the marginal area, or mostly in populated urban impoverished areas such as Tasi-Tolu and so on. Many of the excluded and lower social class in Dili have struggled to escape the city and seek sanctuary in the countryside as a result of food inadequacies.
However, the first in the history demonstrated how Timorese state’s response to Covid-19 has led to Filomena Fatima, a mother with four kids negating her social life by decided to suicide. Maria is among the captive citizens, and she was a sacrificial victim in the altar of excessive and exaggerate biopolitical response of the state against the virulent treat in Timor – a response that some activist of local NGO suggested as backwardness, because the prevention-measures that lacking of broad and the actualization of scientific debates, finding and measurement, hence mostly drive by reactive hysteria.
This suicide due to hunger and depression is not a voluntary act but a despair and rebel against the unjust world created by our social institution and economic system – it is an insoluble precarious and insatiability against the excessive population control and biopolitical power that reduced us into a silent creatures.
She died in Holy Friday, where previously Timorese Christian celebrates the Holy Thursday that reminds everyone to practicing the commensality, while majority living in Dili has left with no foods in the table – inadequacies of food become a disaster for Fatima, that her lately unlivable life was the ultimate revelation of frustrated space and deteriorated life of Dili and Timorese state. And it is to say, specifically that, Dili, a major and dense town in Timor has turned into a hole of unemployment, isolation, depression, poverty and death.
In another, Timor-Leste registered three-deaths related to Covid-19. Most of them are elders who died from couplet chronic complications and viral infection. After a floods, caused more than fourteen thousand people evacuated and stayed in temporary displaced camps, destroyed houses, roads, water supply and bridges – and we have learned the historical lesson well that intersection between poverty, distress, malnutrition, chronic illness, contaminated water and land after floods including the covid-19 infection will be a deadly combination to determine our Covid-19 related mortality in this lumpendevelopment state. From 2020 until 2021, Timor-Leste has completely immersed itself into widespread consequences of predominant global political, economic, ecological and mental crises driven by the prolonged collapse of global capitalism.
After all, what does this rampant social inequality and breakdown really mean for us? – we must confess that, our busy minister, our master of business people, or our so called national leaders won't, cannot and do not know tell us why – why our capitalist democracy has always been tasked to carry us all to this disastrous end?
The suicide due to exaggerate life control, to death caused by massive floods and landslides to the Covid-19 related death combined with malnutrition and chronic illness shows how the poor always been a frontline to be paid a big price and to be sacrificed to disastrous failure triggered from our malaise democratic and monstrous economic system – a political economic system that responsible for creating aggressive social injustice and inequality, driving so many people into greater misery and poor so the capital must be accumulated and concentrated in few pockets. Those victims are the consequence of uneven development and rising inequality since our independence.
It is to say also that we are living in an age of holy ghosts. In this, a specter that haunting are not only the communism, but the specter of capitalism that threatening its very own existence and eating itself away – depression compel us to be self-exploited, so do the capitalism and liberal democracy – for less than a millennium, the system has not only drove society into deeper social inequality, war, genocide or concentration camp like in Indonesian occupation to East Timor, but completely forced us to accept that humanity extinction is just a possible end. It is not only us, the mole, the proletariat, the masses or the people who are historically and politically subject to change but it is also the system is destroying itself.
In the end, floods in Timor killed almost fifty Timorese, and it certainly took place on Easter weekend, a resurrection of Jesus Christ. For traditional animism believes the great ‘grandfather’ was anger, and many of Christian belief, Covid-19 and floods was a curse from the god because we didn’t celebrate the body-soul resurrection of Jesus and its return to his father's eternal equalitarian kingdom. For sure, we shall avoid these oriental spiritualism and obscurantism that our obscurantist middle class and fanatic right wing compelled us to ignored how capitalism were all, is a system and process that responsible for global ecological rift, including debt, poverty, inequality, exclusion and so on in Timor.
Thus, resurrection as insurrection, and there is a complex dialectic of hopes and crisis – there were always an ‘irruption of hopes’ that is inherent in social crisis – hence, one must begin with a new hope catalytic from the unity of emancipatory political vision and struggle rather than false optimism of democratic will. In this calamity, the president of Timor-Leste calls to reopen a reflections – for us, it is not reflection but to think – to rethink about radical hopes, emancipatory politics, change and newness. We must think, anticipate and organize a politics of thought – a new hope starts with this kind of qualitative convictions.
Be courageous!
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