After the Truth Commission: Genderand Citizenship in Timor-Leste

Lia Kent1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract This article explores the relationship between truth commissions and gen-dered citizenship through a case study of Timor-Leste. It examines how, 10 years afterthe Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has completed itswork, women’s citizenship remains constrained by, and negotiated within, deeplygendered narratives of nation-building that are informed by historical experiences ofthe resistance struggle. The power of these narratives—which foreground heroismrather than victimisation—underscores the need to situate truth commissions as partof an ongoing politics of memory. Despite the power of political elites to shape thispolitics, the continued marginalisation of sections of society within official narratives isalso providing an impetus for alternative truth-telling efforts that seek to broaden publicperspectives on the past. By promoting new narratives of women’s experiences of theconflict, these projects might be understood as attempts to negotiate and transformgendered conceptions of citizenship in the present and for the future.

Keywords Truth commissions .Memory . Politics . Gender . Citizenship . Timor-Leste

Introduction

This article seeks to unravel the complex relationship between truth commissions andgendered citizenship by examining the ways in which these mechanisms, and thenarratives they produce, become embedded within a politics of memory. Scholarlyconversations about transitional justice and citizenship tend to assume that the after-math of violent conflict constitutes a critical period when systems of governance mightbe radically reconfigured and new relations forged between the state and its citizens. Atthese formative times, it is thought that truth commissions might strengthen inclusive

Hum Rights RevDOI 10.1007/s12142-015-0390-2

* Lia KentLia.kent@anu.edu.au

1 State, Society and Governance in Melanesia program, Australian National University, Canberra,Australian Capital Territory, Australia

citizenship by providing opportunities for victimised sections of the population to telltheir stories to the nation and publicly recognising them as rights-bearing citizens (e.g.de Greiff 2009, p. 62; Arthur 2014; Fullard and Rousseau 2014). More critical feministperspectives have questioned the terms by which truth commissions processes incor-porate citizens into the polity (e.g. see O’Rourke 2012; Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos2012). It is argued, for instance, that the promotion of women’s subjectivities as‘victims’ may be problematic for the long-term agenda of achieving gender equality.This is because labels such as ‘victim of sexual violence’ may embed notions ofvulnerability and lack of agency that may work to ‘fix’ women’s ‘social positions’and political identities in the newly emerging society as ‘passive, inferior, vulnerable,and in need of (male) protection’ (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos 2012, p. 10).

While these perspectives are important, they may also mask a more complexpicture of the relationship between truth commissions and citizenship. Because the‘transitional state is not a tabula rasa’ (Brown and Ni Aolain 2015, p. 134) truthcommissions—including the identities they reinforce—necessarily becomeentangled within broader societal debates about the meanings of the past. Wemight understand these debates as constituting a politics of memory. The term‘politics of memory’, which is drawn from the memory studies literature, capturesthe process whereby a society—including political elites, social groups and insti-tutions—interprets and appropriates its past in the service of the present and thefuture (Barahona de Brito 2010, p. 360). It takes as its starting point the idea thatmemories are socially constructed and are integrally connected to questions ofidentity formation, belonging and citizenship. The notion of a politics of memoryalso departs from the idea of ‘rupture’—that there is a definitive break with thelegal and political orders of the past—and acknowledges that narratives about thepast endure over time while also being continually revised and reconstructed.From this perspective, we might understand the narratives produced by transitionaljustice mechanisms as comprising just a small part of an ongoing, contested,process of social memory making (Barahona de Brito 2010, p. 360).

In this article, I take a close look at the politics of memory in independent Timor-Leste and consider what it reveals about how women’s citizenship is both understoodand contested. Drawing on recent fieldwork observations, I examine how, 10 years afterthe Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has completed itswork, women’s citizenship remains constrained by, and negotiated within, deeplygendered narratives of nation-building that are informed by historical experiences ofthe resistance struggle.1 I begin by discussing the CAVR’s efforts to recognise women’sexperiences of violence during the conflict and, through this, acknowledge them ascitizens. I then demonstrate the limits of these efforts by charting how the liberal humanrights narrative produced by the CAVR has intersected with and been overshadowedby, an alternative narrative of the past promoted by East Timor’s political elite. Thisversion of the past eschews the focus on the suffering victim in favour of an emphasison the heroic resistance struggle. While this is an intensely masculine narrative thatreinforces problematic gendered assumptions about male and female roles, it is

1 This research was funded by ARC DP 140102388. Fieldwork was conducted in Timor-Leste in July 2014.The ethical aspects of this study were approved by the ANU Human Research Ethics committee on May 19,2014.

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nonetheless also extremely powerful, resonating both with discourses of the resistanceand with the perceived nation-building imperatives of the present.

The final part of the paper sketches emerging attempts by two East Timorese non-government organisations to open up new spaces for women to articulate their mem-ories of the conflict. These attempts, while small scale, highlight how alternative truth-telling projects are beginning to broaden the narratives promoted both by East Timoresepolitical elites and the CAVR and contribute to the ‘thickening’ (Klep 2012, p. 26) ofthe collective memory of the conflict. By promoting new narratives of women’sexperiences of the conflict, these projects might also be understood as attempts tonegotiate and transform gendered conceptions of citizenship in the present and for thefuture. I begin, however, with a few remarks about the contested concept of citizenship.

Conceptualising Citizenship

At its most basic, citizenship is conceived of as the set of rights and responsibilities ofmembers of a national community. Yet, citizenship is also a contested concept, in partbecause of its basis in the liberal idea of the autonomous, rights-bearing individual ableto participate in the political life of the nation. Feminist scholars point to how theseassumptions ignore the ways in which citizenship is mediated by social, economic, andpolitical structures that perpetuate the exclusion of certain social groups, includingwomen and poor people (McEwen 2005, p. 972). They also show that the divisionbetween the public and private spheres upon which liberal conceptions of citizenshiprest is problematic for women. This is because the focus on citizens’ formal politicalrights and their participation within the public sphere may overlook other forms ofparticipation, for instance community work and women’s roles within the sphere of thehome and family, as legitimate expressions of citizenship (O’Rourke 2012, p. 138;McEwen 2005, p. 985).

Post-colonial scholars highlight the western bias inherent in liberal citizenshipdiscourse. They argue that the emphasis on the ‘individual’ as the locus of rights andresponsibilities ignores the culturally and socially defined nature of citizenship, includ-ing the extent to which, in many societies, citizenship encompasses notions of collec-tive responsibility, and obligations and loyalties to family and community as well as tothe state (see Faulk 2012, p. 102; McEwen 2005, p. 982).

