I'm not on the ground in Dili and I'm getting my info from a UN press release at this time, so I don't have all the details yet. There was a shooting on Monday in the Comoro neighbourhood of Dili. Supposedly there was some kind of situation to which local officers were called, one of whom is alleged to have shot someone dead.

There are investigations ongoing, so it's difficult to make a judgment, but a Timorese police officer shooting someone dead is terrible news. Another person was shot and injured. The fact that the police have guns is bad in itself. And this is the police force the UN is handing back after "training" them.

If you live in Dili, you will have seen the way some Timorese police officers deal with volatile situations. They sometimes fire warning shots, or else just hit people with batons. I remember being at the finish line of the Tour de Timor and seeing officers kick people, even children, out of the way.

What kind of precedent does this set for the Timorese people now? They see their national police force using guns and shooting people. Of course, we don't know the full details of the situation that unraveled that night. Maybe the PNTL had guns pulled on them, but violence in that area is more likely to involve rocks or maybe knives.

Not a good way to end the year. No word yet on who was killed.

Addendum: The pieces are starting to come together. It sounds like there was a brawl at a wedding and police fired live rounds into the crowd. A 25-year-old man called Kuka was killed.

It will be interesting to see how Longuinhos deals with this. He does seem to think he is in control of a military force, after all.

Earlier this month, Tempo Semanal reported that a PNTL officer shot shot a youth in the chest at a party in Dili. The same story went on to say that the Timorese police force had requested more weapons, a request that was turned down by the government.

The idea of putting guns in the hands of inexperienced, untrained, immature police officers is frightening. There needs to be tighter gun control. I don't want to hear about investigations into this or that, or empty promises — they need to get guns off the street.

This is a real test for the PNTL and the UN. Just recently, Atul Khare was talking about the importance of police accountability and disciplinary measures against officers who violate the penal code.

Addendum two: A slightly edited account from Dili:

Many in Dili were prepared for possible clashes this morning at, during and after Kuka's funeral, funeral procession and his sad burial. The prime minister was in lockdown with immense security around his home on and off all day. The PNTL have so far kept their distance. President Jose Ramos-Horta has condemned the tragic and unnecessary killing of this young, talented and deeply loved university student and vowed there will be consequences for those PNTL involved.

This is from the International Cost of Living Ranking for October 2009. Apparently Dili was the fourth-highest climber, rising 106 places. Transport in Timor-Leste also comes in as being very expensive, with Dili actually topping the transport basket group. This is perhaps reflective of the changing face of Dili, which is certainly not in keeping with the (lack of) changing face of the rest of the country.

There seems to be a huge drive to get money pouring into Dili for the building of hotels and for new businesses, which will ultimately benefit only a few people. Dili is still very small. There are few jobs, especially in the civil sector. As the cost of living rises and Dili's population continues to increase, it will become more and more apparent that Timor-Leste's most developed city is no closer to being able to effectively support its own people.

Young people go from the districts to Dili to study or find work or both, but there are still very few opportunities for them, even with all this new investment and development.

The first two pars of this article are pretty amusing:

Sleepy Dili, capital of East Timor, doesn't have much going for it. Its tallest building is just three storeys.

The most obvious economic activity is the purveying of SIM cards and pirate CDs of 'jiggy-jig'. The harbour is full of ships, but only because some dopey official misordered an import of rice. When a dozen boats arrived from Bangkok laden with the stuff, there weren't enough warehouses. So it stayed on the ships. Expensively. All year.

I haven't been in Dili for a while, so I'm assuming there are once again loads of ships off the coast, as there were before. There haven't been enough warehouses for some time. I think at one point they were shipping in concrete to build them so they had somewhere to put the rice.

But East Timor, one of the ten poorest places in the world, does have one thing going for it; a parliament so dysfunctional that it can't agree how best to invest the growing stash flowing in from oil and gas fields off its south coast. And because few East Timorese politicians can bear the sight of each other, let alone decide what to do with nature's bounty, the $5 billion in royalties East Timor has saved up since the Timor Sea fields came onstream in 2004 is automatically shunted into boring old US Treasuries throwing off a guaranteed 1.35 per cent.

The tone of the article is quite funny, but surely there is at least some agreement on how to spend the money. There is a budget every year, after all. Speaking of the budget, the finance ministry released its Q3 execution report recently. I haven't read it myself, but La'o Hamutak has, noting a number of budget line changes.

