On January 9, 2009, the President of Timor-Leste’s National Parliament, Fernando La Sama de Araujo, officially inaugurated the Parliamentary Research Center. The Center will be staffed with eight Timorese researchers who will work to develop creative approaches to policy analysis, anticipate legislative needs, and respond to specific requests from legislators in a timely and impartial manner. The objectives of the Center, which is located within the National Parliament, are to maintain parliamentary library resources and IT infrastructure, to strengthen legislative research functions, and to preserve official documents.
Read more »

By Angie Bexley

Angie Bexley is a Ph.D. Scholar at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. The Asia Foundation funded her print-making project in Dili, described below.

In early October, the Timorese art collective Gembel launched its first major exhibition in Dili, with financial assistance from The Asia Foundation. The exhibit, Recovering Lives Across Borders, featured the print works produced from successful collaborations between Gembel and two unique art groups: Taring Padi from Indonesia, and Culture Kitchen from Australia. The collection of works explored the inter-connection among the three nations, particularly in terms of environmental and social justice. The collaborations and the themes in the artworks themselves promote young Timorese as productive, vital members of society.
Read more »

By Erik Jensen

Erik Jensen is The Asia Foundation’s Senior Legal Advisor, a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and co-director of the law school’s Rule of Law Program. He is also an advisor to Stanford’s Afghanistan Legal Education Project.

From 1985 to 1989 I was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and a law consultant to The Asia Foundation’s office in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  During that time, I also taught in Sri Lanka’s law schools. Last December, I was back in Sri Lanka and learned that a book I wrote during my days there, An Introduction to International Law from a Sri Lankan Perspective (Open University Press: 1989), was still the standard text.  I suppose that I should have been flattered, but I was disappointed and saddened that they weren’t using a newer, updated text.  There have been no updates to the book in nearly twenty years, two decades in which incredible developments in international law have taken place.

The Asia Foundation is deeply concerned about the quality of legal education across the developing world. 
Read more »

As Asia’s youngest and poorest country, Timor-Leste has had a turbulent start. Since establishing independence in 2002, the nation has experienced periodic bouts of serious instability, including the February 11th near-fatal attack on President Jose Ramos-Horta and the unsuccessful attack on Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao and violent unrest in 2006 that was compounded by open warfare between the military and the police.

To provide The Asia Foundation with an in-depth update on the current situation and progress since independence, the Honorable Hans G. Klemm, U.S. Ambassador to Timor-Leste, visited Foundation headquarters on October 2nd.
Read more »

By Thomas Parks

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Governance and Conflict Programs. He is based in Bangkok and can be reached at tparks@asiafound.org.

Dili, Timor-Leste ” The security situation in Timor-Leste seems to be improving. Since the February 11th attacks on President Ramos-Horta and Prime Minster Xanana Gusmao, Dili has been remarkably quiet. With the April 27 surrender of Gastao Salsinha and the remaining rebel hold-outs, the government has shown that it can use negotiation to resolve an ongoing security threat. Growing military and police cooperation indicates that the dangerous rivalry between the two has diminished. To the occasional visitor, the country seems a very different place from 2006 when street violence was a daily occurrence.

The relative calm, however, may be misleading, as many of the challenges from 2006 remain.
Read more »

By Silas Everett

Silas Everett is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Timor-Leste. This piece is scheduled to appear in the Spring/Summer 2008 edition of the Ultimate Sports Guide. He can be reached at severett@asiafound.org.

You might ask why Timor-Leste, at the very bottom of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) rankings at 202 of all countries, is likely to be a future talent factory for football. I see three promising factors.

First, Timorese possess an inexhaustible fighting spirit. Not 10 years ago, during the Indonesian occupation, Timor-Leste’s isolation was almost complete. Possessing a radio was a punishable crime; speaking a foreign language other than Indonesian led to detention and imprisonment. An estimated 180,000 Timorese were killed during the occupation. The Indonesian withdrawal left over 80 percent of Timor- Leste’s infrastructure destroyed. Now it’s rising from the ashes.
Read more »

By V. Bruce J. Tolentino

Bruce Tolentino is The Asia Foundation’s Director for Economic Reform and Development Programs.

Senhor Arnaldo Sombico, the Elder from the enclave district of Oecussi, smiled ruefully as he spoke of the unexpected impact of Timor-Leste’s independence from Indonesia. “This independence gave me a headache!”

At independence in 2002, the domestic boundary of Oecussi District was transformed into an international border, part of the demarcation between Indonesia and the world’s youngest nation of Timor-Leste. The creation of the international border meant that crossing had to be authorized by the sovereign laws of two separate countries — and the whole panoply of passports, visas, customs, and immigration authorities and related fees and costs all came into play. The border separated members of families and set up barriers between people sharing a common history, culture, and economic endowments.
Read more »

By Katherine S. Hunter

Katherine S. Hunter was The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Timor-Leste until January 2008 and is the Coordinator for the Luce Scholars Program.

The newly independent nation of Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) faces daunting challenges in implementing the rule of law. Until recently, most efforts have focused on the important “hardware” of the justice system: training judges and prosecutors, establishing courts, and adopting laws. With insights gained from five years of independence and the security crisis of 2006 and 2007, officials now realize that strengthening the rule of law also requires critical attention to the “software” side, including broad and regular public access to legal information resources ranging from increased availability of the text of new laws, materials that explain and highlight key provisions of the laws, and reference materials in languages commonly understood by a multi-lingual citizenry. Information needs in the justice sector are particularly acute because laws are written primarily in Portuguese, which is understood by less than 10% of the population. This means that almost no one has access to the basic Civil Procedures Code.
Read more »

By Thomas Parks

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Conflict and Governance.

Violent conflict presents enormous challenges for development and security in Asia. Many of Asia’s worst cases of instability and political violence are a direct result of sub-national conflicts involving areas in remote or border regions. In these peripheral areas, the state tends to have very limited capacity and its authority is challenged by armed non-state actors. Conflict-affected peripheral regions are usually home to disaffected minorities or marginalized populations that hold significant grievances with the central government and political establishment. These center-periphery conflicts raise an important set of questions that largely fall outside current policy discourse on fragile states.
Read more »

By V. Bruce J. Tolentino

Dr. Bruce Tolentino is the Director for Economic Reform and Development Programs at The Asia Foundation.

“While great advances have been made in reducing poverty in Asia, there remain stubborn pockets of deprivation,” said Dr. Arsenio Balisacan, speaking at a recent economic and reform seminar organized by The Asia Foundation in San Francisco.

Dr. Balisacan is a noted poverty analyst from the Philippines, the current Director of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA).

The statistics expressed in terms of Asia-wide averages gloss over wide disparities in per-country growth. China, Vietnam, and Thailand show major decreases in poverty between the early 1990s and the early 2000s ” largely explaining the fall in the proportion of people living on US$1 per day or less from as much as 80% to only 20%. However, poor people continue to dominate the populations of Cambodia, Laos, and Timor-Leste.
Read more »