Building on these critiques, critical transitional justice scholars problematise thenotion of the individual rights-bearing citizen that is central to the ‘transitional justiceimaginary’ (Laban Hinton 2014). Some highlight how the tendency of truth commis-sions to assume that persons are ‘autonomous individuals with the capacity to choosefreely how to engage in institutional processes’ ignores the structural barriers thatconstrict and shape the terms of this participation (Ross 2010, p. 75). Others arguethat the focus of transitional justice on state-level reform means that there are fewmechanisms to deal with people for whom the formal relationship to the state is tenuousor irrelevant (Darian-Smith 2013, p. 256). That transitional justice mechanisms may, bypromoting victim subjectivities, work to fix identities in ways that have problematicgendered consequences, is now also the subject of an emerging body of scholarship(see Ross 2010; Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos 2012; O’Rourke 2012).

Despite the importance of these critiques, what they understate, perhaps, is thedegree to which citizenship status is fluid, dialogic and negotiated rather than static.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

A number of recent writings on citizenship, which are informed by social theoryinsights into the ‘emergent’ and ‘performative’ nature of identity (Darian-Smith2015, p. 8), acknowledge this fluidity (e.g. see Faulk 2012). Citizenship status, thesescholars argue, is not a fixed ‘bundle of rights’ possessed by individuals but rather a‘social process of mediated production of values’ that takes place within specific local,socio-economic, cultural and political contexts (Ong 2003, p. xvii, cited in Feldman2007, p. 149). The idea of citizenship as negotiated is significant because it suggeststhat individuals are not just passive recipients of a pre-determined concept, but haveagency in the construction of their citizenship, even as they are also constrained bybroader social and political structures (McEwen 2005, p. 972).

In the context of Timor-Leste, where the population has recently emerged from450 years of Portuguese occupation followed by 24 years of Indonesian occupation,these critiques and new approaches to citizenship have deep resonance. Women’scitizenship was restricted during the Portuguese colonial era due to the permeation ofa conservative Catholicism that entrenched women’s roles in the domestic sphere whileat the same time also eroding their ritual and sacred power (Niner 2011, p. 419).Citizenship was further reshaped during the Indonesian occupation when, as is wellknown, between 100,000 and 200,000 people lost their lives (from a pre-occupationpopulation of less than a million) due to a combination of direct military assault and theillness and starvation caused by the regime’s insidious resettlement policies (CAVR2005a, chapter 7.7) The occupation had contradictory consequences for women; whilethey were the targets of sexual violence, sexual slavery and other forms of violence,many also took on new roles, for instance within the resistance movement, or as headsof households while male members of the family were away fighting (Cristalis andScott 2005).

Since Timor-Leste gained its independence in 2002, women appear to have madesignificant advances towards equality. The national constitution contains provisionsrelating to the equality of women in all areas of family, social and cultural life and theTimor-Leste government has ratified the United Nations Convention on the eliminationof all forms of discrimination against women (CEDAW). Timor-Leste also has one ofthe highest rates of female representation in parliament in the world (38 % in 2012)(SEPI 2014, p. 5). Yet, pervasive structural discrimination and socially constructedbeliefs about women’s and men’s ‘traditional’ roles in society—which reflect, in part,the legacies of colonialism and occupation—continue to circumscribe women’s fullparticipation in public life. Women parliamentarians tend to lack influence in decision-making processes and women hold a limited number of positions in top executiveposts. Perhaps more so than national level politics, the sphere of local politics remainsoverwhelmingly male dominated, despite the fact that women are guaranteed at leastthree places on suco (village) councils.

Beyond the formal political sphere, while it is undoubtedly the case that thestructural legacies of colonialism and occupation continue to affect the lives of muchof the population in the form of poverty, food insecurity and low levels of formaleducation, women are worse off than men (United Nations 2012, pp. 9–10). They areless educated, and it is estimated that up to 45 % of women 15 years and over have nothad any education (United Nations 2012, p. 10). East Timorese women also have oneof the highest birth rates in the world (the average number of children for each womanis around 5.7) and one of the highest maternal mortality rates (UNDP 2011, 2013, p.

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16). That East Timorese women continue to endure troubling levels of violence in thehome is further evidence of significant gender inequalities. Despite recently passedlegislation that defines domestic violence as a public crime and requires the police toinvestigate it, many cases do not make it to the formal legal system, suggesting thatwomen are fearful of disruption to their socio-economic support systems or are subjectto social pressures from family members to withdraw cases in a context where domesticviolence is still considered a ‘small’ matter to be resolved in the family (UNDP 2013;JSMP 2013). These ongoing challenges destabilise any clear cut delineation between‘war’ and ‘peace’ (Cockburn 2004) and highlight the difficulties in translating women’sformal rights into substantive and meaningful citizenship.

Understandings of citizenship are further enriched by recognising that Timor-Lestesociety is held together by strong kinships-based ties that retain a primary function inthe organisation of social and political relationships. This suggests that citizenshipneeds to be conceptualised as encompassing more than relations between individualsand the state. The limited reach of the state into the rural areas—where 80 % of Timor-Leste’s population live—has also contributed to a ‘deep disconnection’ between urbanand rural life, which is exacerbated by significant and deepening rural-urban inequal-ities (Brown 2013, p. 20). In this context, it seems unlikely that East Timorese peopleunderstand themselves to be citizens in the sense of being equal members of a nationalpolity (see Douglas 2000). Rather, citizenship is conceptualised both in more narrowterms—the state is viewed as a source of wealth and benefits that can be tapped into ifthe right means are employed and the right connections are made (see Jacobsen 1997;Grenfell 2009, p. 91)—and in more broad terms, as encompassing a web of different,overlapping, relationships between and amongst kinship networks and the formalstructures of state.

Conceptions of citizenship are also in a state of flux, and that the question of whocounts as a citizen, and what material benefits and political privileges flow from this,remains a critical, contested, and ongoing one. While the end of the Indonesianoccupation has, in theory, opened the possibility of creating radically different relation-ships between the state and its citizens, as I now explore in more detail, conceptions ofcitizenship remain deeply gendered, and continue to be shaped and constrained by thenation’s unique history as well as the present-day demands of nation-state building.During this formative period, a number of ‘truth telling’ projects have been initiated,which have attempted to open up space for the negotiation of new ideas of citizenshipbased on an appreciation of women’s (and men’s) experiences and roles during theconflict. The first and most ambitious of these projects was undertaken by the CAVR,between 2002 and 2005.