Many of these are interesting, but the largest is on page 42: a shift of $70 million within the Ministry of Infrastructure allocation for Capital and Development from the Heavy Oil power project to Pakote Referendum. The budget line for Construction of the "New Electric Generation system, transmission lines and supervision" has been cut from $87 million to $17 million, while the Capital line for the Office of the Secretary of State for Public Works has been increased from zero to $70 million, giving that office a total budget of $70,072,000.

And…

As we have written before, La'o Hamutuk believes that the objective of the State should be to provide services and benefits to its citizens, and that simply counting the percentage of money which has been spent is not a meaningful measure of how the Government is doing its job.

The Spectator article then goes on to praise the Timorese for the success of the Petroleum Fund in the face of the global economic crisis. The article also makes note of the transparency of the fund, which is actually not as transparent as people think, as La'o hamutuk also noted in its analysis of the Linaburg-Maduell index.

Timor-Leste score is "less than SWFI's suggested 'minimum rating of 8 in order to claim adequate transparency.'"

It’s the movie every expat in Timor-Leste has been talking about, the movie the Aussie media has been in a frenzy about and the movie some Indonesians would rather forget about.

The real-life story that the movie Balibo is based on was always going to overshadow the film itself, but no-one could have predicted how much of a talking point this would all become.

Despite being banned by censors in Indonesia, Robert Connolly’s Balibo is already freely available for the throngs of travelers who visit Bali. Copies of the DVD are stacked innocuously next to the likes of Paranormal Activity and Avatar at pirate stores all over the island. The same is said to be true in Jakarta.

Officially released on August 13, the movie tells of the fate of five Aussie-based television journalists who were murdered in Timor-Leste in 1975 by members of the Indonesian military who were in the early stages of invading the country.

Coaxed by a perpetually well-dressed, youthful Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac), beer-guzzling Australian journalist Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia) flies to Timor-Leste to uncover the fate of the young journalists who, unbeknownst to him, are already dead. As the Indonesians land in Dili, East is also murdered, but not before managing to growl a few “Mongrels!” at his executors.

The Balibo movie is based on a true story, but it doesn’t literally depict how events unfolded, as consulting historian Clinton Fernandes told the Jakarta Globe.

“It is a true story in the sense that it telescopes events that would have taken much longer,” he said.

Indonesia’s banning of Balibo has only served to generate more publicity for the movie. Indeed, the call for justice for those six journalists is so loud that the rest of the world would be forgiven for not realizing that about 180,000 Timorese died during the Indonesian military occupation of Timor-Leste between 1975-1999.

It all went a little kooky earlier this month when former Indonesian army lieutenant Gatot Purwanto, who has ties with the government of Timor-Leste, made headlines when he admitted to Tempo magazine that the Balibo Five were executed and burned to hide evidence of the Indonesia’s invasion, contradicting the previous story that they were killed in crossfire

Purwanto, who said he was there in the border town of Balibo when the five were killed, also claimed the Indonesians were provoked by gunshots coming from the house where the journalists were hiding.

On a side note, Purwanto played a role in the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, when 271 innocent Timorese were slaughtered by Indonesian troops in Dili.

Shirley Shackleton is the wife of Greg Shackleton, one of the five journalists killed in Balibo. She called Purwanto’s original and subsequent statements part of “what now appears to be a blatant attempt to provide an alibi for his commanding officer’s part in a deliberate crime against humanity merely to confuse an Australian Federal Police investigation into the Balibo murders”.

The debate rolls on with twists and turns, but did anyone actually watch the movie, you know, as a movie, for fun?

And is it blasphemous to say I wasn’t bowled over by Balibo?

The development of the Balibo Five and their story seemed constricted to the point of being lost. I didn’t believe that they wanted to stay in Timor-Leste while all around them were telling them to go. I didn’t feel like they wanted to put their necks on the line for some kind of greater cause.

Ultimately their deaths were significant, but in the movie they seemed like five young guys on some kind of thrillseeking mission. The movie didn’t give the characters any kind of motive for putting themselves in the firing line.

I also wasn’t convinced by Roger East’s swerve from desperately wanting to go home and nearly drowning Jose Ramos-Horta to choosing to stay on in Dili knowing that he would probably be killed there.

When LaPlagia was wading through the river trying to find his way home, I half-expected him to look up to the sky and see Ramos-Horta’s face in the clouds peering down at him, uttering words of encouragement.

The Balibo movie has become important because it thrusts into the limelight the deaths of the Five and Roger East. It’s good that this issue is getting attention, certainly.

