Chapter 1 Aims, Structure and Methods
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CHAPTER 1 AIMS, STRUCTURE AND METHODS INTRODUCTION This thesis is a study of FRETILIN, the political party which led the independence struggle in Timor-Leste. The primary aim of my research has been to discover how FRETILIN’s theory and practice of ‘popular education’ in the period from 1973 until 1978, and, in particular, in the Resistance Bases known as the Bases de Apoio, contributed to the capacity of FRETILIN and its supporters to sustain that struggle over two and a half decades of brutal military invasion and occupation by the Indonesian Military. My secondary aim has been, through undertaking this research, to contribute to a process of ‘re-conscientisation’, by helping the participants in my research to rediscover the relevance of popular education now in independent Timor-Leste. While Portuguese colonialism had come in different social and political forms and with different ideologies (Gunn 1999), it had completely negated the education of the people or mass education, keeping the majority of the indigenous Timorese illiterate and excluded from politics until early 1974. When the April 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal overthrew the fascist regime which had ruled there since 1926, and political parties became legal in Timor, FRETILIN was the only political party able to read this persistent social dimension of colonialism, and initiate change. Two leaders, António Carvarinho ‘Mau Lear1’ and Roque Rodrigues2 were central figures in the first FRETILIN Education Committee. In early 1975, Roque Rodrigues explained FRETILIN’s education policy to an Australian journalist, Bill Nicol, saying that “colonialism used many guns, one of which was illiteracy.” Nicol quoted Rodrigues directly: A struggle against illiteracy means also a struggle against mindlessness.3 The colonial state used the education system to polarize the people’s creativity and suffocate the Timorese culture. A struggle against the colonial education is to promote an education that is to serve the mass of the Timorese people and to stimulate the indigenous culture (Nicol 2002, p.162) 1 António Carvarinho ‘Mau Lear’ was a member of the Casa dos Timores group of Timorese university student activists based in Lisbon in 1974. See Chapter 3. 2 Roque Rodrigues, a psychologist and a Portuguese Army official was dismissed because of his alliance with FRETILIN and later became a member of the Central Committee of FRETILIN. He is now adviser to the President of the Republic and lives in Dili. 3 This may be Nicol’s tranlation of ‘obscurantismo’, the term usually used to describe the state of a lack of political consciousness 1 He told Nicol, further, that FRETILIN teachers and FRETILIN schools were vital, to spread a popular ideology and to revolutionise the education system, creating a new mentality, a new citizen, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, popular and democratic (Nicol 2002, p.163). FRETILIN’s army of the pens,4 the Pedagogy of the Maubere Revolution, had begun. PREVIOUS STUDIES ON FRETILIN AND POPULAR EDUCATION Among the many studies of Timor-Leste, the most significant and relevant to this study are two written in the 1970s, Jill Jolliffe’s East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism published in 1978 (Jolliffe 1978), and Helen Hill’s Stirings of Nationalism in East Timor: FRETILIN 1974-1978, based on a Masters thesis from that time, published in English in 2002 (Hill 2002). Both books give some account of the history examined in this thesis, including of Nicolau Lobato’s clandestine group in Dili, the Casa dos Timores students in Lisbon, the student organisation UNETIM, and FRETILIN’s ‘base work’ and literacy campaign prior to the invasion. Both Jolliffe and Hill were post-graduate students in Australia at the time, and both visited in 1974-1975 to collect first-hand stories of FRETILIN. Hill’s book remains the only book written specifically about FRETILIN. Another contemporary account was from Bill Nicol, an independent Australian journalist who visited Portuguese Timor in 1974-1975 to cover the political events of that time, and later wrote Timor: The Stillborn Nation, first published in 1978 (Nicol 1978), and republished in 2002 under a new title, Timor: A Nation Reborn (Nicol 2002). Despite many problems with his analysis, his clear stories about the leaders and programs in 1974-1975 became a useful source for this study. Although useful, these three publications do not include any acount of the FRETILIN alternative government that operated in the Resistance Bases after the Indonesian invasion on December 7th, 1975, but some material on this was discovered in books by Andrew McMillan (1992), John Taylor (1999), António Barbedo Magalhães (2007) and José Mattoso (2007). Another major source is the report of the Timor-Leste Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR 2006). The original FRETILIN leaders and a younger generation of FRETILIN members, 4 The phrase ‘army of the pens’ is inspired by a speech by the Chinese Leader Mao Tse-tung in Yenan province in 1942. See Chapter 4, below. 