The CAVR and Women’s Citizenship

The wake of the 1999 referendum that brought the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste to an end saw intense discussions take place between and amongst the UN, theEast Timorese political elite and civil society about how best to ‘deal with the past’.Following the announcement of the referendum results, which demonstrated that anoverwhelming majority of East Timorese people were in favour of independence, therehad been an intensified campaign of violence and abuse at the hands of East Timoresemilitia, armed and trained by the Indonesian military. Over 1000 people were killed,

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

thousands of houses and villages were destroyed and around 400,000 people displacedfrom their homes.

In response to the violence, the United Nations Administration in East Timor(UNTAET), which governed the territory from 2000 to 2002, established a series oftransitional justice mechanisms. Key amongst these was a truth commission, known asthe Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). The CAVR wasmandated to inquire into the extent and nature of violations of human rights andhumanitarian law that occurred during the Indonesian occupation, promote communityreconciliation and prepare a report containing its findings and recommendations. Aspart of its ‘truth seeking’ role, the CAVR conducted interviews around the nation thatgathered statements from thousands of people. It also organised a series of eightnational public hearings on topics including political imprisonment, women and theconflict, forced displacement and famine and massacres, at which selected communitymembers had the opportunity to give public testimonies. The CAVR produced a 2500-page report outlining its findings, entitled Chega! (No More! Stop! Enough!), whichwas presented to Timor-Leste’s President and Parliament in 2005.

The CAVR’s efforts to encourage women’s participation in its various programmesand document their experiences of the conflict have rightly been lauded (e.g., see Porter2012). In relation to its truth-seeking role, the CAVR made special efforts to documentthe ways in which women experienced the conflict differently from men. It opened updiscussion of the issue of sexual violence, documenting hundreds of instances of rape,sexual harassment and sexual slavery. While the vast majority of these acts were foundto have been committed by the Indonesian military and its auxiliaries, the CAVR didnot shy away from examining how the violence of the militarised Indonesian occupa-tion was entangled with, and exacerbated by, the pre-existing gendered inequalities inEast Timorese society. For instance, it recognised that in a conservative, Catholicsociety in which perceptions of rape are influenced by notions of ‘honour’, womenwere often stigmatised and blamed by their communities for breaking tightly embeddedsexual mores (CAVR 2005a, Part 7.7).

While women were encouraged to participate in all eight of the CAVR’s nationalpublic hearing, a specific hearing was also devoted to women’s experiences of theconflict. At this hearing, 13 women from across the country spoke publicly about theirexperiences of rape, torture, sexual abuse and sexual slavery, physical abuse, tortureand the loss of loved ones. These women were also encouraged to deliver ‘messages’ tothe nation’s political leaders. Many of these messages highlighted the continuitybetween women’s past experiences of violence and their ongoing hardships in thepresent, and appealed to the state to provide economic assistance for themselves andtheir children. As Sra Vitoria Henrique’s message reads:

Don’t just drive around in your big new cars, or fly around the world. In villagesin all 13 districts there are so many widows and orphans. I ask you to dosomething to help them in their daily lives (CAVR 2005b, p. 44).

By encouraging the delivery of these messages, the CAVR might be under-stood to have provided opportunities for women to ‘declare’ their status as bothvictims of past violence and rights-bearing citizens in the present (Fullard andRousseau 2014, p. 56)

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In addition to creating opportunities for public truth-telling, the CAVR alsoattempted to foster women’s citizenship through the recommendations in its finalreport. Under the category ‘women’, Chega! made 11 specific recommendationsdirected towards developing a culture of equality in Timor-Leste. These recommenda-tions, which are directed at addressing both the individual and social needs of women’svictims, include support for programmes to counter prejudice against victims of sexualviolence, for women’s initiatives to prevent and resolve conflict, and for the‘mainstreaming’ of ‘gender equality and the full participation of women in the eco-nomic, social and cultural and political life of Timor-Leste’ (CAVR 2005a, part 11,4.1). The CAVR also recommended the establishment of a reparations programmetargeted at the most vulnerable victims, and suggested that at least 50 % of resources forreparations be devoted to female beneficiaries (CAVR 2005a, chapter 11).

Yet, the CAVR’s efforts to foster new conceptions of citizenship were inevitablylimited. As the CAVR itself acknowledged, a number of structural barriers worked toprevent women from participating in its various programmes. It noted that, in additionto being constrained by cultural expectations that women do not take part in publicactivities, women (and their families) were vulnerable to being stigmatised if theyspoke out about sexual violence. The CAVR recognised that, although it recorded 853cases relating to sexual violence, the actual number of these cases is likely much higher(CAVR 2005a, chapter 7.7).

Adopting a longer term view, it is also apparent that the commission’s status as a UN-sponsoredmechanismwith a limited life span has given it little control over the circulationand reception of its report and recommendations. Ten years after the completion of thefinal report, there remains limited knowledge of, or debate about, Chega! within Timor-Leste. From a very practical perspective, this raises questions about whether the commis-sion’s emphasis on written products was appropriate in a society with very low levels ofliteracy. At a more conceptual level, questions can be asked both about whether the liberalconceptions of rights and citizenship promoted by the CAVR took adequate account of thestructural barriers that prevented their realisation as well as how deeply its version of the‘truth’ resonated with preferred understandings of the conflict.

Firmly grounded in the transitional justice imaginary (Laban Hinton 2014, p. 248)the CAVR produced a liberal human rights narrative of the conflict that foregroundedthe experiences of the individual, rights-bearing, ‘suffering victim’ (Humphrey 2008).In relation to women, experiences of sexual violence were give particular emphasis.While this gave important public recognition to an aspect of women’s lives that hadlargely been ignored or tainted with stigma, there was also a cost. This was that storiesof collective and political agency—including the roles that many women played withinthe resistance to the Indonesian regime—were obscured, as were the social, economicand structural dimensions of women’s oppression.

The CAVR’s attempts to promote women as individual, rights-bearing citizens—while laudable—have also had limited impact in shifting the multiple, and deeplyentrenched structural barriers that reinforce the continued stigmatisation of womensurvivors of sexual violence, and prevent women’s voices from being heard or takenseriously within their local communities, the formal political arena or the legal system.Part of the reason for this is that the report has had limited traction amongst the Timor-Leste’s political elite. What has become increasingly clear is that the CAVR’s narrativeof the suffering victim has intersected with, and has largely been subsumed by, an

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

alternative post-colonial narrative of the conflict, which celebrates the heroic andvictorious resistance struggle. This narrative, which is deeply resonant amongst muchof the population, has been shaped in new ways and given new power due tocontemporary circumstances.

