Analysis: Will the Web save East Timor?

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by Stewart Taggart

(IDG) -- Walk down any street in East Timor's capitol of Dili and the scene is the same: blackened, roofless buildings and heaps of rubble. Severed telephone lines dangle from exposed walls, charred satellite dishes point skyward, and traffic lights stare blindly at intersections. Only a tiny fraction of the city's 60,000 residents have running water or electricity. Pigs and chickens pick rubbish from drainage ditches while a few children play trampoline on bits of corrugated roofing. Emaciated dogs trail clouds of flies.

The devastation is complete. Little escaped the political violence of last September after a popular vote ended 24 years of brutal military rule by neighboring Indonesia. For weeks afterward, anti-independence militias, Timorese thugs with rumored ties to the Indonesian military, roamed the country furiously burning everything in their path, leaving only scorched earth behind them.

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Now East Timor, the world's newest nation, must build an economic, political and physical infrastructure from little more than ashes.

The work has already begun. On one street corner, an elderly entrepreneur sells powdered milk and candles from a wooden shack. On another, workers tap nails into wooden beams or dab new concrete onto the walls of buildings that a few days before looked a total loss. And just a short walk from the docks that were once the economic heart of this harbor city is the nucleus of East Timor's reconstruction: the government administration building.

The fresh white paint and unbroken windows of its porticoed flanks are alone enough to make the building stand out. But its true significance is signaled by the rack of functioning satellite dishes on its roof, the braids of orderly telephone and power cables that wrap its sides and the loud talk of people on mobile phones in the parking lot.

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Inside this Iberian architectural treasure, the United Nations has taken on the role of interim government while the fledgling nation prepares to elect its own government next year. From a generator-powered control room, borrowed bureaucrats run makeshift ministries -- agriculture, trade, fiscal affairs -- using hastily wired computers. Operatives buzz back and forth, setting tariffs, planning roads and budgeting aid programs. E-mail, Internet access and a high-powered intranet lubricate the wheels of an ad hoc bureaucracy in a country with no reliable electricity, little phone service and virtually no PCs.

Away from the administrative fray, though, toward the back of the complex, is where East Timor's future is really being laid out. Behind tinted windows that eclipse the midday sun, Pedro Braga sits at a corner desk in a tightly packed office. The head of the U.N. interim government's IT telecommunications division, Braga's job is to bring East Timor into the digital age.

Half Portuguese and half Chinese, Braga was born 66 years ago on Macao -- an island that, like East Timor, was once a colony of Portugal. Right now, he's talking on one of the few functioning desk phones in the country. It's a short call. Braga has things to do, and an engineer's economy with words.

He picks up a sheaf of papers he's been working on mornings, evenings and weekends for months. "Here it is," he tells me, "the future of the country."

Specifically, it is an outline of the series of herculean tasks required to rebuild East Timor's telecommunications system. It's pretty bleak stuff. Last September, before the violence, this nation of 770,000 people had only 8,000 fixed telephone lines. Now it has 2,000. Of 28 telephone structures nationwide, including buildings and telephone towers, only one remains undamaged, the central switch in Dili.

The relative numbers are even more disturbing. In the United States, there are roughly 64 phones per 100 people, or a "teledensity" of 64 percent, according to the International Telecommunication Union. In middle-income countries like the Czech Republic, teledensity is generally around 32 percent, while lower-income countries like Guyana and Jordan may have teledensities as low as 6 percent. In East Timor right now, teledensity is estimated at 0.26 percent.

As for computer ownership, the gap is even more dramatic. More than half the people in developed regions of Asia like Singapore own some kind of personal computer, according to market-research firm Roper Starch Worldwide. The proportion is roughly the same in North America. In East Timor, there are essentially no computers, at least outside the U.N. compound. If you need to communicate with someone here, you just have to walk around until you find them.

Which is not to say that Braga has given up hope. This fall, he and his staff will award a multimillion-dollar contract to overhaul the nation's telecom system, providing East Timor with all the communications accoutrements of a more developed economy -- mobile telephony, fixed-line telephony, data carriage and international access. Braga's not sure who will step up to bid, although Australia's Telstra (TLS) and Portugal Telecom appear interested, as do a few private consortia. Ideally, Braga says, he'd like to see the results of East Timor's first national election late next year beamed around the country over a fully functioning telecom system.

Braga is painfully aware of how ambitious that timeline is. He is also aware that some may ridicule such an ambition for a nation that can barely feed, clothe or educate its people, much less provide a dial tone. But the U.N. sent him here to make sure that East Timor has the best possible chance of recovery. If he gets telecommunications right, he says, the synergies of the information age will form a tailwind, blowing East Timor out of the horrifying present and into the prosperous age enjoyed by so many in the West.

Out on the streets, it's easy to see the raw material from which an East Timorese Internet Economy might take root. On street corners, teenagers will sell you single cigarettes from a pack. On the road to the airport, street hawkers will top off your gas tank from plastic jugs of gasoline, undercutting the city's one gas station. Outside Dili's few cafes, kids sell you newspapers and keep an eye on you, hoping they can retrieve the paper later to sell again.

Braga's dream is to provide the means to link this street-level hustle to the crankshaft of modern communications. He is not alone. International organizations like the G8 and the World Bank increasingly cite entrepreneurship and technology as the twin engines that will drive Third World nations out of their misery. And as the U.N. convenes its 55th General Assembly on Sept. 5 in New York, such issues are at the top of the agenda. But what can the Internet, or even a working telephone, do for a nation with no new economy, with no economy at all?

For an unabridged version of this story CLICK HERE.

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East Timor International Support Center

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