Missing the Beat

In recent weeks, the PNTL's most visible presence in the country has been at checkpoints on main roads into Dili. They are part of an operation to block any armed protesters from taking part in an anti-government march proposed several months ago by the Fretilin opposition. The roadblocks have raised UNPOL fears that Timorese police could become politicized, further destabilizing the force.

In Short Supply It's widely agreed that the force is woefully under-equipped. Logistics officer Sub-Inspector Lucerio Lay says the PNTL owns no working radios (it relies on the U.N.'s network) and has only 190 vehicles and 271 motorbikes for more than 3,000 police. New radios have been bought from Australia, he says, but they can't be used until special software arrives. While Lay talks, his noisy, cramped office is intermittently blacked out by power cuts.

Police have only 46 computers, mostly old and running a variety of software. Small patrol boats have been ordered to watch the country's 700 km of coastline, but they have not arrived because of a dispute with contractors. There is hardly any equipment for recording or electronically storing fingerprints. There are only 120 tear-gas guns and 150 pepper-spray canisters, equipment U.N. forces found indispensable during the rioting that followed the 2007 elections.

At the PNTL police posts within the Comoro district of the city's west, poorly equipped officers paid $125 a month live in tents without mosquito nets or proper toilets. At one post the single radio shared by eight men is broken, forcing them to call in reports on their personal mobile phones. At another post, responsible for a 4-sq.-km district, officers have no patrol vehicles and sprint to jobs on foot. "The U.N. is providing everything," says one UNPOL officer. "Even the toilet paper."

Another issue is the country's 228-km land border with Indonesia, which squirms its mostly unmarked way through dense jungles, over rugged hills and along broad rivers. Just beyond Batugade, at the most northwesterly point of the border, barbed wire and guards block the road into Indonesia. But a kilometer south is a large unfenced clearing amid thickets of stubby palm trees where the constant smugglers' traffic has flattened an area the size of a basketball court. It is littered with the yellow hessian bags used to carry contraband and the remains of smugglers' campfires. "I see the police about once a week," says Alfredo, an Indonesian petrol smuggler. Other smugglers say the regular local police patrol consists of two unarmed officers who walk to the clearing and turn back.

Faction Victim The force is disunited as well as over-stretched. Edward Rees was a former adviser to Ian Martin, the special envoy to East Timor who was sent by the U.N. to assess the situation after the violence of 2006. Now living in Dili, Rees says there are factions in the PNTL that have not forgotten the fighting. "They are trying to work together now, whereas in 2006 they may have been trying to shoot each other." All the same, he worries that the force lacks the cohesion to deal impartially with a large protest or riot, an ever-present threat.

Earlier this year an anonymous brochure was circulated predicting 2006-style trouble should a new police commissioner be chosen from the country's east, but Acting PNTL Commissioner Afonso de Jesus dismisses it as scaremongering. "I don't believe any of this," he says. "We have a strong structure. In 2006, the police split at the top but not down the bottom. At the lower level all the police remained the same." And he is upbeat about his men's ability. "Though we lack support and logistics, as Timorese we will sacrifice those things to do this job." Former U.N. adviser Rees is also optimistic. "Dili is a safer city than it has been in a very long time," he says. "On a day-to-day basis, the PNTL is in a better position to provide safety than UNPOL is."

At Gleno police station, 30 km southwest of Dili, there are signs of progress. While overworked Australian UNPOL officers complain good-naturedly about having to pay $200 out of their own pocket to buy a cell door, an off-duty PNTL task-force officer brings in a drunken man who has been terrorizing local market traders with a machete. Says an admiring UNPOL district commander, Paul Harvey: "There are PNTL officers here I would rather work with than some officers back home." The long-suffering people of East Timor hope his confidence is well founded.