The Heroic Resistance Narrative

During the tabling of Chega! in the national parliament, in 2005, the then PresidentXanana Gusmao, and former charismatic leader of the resistance, gave a lengthy speechin which he criticised the CAVR’s commissioners for promoting what he termed‘grandiose idealism’. Critical of the report’s focus on prosecutions and reparations, healso rejected its underlying narrative of human rights—with its emphasis on the needfor the state to respond to suffering victims, stating:

In times of sacrifice we rose to be heroes. Today, in times of peace, we areregarded as victims! Our people, the heroic and forsaken people of Timor Leste,do not deserve to be treated with so blatant a disrespect! (Gusmao 2005)

‘True justice’, Gusmao went on to argue, was the recognition by the internationalcommunity of the right to self-determination and independence of the People of Timor-Leste. He also rejected the CAVR recommendation that Indonesia and the foreignpowers who supported Timor’s occupation provide reparations to conflict victims,instead suggesting that it was the responsibility of the state of Timor-Leste to care forthose who ‘gave their best’ to the independence movement (Gusmao 2005).

Gusmao’s speech, which contains an implicit critique of the ‘foreign’ values pro-moted by the UN-sponsored CAVR, powerfully invokes the heroic resistance narrative.This narrative is commonly plotted as a story through which ordinary East Timoresepeople, collectively portrayed as the ‘little people’ (ema ki’ik), won their struggle forliberation via acts of determination, endurance, sacrifice and national unity, overcomingthe oppressiveness of successive colonial occupiers. It is closely tied to (and, at times,delicately balanced with) a narrative of ‘reconciliation’ that emphasises forgiveness andmoving on, and promotes modernisation and ‘development’ rather than retribution asthe best means of moving on from the violence of the past.2

The heroic narrative is embedded in the nation’s constitution, which lists ‘valoriza-tion of the resistance’ as a founding principle of the nation-state. It is given physicalexpression in the memorial landscape. Its most striking embodiment can be seen in theimposing statue of Nicolau Lobato, one of the nation’s founding fathers and military

2 The narrative of reconciliation promotes both ‘external’ reconciliation with Indonesia and ‘internal’ EastTimorese reconciliation. External reconciliation is embodied in the bilateral Commission for Truth andFriendship (CTF), which was established by the East Timorese and Indonesian governments in 2006 withthe aim of contributing to a ‘definitive closure’ of the issues of the past with a view to fostering relationsbetween the two countries. Internal reconciliation is promoted through the periodic granting of amnesties forconvicted East Timorese serious crimes perpetrators. There is also a tacit agreement amongst political leadersnot to bring to light issue relating to an internal political conflict that took place between FRETILIN and UDTjust prior to the Indonesian invasion, and which led to the loss of hundreds of lives. The narrative of internalreconciliation was also evident in the efforts of former Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao to bring pro-integration (with Indonesia) supporters into his government and cabinet, which led to some resentment thatthey were undeservedly reaping the benefits of independence.

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resistance leader, which was erected in 2014 near the national airport. Lobato, who waskilled by the elite Indonesian commando force Kopassus in the early years of theoccupation, is represented in military fatigues, holding Timor-Leste’s national flag inone hand, and an automatic rifle in another.

The clash between the CAVR’s narrative of the suffering victim and the politicalelite’s narrative of heroism is starkly evident in the ongoing discussions within thenational parliament about the Chega! recommendations. These discussions lookedpromising in 2009 when, as a result of pressure from local and international civilsociety organisations, the Parliament authorised a committee to develop draft laws for areparations programme and for the establishment of an ‘Institute for Memory’ toimplement other Chega! recommendations.3 However, in February 2011, the debateof the draft laws was indefinitely postponed. While the justification given for the delaywas that the issue of veterans’ payments needed to be resolved first, a more contentiousunderlying issue surrounded the definition of who qualifies as a victim. Specifically,because the definition of a victim proposed by the CAVR is independent of a person’spolitical affiliation, it potentially grants victims of human rights violations committedby members of the East Timorese resistance the right to reparations (Ottendorfer 2013,p. 32). This issue poses a serious problem given that in the eyes of many East Timorese,those who supported integration with Indonesia are regarded as ‘traitors’ and do notdeserve to be compensated for any harm done to them (Ottendorfer 2013: 32).

In order to understand the potency of the heroic narrative in Timor-Leste’s nationalimaginary, it is necessary to take a closer look at the anti-colonial struggle and thepopulation’s historical experiences of resistance to the Indonesian occupation. As partof this examination, how women’s roles were constrained by nationalist struggleimperatives and the extent to which human rights discourse was adopted relatively lateinto the language of the resistance need also to be considered.

The anti-colonial struggle in East Timor (as it was then known) is widely regarded ashaving emerged in the early 1970s. Following Portugal’s initiation of a decolonisationprocess in its overseas territories, in 1974, political parties quickly formed in EastTimor, the most popular of which was Frente Revolucionaria de Timor-LesteIndependente (FRETILIN)/Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor) aradical pro-independence party that called for immediate independence and the rejec-tion of colonialism, and presented its cause as the ‘struggle of the common people’(Hill 2002, p. 60; Ottendorfer 2013, p. 26). FRETILIN’s philosophy was influenced byTimorese students who had been exposed to radical Maoist and Marxist thought inPortugal (Niner 2009, pp. 22–23). The choice of the name FRETILIN reflected theinfluence of African nationalist movements in the former Portuguese colonies, inparticular the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), with whom someof the founding members of FRETILIN had strong links (Joliffe 1978, p. 63).

FRETILIN’s social and political program centred around an ‘ideological revolutionto overthrow colonial and traditional power structures, including gendered ones, inconjunction with mass mobilisation in a guerrilla-style military resistance’ (Niner 2013,p. 232). As part of this program, a women’s organisation, the Popular Organisation ofTimorese Women (Organizacao Popular da Mulher Timorense—OPMT), was

3 It is proposed that this Institute would also implement agreed recommendations of the CTF. Amongst otherthings, it would establish a human rights documentation centre and promote the search for missing persons.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

established in 1975. According to the founding secretary of OPMT, Rosa ‘Muki’Bonaparte, an educated woman who had recently returned to East Timor from studiesin Portugal, the organisation had a dual objective: ‘firstly, to participate directly in thestruggle against colonialism, and second[ly] to fight in every way the violent discrim-ination that Timorese women have suffered in a colonial society’ (Bonaparte, quoted inFranks 1996, p. 158). Bonaparte emphasised programmes focusing on women’s liter-acy and the importance of working to overcome discriminatory cultural practices suchas the payment of barlake (bride price) and polygamy. Women were also encouraged tobecome aware of their conditions of oppression under colonialism and patriarchy anduse this realisation as a means of achieving self-liberation or kore a’an (Leach 2013).

