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The new Timorese Government is not an oligarchy. For Aristotle an oligarchia designated the rule of the few for the few, rule that was exercised not by the best, but by bad men unjustly. Aristotle differentiated an oligarchy from an aristocracy where government by the few is vested in the best individuals. In the case of Timor the people (civil society) decided the best individuals are those that formed the government led by Xanana. It may be an aristocracy but it is an elected one.

This was not a one off, it was not just an uprising by a few upset because they had been left out of government, Timor is not a failed state, it is an experiment for a failed global system. The problems of Timor are a symptom of a wider problem initiated by the UN, the World Bank and the IMF back in 1999, the painful process of structural adjustment, of primitive accumulation and the manufactured creation of a middle class, in order to make Timor another piece in the global Empire of a failed economic system.

I’ve been back from Dili for a few days now and hadn’t thought about the mass grave for a few days until last night when a report came in from the Jakarta Globe that a total of seventy two bodies – up from earlier estimates of thirteen, twenty four and fifty two – had been located in the mass grave outside of the Palacio.

We may be saving money for the next generation but now is it not too hard to take that money to free the 150,000 families from poverty? The idea of saving this money for the “next generation” is a big problem when all we are doing is condemning that generation to even greater poverty.

A guy came in here from the Navy the other day and…I asked him if they’d taught him how to stop these from going off…and I handed it to him like this. He looked at me…for a split second his training crept in and he goes like “You’ve just given me a bomb”