2 have also made significant contributions in autobiographies, political analysis and academic writing, including Abílio Araújo (1977), Jose Ramos Horta (1987), Constâncio Pinto (Pinto and Jardine 1996), Filomena de Almeida (1997), Xanana Gusmão (2000), and Laura Abrantes and Filomena Sequeira (2008). Of particular note is the work by Estêvão Cabral, a younger member of UNETIM and FRETILIN who joined the guerrilla fighters and was captured, and eventually managed to obtain higher degrees in Great Britain. His doctoral thesis, FRETILIN and the Struggle for Independence in East Timor 1974-2002 (Cabral 2002) provides a solid structural analysis of FRETILIN and its armed wing, FALINTIL. Still, the focus of these works is not education, nor specifically the popular education of Timor- Leste and of FRETILIN. The only book specifically about education in Timor-Leste was written for UNESCO by Susan Nicolai, published under the title Learning Independence: Education in Emergency and Transition in Timor-Leste (Nicolai 2004). Though her focus was on education during the emergency situation after 1999, she nevertheless used the term ‘popular education’ to describe FRETILIN’s alternative education program between 1974 and 1999. A Masters thesis by an Australian solidarity activist, Deborah Durnan, on Popular Education and Peacebuilding in Timor-Leste (Durnan 2005) also gave some account of FRETILIN’s early popular education work, though its main focus is on the work of the popular education network, Dai Popular, in the period after 1999, a topic covered in this thesis in Chapter 13. More recently, a Master’s thesis on education by a Timorese, João Pereira, briefly acknowledges the education program of FRETILIN from 1974-1975 (Pereira 2010, p.34). Finally, while this thesis was in progress, a number of papers were presented by myself and others to the adult and popular education stream of two Timor-Leste Studies Association Conferences, which I helped to organize in 2009 and 2011 (Leach et al 2010). This work has contributed to a growing awareness of the role of popular education in our country. The numerous other publications about Timor-Leste to which I have referred are not listed here, but are mentioned in the introductions to the chapters in which they are discussed. Finally, to establish a proper understanding about the main popular educators whose ideas had influenced the popular education work of FRETILIN, as I discovered in my study of early 3 clandestine groups of 1973-1974, I consulted some of the original writings of Paulo Freire, Amílcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Mao Tse-Tung, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and V.I. Lenin. Those original works, and some secondary sources analyzing their ideas and work, are also referenced in the relevant chapters, particularly in Chapter 4. THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS STUDY This study covers four distinct periods of recent Timorese history. The first is the period from the early 1970s to the Carnation Revolution in Portugal on 25 April 1974, during which time two active clandestine groups of young Timorese intellectuals opposed to Portuguese colonialism formed, one in Timor and the other in Portugal. The second period, the period of decolonization, runs from May 1974 until August 1975, and its main features were the formation of political parties, the Portuguese-sponsored decolonization, the continuing instability of Portuguese politics in Lisbon, and the grass roots education campaign of FRETILIN. This period ended in August 1975, with the attempted coup d’état by FRETILIN’s coalition partner, UDT, and FRETILIN’s successful counter-coup. The third period, from September 1975 until December 1978, covers the Indonesian armed incursions followed by the full-scale invasion in December 1975, until the fall of the last of the Resistance Bases in December 1978. The fourth period, from 1979-2002, was the period of re-organization of the FRETILIN-led state, RDTL, into a nationalist movement, the work of the clandestine front, the UN-supervised referendum, the period of UN rule after Indonesian withdrawal, and the final realization of self-determination, in May 2002. In my analysis, I have also sometimes written of two separate eras, the first being the era of the first independent state, the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste, which I call RDTL 1, from December 1975 until May 2002; and the second, the era of RDTL II, from end of the occupation until today. This second era is characterized by the United Nations intervention, and a new political pluralism. The thesis is divided into three main parts. Part One, consisting of four chapters, deals with the foundations of the thesis. Chapter 1, explains the aims, the overall thesis structure, the specific research questions, the research approach and methods, and the principle sources. Chapter 2 4 presents personal testimony of my experience of the popular education of FRETILIN, as a child in the Resistance Bases and immediately afterwards.