FRETILIN’s efforts to achieve independence in 1975 were, of course, in vain.Although the party declared independence on November 28, 1975, 9 days later,Indonesia launched a massive air and sea invasion of the territory. Thousands of people,including entire villages, fled into the mountains behind Forcas Armadas de LibertacaoNacional de Timor-Leste (FALINTIL)/Armed Forces for the National Liberation ofEast Timor, FRETILIN’s armed wing (Niner 2009, p. 30). During the 24-year occu-pation that was to follow, and amid the devastating losses experienced both by thearmed resistance movement and civilians, resistance leaders continued to invoke the‘capacity of the East Timorese people to suffer, to endure, and collectively to overcomegreat adversity’ (Traube 2007., p. 10). This emphasis was given additional force byCatholicism. Numbers of identifying Catholics increased significantly during theIndonesian occupation. As well as providing important solace to those who had lostloved ones, the Catholic faith was able to link individual pain to the suffering of Christ,‘arousing a sense of martyrdom in the name of the struggle’ (Wise 2004b, p. 29).

OPMT grew to a membership base over 7000 in the early years of the occupation,with branches down to the village level. Its members provided a critical link betweenthe FALINTIL forces and the civilian population; they hid resistance fighters in theirhomes, established creches for children orphaned as a result of the conflict, preparedfood and educated women about the importance of the national independence struggle(Trembath and Grenfell 2007, p.56). Women also coordinated the provision of suppliesto the front line, managed armouries and kept guard against enemy infiltration of thebases. From the 1980s onwards, as the FALINTIL guerrilla forces faced decimation andalmost total annihilation, young women (and men) student activists in Indonesia andelsewhere worked to build essential international support for the independence struggle.

As the nationalist struggle became all-consuming, however, the issue of women’semancipation was put on the backburner. As former female resistance fighter ‘Bisoi’explains:

During the guerrilla war we never knew for sure whether we were going to live ordie, and every single man and woman concentrated only on how to survive …We did not receive any information about women’s rights at that time. At thattime we didn’t care about these issues and concentrated only on how we wouldsurvive if the Indonesians attacked (Bisoi, quoted in Niner 2013, p. 237).

The cause of women’s equality suffered further setbacks due to the fact that womenin the resistance were not treated as equals by their male comrades. Men took thedecisions regarding resistance strategy, and women guerrillas were excluded from the

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FALINTIL command structure and were similarly underrepresented in the structures ofthe political leadership (Cristalis and Scott 2005, p. 31). Thus, even though womencomprised up to 60 % of the Clandestine Front (Cristalis and Scott 2005, p. 39), thenetwork of civilians based in the villages and towns who supported, and faroutnumbered the FALINTIL guerrillas, and took on key roles within the Diplomaticfront (those engaged in diplomacy and advocacy abroad), the vast majority did not holdformal positions within the Resistance hierarchy (Cristalis and Scott 2005, p. 31).4

Unlike the language of women’s emancipation, the language of human rights was arelatively late import into the rhetoric of the resistance struggle. It was not until in the1990s when, facing the decimation of the FALINTIL guerrilla forces, political leaderssuch as Gusmao began to view it as pragmatically necessary to tone down some of themore radical anti-colonial rhetoric of the struggle and adopt the language of peace,diplomacy, non-violence and human rights, in order to make it more internationallypalatable (Webster 2007, p. 583; Wise 2004a, pp. 166–167). By making subtle changesin language, adopting a revised resistance strategy that gave more emphasis to the rolesof the Clandestine and Diplomatic fronts, and forging links between East Timor andother international causes (such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa),Gusmao and other East Timorese political leaders closely aligned with him recast theresistance as a self-determination struggle that could garner critical international sup-port (Webster 2007, p. 583: Wise 2004a: 166–7).

Since independence, the heroic narrative has become central to the contemporaryconstruction of national identity, and of citizenship, the basis upon which politicalleaders have sought to foster a sense of national pride. In its search for a ‘useable past’(Zamora 1998), Gusmao and other key members of the political elite have sought towrite individuals painful stories of suffering into the wider story of the march towardsfreedom. The figure of the hero promoted by the political elite stands in stark contrast tothe image of the CAVR’s suffering victim. While the victim is vulnerable and requiresstate assistance to heal the wounds of the past, the hero embodies agency and activeresistance and the willingness to sacrifice the self for the greater goal of independence.The pre-1990s language of liberation appears to have gained dominance over thelanguage of human rights used during the latter part of the struggle.

Women are both central to and peripheral in the heroic narrative. Constructed as the‘symbolic form of the nation’ (Brown and Ni Aolain 2015, p. 139), they are valorisedas grieving widows of the fallen, mothers of future generations and ‘vehicles fortransmitting the whole nation’s values from one generation to the next’ (Enloe 1989,p. 54). The needs of ‘vulnerable women in the districts’ are commonly invoked by thepolitical elite as a justification for modernising, forward-looking, development dis-courses. Yet the actual voices of women, and their experiences in the past and present,are strikingly invisible within these pronouncements. The resistance era marginalisationof women within decision-making structures continues suggesting that, while theirroles within the resistance may have been tolerated for the sake of the ‘struggle,’ theywere not seen as ‘natural’ womanly roles. In the context of the urgent need to rebuildthe nation after the referendum, women are now expected to retreat to the margins ofpolitical life and assume a narrow range of identities.