However, the movie gave little attention to the Timorese plight except in the closing scenes, which I thought were well done, but not particularly compelling. Compare this to the TV drama Answered By Fire, which had me on the edge of my seat, charged with anger and sadness, eyes full of tears.

I know a lot of people put a huge amount of effort into making Balibo as historically accurate as possible, so I don’t want to slate the movie. I’m not criticizing the historical merit of it, but I was expecting to draw emotion from the movie.

I wanted to be outraged when the journalists were slaughtered, but their naivety in the film made it difficult. Again, I’m looking at this purely as a movie. I expect to take some flak for writing this, but those are my first impressions.

There is perhaps some irony in Ramos-Horta being shown so riled up and emotional in his quest for justice for the people of Timor-Leste. Ask him today and he will tell you with some passion about the virtues of amnesty for perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed during the occupation years.

I thought LaPlagia put in a solid performance as Roger East and Isaac’s Ramos-Horta was convincingly cocksure. The Timorese cast in the movie were exceptional, so hats off to them.

I’ll probably watch Balibo again in the next few weeks. In the meantime, anyone who wants more background information need only go to Google News and search “Balibo”.

It was about four in the afternoon and I was on Rote Island, West Timor, sat in someone’s front yard with half a dozen bare-chested, tough-looking Indonesian chaps. We were drinking sopi, (arak) as you do on a sunny Saturday afternoon. There were a lot of children milling about and it was a beautiful day.

I was called into the house and given a plate of rice, salted fish, chopped tomato and sambal, and that weird, bitter, green vegetable people love over here. While I was eating, five of the village boys and girls came into the house looking for someone. Before I knew it, there was a sound system blasting and the children were involved in a traditional dance class.

After I’d finished eating I went outside and looked around. There were puppies all over the place. I sat down and continued my afternoon drinking session while the dancers shuffled about.

It could have been a scene in Timor-Letse. It was eerily reminiscent of my experiences on the eastern side of the island of Timor. Even the music was the same. The people looked the same. The houses were the same. The table with a single glass and a plastic water bottled full of liqueur was the same.

I hadn’t seen another foreigner for about a week. Everywhere I went, people gawped at me as if I were an alien. Foreigners do visit Rote Island, but it’s usually around March time or else in October when there’s a big surf jam. The majority of tourist movement is around the beaches.

I went to the beaches on stunning, clear days and was more or less the only person there. I saw no bars, discos, nightclubs, backpackers or anything at all really except for a few shells and some seaweed.

That night, while riding back with friends to the place I was staying, we stopped off to buy some “special” sopi that a man made in the back of his house. While I was sat in the front room with half a dozen children and a few old people, a woman of about 20 poked her head thought the front door and just for moment I caught sight of her before she quickly retreated and ran round the back.

She looked like a Western woman, with pale skin and short, scruffy blonde hair. The image of seeing her for that second or two was striking. I found out that her father was Australian and her mother Timorese. She had a beautiful face, although she was chronically shy.

To all intents and purposes she was Indonesian, but there in the middle of a jungle village on a tiny island, she was an unexpected sight, much as I was no doubt.

After we got back home my friends cracked open the special sopi. I don’t consider myself a hardened drinker and I get drunk easily, but I can drink and do shots and I’d had a lot of practise drinking tua sabu with my friends in Timor-Leste, so I wasn’t expected anything out of the ordinary.

Tua sabu is usually about 60 or 70%, I believe, and we often mix it with beer. But this sopi… holy cow. I’m sure it was about as close to drinking pure alcohol as I’ve ever come. It wasn’t so much an after taste as an afterburn that lingered in my throat.

I’d read stories about people going blind or else dying after drinking arak, so I decided to play it cool and just do one more shot before going to bed. I think we paid 20,000 rupiah for a 1.5-litre bottle full of the stuff.

Of course, drinking arak is nothing special. You see tourists drinking it with the surfer boys in Bali all the time. But this stuff was home-brewed on Rote Island, away from the masses.

I would probably struggle to live on Rote Island as there isn’t a whole lot to do or eat, but for a change of scenery, it was like all the parts of Timor-Leste I love without any of the bits I find frustrating.

On a side note, I will be in Bangkok December 27 until January 1, then in Bali until January 4, then in Salatiga until February 12, then in Bali again until about February 20, after which I assume I will go to Timor-Leste for a while and then back to Kupang. Should I be blessed with a little bit of luck, I might then be in London for a year from September.