4 The resistance struggle is commonly thought of as being divided into three ‘fronts’: an armed front, aclandestine front and a diplomatic front.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

Nonetheless, the heroic narrative is not static and has been negotiated and reshapedin the light of contemporary preoccupations. For instance, while its primary audience isnational, it cannot be denied that it is also directed, in part, to the internationalcommunity. It sends a message of strength, self-confidence and self-reliance thatchallenges the international community’s construction of itself as the western ‘saviour’of Timor-Leste (see Orford 2003, p. 165; Kent 2012, pp. 38–39). This message hasbeen given added force by the recent departure of the UN after a 13-year peacekeepingpresence and the rapid rise in the new nation’s economic fortunes with oil and gasrevenues from the Timor Sea. As the political elite has repeatedly emphasised, in thisnew environment, the nation has increasingly less need to rely on the charity of theinternational community.5 Instead, it sees itself as becoming an ‘upper middle incomecountry’ by the year 2030 (Magalhaes 2015). The heroic narrative—and the associatednarrative of ‘reconciliation as forgiveness’—has also enabled leaders to sidestep thequestion of criminal accountability for the violence of 1999 in a context wherediplomatic relationships with Indonesia are essential to the nation’s survival, and wherethere is dwindling international support for an international criminal tribunal.6

The current emphasis in the heroic narrative on the armed front of the resistance isalso noteworthy. This emphasis, evident in memorialisation and commemorationinitiatives, is particularly obvious in the Veterans Valorisation Scheme, a key nation-building scheme that was established in 2006 to provide symbolic recognition andeconomic benefits to veterans. The way in which eligibility for veterans’ benefits isdetermined by the scheme—which places an emphasis on a person’s ‘rank’ and thenumber of years they ‘exclusively dedicated’ themselves to the resistance—makes it fareasier for former guerrilla fighters to claim recognition as a veteran than those whoparticipated in the Clandestine and Diplomatic fronts of the resistance.7 Because theytended not to hold designated rank within the resistance, women are particularlymarginalised within the scheme. While many women are accessing pensions as widowsof martyrs, the vast majority are unable to gain recognition on the basis of their owncontributions to the resistance. 8 These biases within the scheme have significantmaterial consequences given the large proportion of the budget that is allocated toveterans affairs; in 2012, US$109.7 million (or 9 % of actual annual state expenditures)was set aside for veteran’s benefits (IPAC 2014, p. 12) while only 7.1 % was allocatedto education and 3.3 % to health.9 The size of the veterans’ scheme reinforces the extentto which it is elevating militarised, masculine identities over a more inclusive vision ofcitizenship by privileging former armed combatants with significant economic statusand power.

That the armed guerrilla forces have been celebrated over and above the Clandestineand Diplomatic fronts also underscores the degree to which political leaders have been

5 These statements also reference Australia’s role in negotiations over disputed claims for oil and gas in theTimor Sea.6 An international tribunal was proposed but support quickly faded in the light of the great expense of theinternational tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the desire of many western states to buildpartnerships with Indonesia in the so-called war against terror7 Clandestine activities were often only possible by concealing one’s activities behind study or work, or usingone’s position within the Indonesian government, police or military, to pass on intelligence to the Resistance,which makes it difficult to (see Kent and Kinsella 2014, p. 10).8 This perpetuates a public/private divide in which women are principally viewed as ‘belonging’ to men.9 See Timor-Leste budget transparency portal, http://budgettransparency.gov.tl/public/index?&lang=en.

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preoccupied within the nation’s stability in the early years of independence. The eventsof the 2006/2007 ‘crisis’, in particular, which are widely understood as having grownfrom a protest by a group of disgruntled soldiers into a broader challenge to stateauthority (ICG 2006), severely challenged the narrative of national unity. Leaving 38dead, hundreds of houses burnt, and more than 100,000 people internally displaced, thecrisis brought to the fore the power of disaffected groups—some of whom identifiedthemselves as veterans—to destabilise the state, while also highlighting the existence ofdeep fault lines amongst the political elite linked to divergent understandings ofresistance history.10 Following the forced resignation of Prime Minister Alkatiri, thenew Prime Minister Gusmao made the payment of veterans’ pensions a key priority ofhis government (Ottendorfer 2013, p. 30), suggesting a pragmatic recognition of theneed to ‘buy peace’ by paying off potential spoilers.

Needless to say, as men debate how best to ensure national stability by valorisingveterans and paying off potential spoilers, women’s interests remain pushed to themargins, their constitutionally guaranteed rights to equality diminished by historicallyentrenched power relationships. That the militarised resistance narrative continues tohave such potency also underscores the importance of situating truth commissions aspart of a broader politics of memory in which political elites promote preferred officialnarratives of the past that seek to reinforce national identity or buttress their ownlegitimacy. This politics influences the reception of truth commission products and hasa bearing on ongoing negotiations of citizenship. It helps to explain why, despite theCAVR’s efforts to provide a space for women to tell their stories and to craft a narrativeof the conflict that foregrounded their experiences, these efforts have had limitedimpact upon women’s lives.

Unofficial Truth-Telling Projects

In Timor-Leste, as elsewhere, the state does not have a monopoly over the politics ofmemory. The continual marginalisation of sections of society from the heroic narrative,and the lack of deep permeation of the CAVR’s products and messages, has provided animpetus for alternative truth telling efforts which seek to broaden perspectives of thepast in the public space. At the forefront of these efforts are a small number of Dili-based intellectuals and activists, many of whom are of a younger generation to the coreelite who now constitute government. Several of these groups are engaged in projects toconstruct monuments that remember civilian deaths, and commemorate past massacres.Some are documenting local stories and experiences of conflict. Of these groups, asmall number are documenting and highlighting women’s roles and experiences of theconflict as part of a strategy for assisting them to stake their claims both as historicalagents and as citizens in the present (see McEwen 2003, p. 746).

10 Debates amongst the political elite about the ownership of the resistance narrative have been prominentsince the referendum. Some of these debates hark back to unresolved issues from an internal political conflictthat took part in 1975 between the two key political parties at that time, FRETILIN and UDT. Others invokedisagreements over decisions about resistance strategy that were taken in the 1970s and 1980s, including thesteps taken by Xanana Gusmao to decouple of the resistance struggle from its exclusive link to FRETILIN.Given Gusmao’s close historical ties to FALINTIL, the current emphasis within the heroic narrative on thearmed component of the struggle suggests that ‘Xanana’s men’ are being rewarded and that Gusmao’s versionof this narrative has prevailed.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

One organisation that is at the forefront of efforts to produce narratives aboutwomen’s experiences of the conflict is Assosiasaun Chega! Ba Ita (ACbit)/AssociationChega! for us). The organisation’s name makes self-conscious reference to the CAVRreport, suggesting the importance of making this report meaningful for everyone andthe ongoing failure of the government to implement its recommendations. Although itwas only established in 2012, a number of ACbit’s staff, including its director, formerlyworked for the Timor-Leste office of the International Center for Transitional Justice,an international NGO that leads efforts to promote the globalised truth commissionmodel worldwide. It is also closely linked to an Indonesian organisation, Asia Justiceand Rights (AJAR), which works on accountability and human rights protection in theAsia Pacific region and which is led by a prominent Indonesian women’s rightsadvocate and former staff member of the CAVR.

ACbit, like the CAVR, seeks to highlight women’s experiences of sexual violenceduring the conflict as the basis for advocating for their rights to reparations and justicein the present. ACbit’s efforts to date have centred on advocating with members ofparliament and senior government officials to implement the CAVR recommendations.It also organises a travelling mobile exhibition of Chega! around the country thatpresents the material in the report in a visual format, making it more accessible to thosewith little formal education. Another key focus of ACbit’s work is supporting womensurvivors of conflict-related sexual violence, and it organises workshops in whichwomen are encouraged to share their experiences with one another. ACbit alsospecifically attempts to shape public memory of the conflict, particularly in relationto the gendered nature of its impacts. One of its recent publications is a book based onwomen’s personal stories of sexual violence during the Indonesian occupation. EntitledProlonged Struggle: Voices of Women Survivors of Violence, and accompanied by aseries of recent photos of the women, the publication aims to highlight how women’spast experiences of violence continue to reverberate in the form of ongoing economichardship and marginalisation.

ACbit’s initiatives suggest that the CAVR report—and its underpinning narrative ofvictims’ rights—continues to have some resonance in Timor-Leste, at least amongst asmall educated elite. ACbit appears to maintain hope that the promotion of victimsubjectivities amongst women survivors of sexual violence may assist those who havebeen marginalised within the heroic narrative to address their claims for redress. Yet, anuanced reading of ACbit’s work also suggests that the organisation does not adopt liberaldiscourses of transitional justice and individual rights in the ‘whole cloth’ (see Merry2009) but engages with them strategically and selectively, reworking them in the contextof concrete political struggles. For instance, conscious that the discourse of victim’s rightslacks traction amongst the political elite, when engagingwith state officials, ACbit staff donot speak of reparations and justice but of vulnerability and humanitarian need, whichresonates with the government’s own discourse of development.11

ACbit also attempts to translate global transitional justice discourse in ways thatreverberate with the values and priorities of poor East Timorese women. While theyrecognise that providing women with opportunities to tell their stories of the conflictmay be beneficial, and even therapeutic, to those involved, they are also acutely aware thateveryday survival needs are often foremost in the minds of poor, rural women. They are

11 Interview with ACbit staff member, July 18, 2014.

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cognizant, too, of the multiple structural barriers that prevent women from accessingsupport services, expressing their views in public and having these views taken seriously.These barriers mean that, despite the existence of a number of schemes to supportvulnerable East Timorese women—including health assistance schemes, support for singlemothers and housing—the women with whom ACbit work, who are both geographicallyand socially marginalised, do not hear about them. Those who do may have little power toinfluence local leaders who act as critical gatekeepers to accessing this support.12

In recognition of these difficulties, ACbit approaches its truth-telling efforts withcare. Recognising that the women with whom they work need to maintain control of thecirculation of their stories, it works to provide culturally and socially safe spaces forthem to share their experiences with each other, rather than organising one-off publicspeaking events. Truth-telling efforts are also balanced with practical initiatives thatseek to shift women’s position on the margins of political and social life. ACbitattempts to link women in to pre-existing government support services, for instanceby training district-based young people to become community advocates on their behalfand developing plain language guides that explain the various social assistanceprogrammes available to women. It also seeks to build the women’s skills to advocateon their own behalf with local authorities and to foster links of solidarity amongstvulnerable women, assisting them to identify common goals. By facilitating thewomen’s access to resources and schemes that might address their structurally disad-vantaged status, ACbit seeks to make their citizenship substantive and meaningful.

In an echo of post-colonial theories of citizenship, these initiatives also indicate thatACbit is acutely aware of the need for citizenship struggles to take place not onlywithin the national arena and within formal, political structures, but also withinwomen’s own communities and families. Cognizant that the state has a remote presencein the lives of many poor rural women, ACbit’s efforts are oriented not only towardsachieving national level reform but also towards helping to shift women’s positionwithin their own communities. They do not underestimate the challenges oftransforming the deeply patriarchal space of the local community and family, andacknowledge that women’s attempts to assert their citizenship remain constrained bytheir traditionally assigned roles and by their historically entrenched disadvantage. Atthe same time, they recognise the need to engage with kinship, customary beliefsystems and community structures which continue to provide women and men with adeep sense of meaning, identity, belonging and social support.

Organisations like ACbit that promote the recognition of women as victims of theconflict are, however, increasingly few and far between in Timor-Leste. That this is thecase is not surprising given the limited traction of victims’ rights discourse in Timor-Leste. By contrast, there has been a surge of efforts by both East Timorese women andtheir international supports to campaign for the recognition of women’s actions duringthe resistance struggle. A number of recent publications have emerged, with names likeHakerek ho Ran (written in blood) (Alves et al. 2003), Independent Women (Cristalisand Scott 2005), Hau Fo Midar; Hau Simu Moruk (I gave Sweet: I received Bitter)(Rede Feto 2007) and Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Stories of Resistance andSurvival (Conway: 2010). These works seek to reinscribe women into the heroicresistance narrative.

12 Ibid.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

One of the most significant efforts to write women into the history of the resistanceis being undertaken by OPMT. Although OPMT is a far less influential organisationtoday than it was during the Indonesian occupation, its members are, not surprisingly,dismayed that women’s roles are being sidelined in current efforts to memorialise thepast and valorise veterans. In 2010, OPMT initiated a nationwide project, known as theTimor-Leste Women’s History Elaboration Project. Since 2010, the project hasinterviewed over 800 men and women in all 13 districts of East Timor and is currentlyin the process of writing a book that is aimed at an East Timorese audience.

The coordinator of the project, Nuno Rodriques Tchailoro, explains that the projecthas uncovered many fascinating facets of East Timorese women’s involvement in theresistance. He emphasises that those involved in the project decided not to adopt a‘male’ definition of how the resistance movement operated, but to focus instead onwomen’s subjective understandings of their roles and responsibilities. By taking thisapproach, interviews have been able to prise apart the public/private dichotomy and tounravel the extent of women’s involvement in the resistance as messengers, cooks,carers for the sick and political educators. A key finding is the degree to which familywas the locus of support for the resistance. The family, explains Nuno, was not only theplace where key figures of the resistance were hidden, but the place where politicaleducation took place, as it was one of the few spaces that were not dominated by themilitary.13

By focusing on women’s roles in the resistance rather than their experiences ofvictimisation, the OPMT narrative differs quite radically from the human rights narra-tive produced by the CAVR. As another researcher working on the project explained,the project aims to treat women as protagonists in the conflict, as ‘subjects’ rather than‘objects’ of history.14 By focusing on women’s various roles within the resistance, theproject works within the heroic narrative, yet also challenges its militarised, masculineemphasis on the armed component of the struggle. In this sense, it can be understood tobe subtly working against the state’s efforts to ‘consolidate and contain’ the meaning ofsacrifice (see Truitt 2008, p. 26) and delineate those whose lives count in the nationalimaginary.

Nuno also believes that the findings of the project might provide important insightsto those working to promote gender equality in the present. This is because, in additionto documenting women’s roles in the resistance, the project has uncovered intimatedetails about OPMT’s work for women’s emancipation, for instance, their efforts totackle oppressive cultural practices such as barlaque (bride price) and polygamy, andencouraging women’s literacy. These insights, Nuno argues, might help to cultivate anunderstanding that ideas about women’s equality are not an international import, but areembedded in Timor-Leste’s own history. The revitalisation of the OPMT tradition ofagitating against traditional practices is significant given that, since the UN interventionthat followed the referendum, discussions of women’s rights and equality have over-whelmingly taken place in a framework of international human rights. This frameworkis problematic both because East Timorese women face multiple barriers to exercisingtheir formal rights and because, as the fate of the CAVR report suggests, the idea ofhuman rights can easily be dismissed by East Timorese leaders as a set of foreign

13 Interview with Nuno Rodrigues Tchailoro, Dili, Timor-Leste, July 15, 201414 Interview with staff member Women’s History Elaboration Project, Dili, Timor-Leste, July 14, 2014

L. Kent

values introduced and funded by outsiders. The idea of individual rights may notnecessarily resonate either with the needs and priorities of poor, rural women whohave little connection to formal state institutions and processes.

Writing of the Chilean attempts to create memorial sites, Katrien Klep (2012: 260)observes that, ‘through the ongoing process of negotiation and contestation’ ofnarratives, collective memory of the dictatorship period has become ‘thicker’. Thisprocess of thickening helps to open new spaces for people to voice their memories,broadening perspectives on the past in public space and changing the understandingand perceptions of the past (Klep 2012, p. 264). While in the context of Timor-Leste,ACbit and OPMTcan be understood as contributing to a similar process of thickeningof public memory, it is important not to overstate their impact. Both projects arerelatively small in scale and are led by a small group of well-educated, Dili-basedindividuals who, despite their best intentions, struggle to foster social movementsthat might advocate nationally for change. The powerful public discourse of heroisminevitably influences these organisations’ understandings of viable courses of actionand viable narratives, and constrains the possibilities for action available to them.Both organisations are also linked to broader advocacy agendas; in this sense, theymay be shaping representations of women’s experiences to meet pre-existing narra-tives (of heroism or victimhood) and their own strategic goals (the achievement ofreparations for women victims in the ACbit case, and the recognition of womenveterans in the OPMT case). In the case of ACbit, the organisation’s strong interna-tional links and funding sources, and its utilisation of an international rights frame-work, makes it particularly vulnerable to the charges of ‘foreign influence’. Becausethe OPMTwomen’s history project fits more squarely within the heroic narrative, it isperhaps not surprising that the political leadership has been highly supportive of it,and the Prime Minister’s Civil Society Fund has even contributed funding to theproject.

These projects, including their gaps and silences, highlight both the power of officialnarratives to shape and constrain public storytelling and show that these narratives arenot all encompassing. While important stories of women’s agency as political actorsand of their experiences as victims of the conflict are beginning to emerge, missing arethe ‘everyday’ and locally grounded stories of how ordinary women (and men)navigated and survived the conflict, how they endured long term, structurally embed-ded injustices in the form of forced resettlement, famine, deprivation, disease and thedeaths of children, and how family, community and socio-cultural life were quietlyeroded through fear, distrust and suspicion. That these stories have yet to be publiclytold suggests that the myriad forms of ‘social, economic, structural, material andspiritual violence’ that seeped into the everyday lives of local communities(Grunebaum 2011, p. 119) have yet to be fully explored and that the story tellingprocess is far from over. While political and social conditions may not yet be conduciveto the public telling of stories that destabilise the heroic narrative, in the course oftime—and perhaps through the creative use of media such as music, theatre and ritualas well as the written word—a more complex picture of the past, and of women’smultiple subjectivities, might begin to emerge. In this process, unhelpful dichotomies ofself/society, private/public, community/nation and combatant/victim might also slowlybe prised apart (Grunebaum 2011, p. 119) and new conceptions of citizenshipmight be imagined.

After the Truth Commission: Gender and Citizenship in Timor-Leste

Conclusion

The question of who counts as a citizen, and what material and political benefits flowsfrom this, remains critical and contested in Timor-Leste. These ongoing debatesunderscore the extent to which truth commissions are embedded within a broaderpolitics of memory in which different sections of society with varying degrees ofpower attempt to utilise the past for the needs of the present. In the context of Timor-Leste at least, the nation’s transition to independence has not led to a radical reconfig-uration of relations between the state and its citizens but rather, has seen the continu-ation of pre-existing debates and narratives, and for women, the continuation ofstructurally embedded gendered inequalities.

The efforts by civil society organisations to promote new narratives of the conflictnonetheless also highlight that citizenship is a negotiated, and locally embedded,process that continues long after the life of ‘transitional’ projects. Despite beingconstrained by the discourses available to them, alternative truth-telling projects areimportant, first, because they might contribute to the thickening of the public memoryof the conflict by bringing into the public sphere broader perspectives on women’s rolesand experiences. Second, and relatedly, these narratives might help to negotiate andtransform gender conceptions of citizenship in the present and for the future. Arguably,it is in their capacity to link their truth-telling efforts to ongoing, locally groundedefforts to work towards women’s citizenship and equality that these civil societyprojects have their most transformative potential. While their trajectory and impact isby no means certain, it is possible that these and other emerging memory projectsmight, over time, help to prise apart unhelpful gendered dichotomies and foster newarticulations of women’s citizenship grounded in an appreciation of their diverse rolesand experiences both in the past and the present.

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