Timor-Leste’s New Kingmakers

For months, Timor-Leste has been embroiled in political crisis with two voting blocs competing for control of Parliament. On one side is Xanana Gusmao, the independence icon and powerbroker who leads the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) through force of personality. On the other is Gusmao’s rival, President “Lu Olo” Guterres of the Fretilin party, and his former ally, the technocratic Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak of the People’s Liberation Party (PLP), with whom Gusmao fell out in January.

In the middle of this power struggle stands KHUNTO.

A novice party with just five seats in Parliament, KHUNTO – which stands for “Enrich the National Unity of the Sons of Timor” – has come to play the role of kingmaker in Timor-Leste’s game of thrones.

Unexpectedly breaking ranks with Gusmao and the CNRT over whether to extend the pandemic-related lockdown, KHUNTO threw its support behind the fledgling PLP-Fretilin alliance in April. Its decision now gives Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak a mandate to govern until 2023, which he could use to steer government spending away from its longtime focus on infrastructure mega-projects and toward basic development. It also signifies a stunning reversal of fortunes for Xanana Gusmao, a towering figure of Timorese politics who has served as president and prime minister but will now be in the opposition.

That KHUNTO cast the deciding vote is remarkable – not because of its size, but because of its constituency. KHUNTO is a political force unlike any other in Timor-Leste: a party that represents the interests of an outlawed martial arts group, and in turn, the growing population of disenfranchised young people from whom it attracts support. KHUNTO’s ascendancy is all the more extraordinary because martial arts groups have long occupied a fraught place in Timor-Leste, distrusted most for their contribution to the violence of the 2006 Timorese crisis. In 2013, then-Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao banned many of them outright. Yet today, the political wing of one of these martial arts groups has decided the fate of the government – and perhaps the direction of policy in Timor-Leste for years to come.

How exactly did martial arts groups go from the shadows to the political mainstream? Understanding their journey is important both for what it illuminates about Timor-Leste’s past and for what it might say about the future of its democracy. The story begins decades before Timorese independence, in the early days of Indonesian occupation.

The Fraught History of MAGs

Timor-Leste was a Portuguese colony until 1975, when a revolution at home the year prior caused Portugal to suddenly withdraw from its overseas territories. Timor-Leste then enjoyed nine days of freedom before Indonesia invaded. Indonesia’s decades-long occupation of the country sparked not only a military insurgency, but also a clandestine urban resistance movement that drew heavily on youth involvement.

In order to counter the growing population of rebellious youths, the Indonesian military used a tried-and-tested counterinsurgency strategy: Co-optation. Working through its special force command, Kopassus, the Indonesian military created a variety of youth sports groups in Timor-Leste. Key among these were martial arts groups, or MAGs, which centered on the practice of the Indonesian martial art pencak silat. The idea behind MAGs was to create a vehicle through which to instill discipline in unruly young people and inculcate them with patriotic feelings toward Indonesia. MAGs could then serve as pro-Indonesian militias, carrying out punitive attacks or informing on Timorese independence supporters.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Indonesia set up a number of MAGs, including the Faithful Fraternity of the Heart (PSHT) and Kera Sakti. Both of these groups remain active today. Around the same time, an indigenous group of martial artists arose in Timor-Leste. The group – called the Wise Children of the Hinterland, or KORK – fused martial arts with Timorese rituals and magical practices, and would years later give birth to the political party KHUNTO.

In many ways, Indonesia’s strategy of using martial arts groups to keep order in Timor-Leste backfired. While some MAGs intimidated independence supporters as intended, many played both sides of the conflict, and martial artists were often directly involved in the independence struggle throughout the 1990s. For some Timorese activists, membership in a MAG gave them protection from harassment by Indonesian police, even as they passed on supplies, information, and weapons to resistance fighters.

Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste was brutal, resulting in as many as 200,000 conflict-related deaths. In 1999, after a referendum in which Timorese people overwhelmingly supported independence, the Indonesian military and its militia proxies went on a rampage in which they killed thousands and destroyed as much as 85 percent of the country’s infrastructure. In the end, however, Timor-Leste won its independence, becoming a sovereign state in 2002.

While Indonesian support to MAGs dried up after independence, these groups did not disappear. Instead, they remained an important social force, in large part because they filled a vacuum in Timorese society. Timor-Leste is one of the youngest countries in the world – 70 percent of its population is under the age of 30, and 50 percent is under 18. At the same time, the country has had chronically low employment and educational attainment rates, with three-quarters of the population failing to find work in the formal sector and many students dropping out of school at a young age. In this context, MAGs are appealing to young people. They provide a forum for social connection and bonding, protection against everything from neighborhood bullies to gangs, and even welfare support in the absence of state programs.

As Janina Pawelz, a researcher who has conducted interviews with MAG members, notes, “Besides sports trainings, the groups also support an internal network of mutual assistance. This includes, for instance, helping when someone gets sick, practical support for building a house, and financial support for weddings or funerals, and community projects.”

But MAGs cannot only be understood in socioeconomic terms. Membership in a MAG is also closely tied to one’s family, village, and kinship identity, often being passed down from parent to child. As a result, many fissures in Timorese society – from personal conflicts to intercommunal disputes over land, all the way up to national-level political schisms – map onto MAG rivalries.

“If you’re a Jones, you’re PSHT. If you’re a Smith, you’re KORK,” explains James Scambary, a lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and member of UNESCO’s special advisory organization for martial arts groups.

Thus, when political tensions erupted into a quasi-civil war in 2006, conflict often manifested as violence between competing MAGs.

The roots of the 2006 Timorese crisis are complex, but its proximate cause was a dispute between members of the police and the military, which erupted when a group of soldiers was sacked after staging a protest. Because many members of the police and military were themselves members of rival MAGs, these groups were drawn into the conflict. National leaders used MAGs as “rent-a-mobs” to intimidate political opponents and their supporters. Even after national actors came to a resolution, the conflict continued to rage for years, in part because it had ignited long-standing local disputes over land between families and villages who were tied by kinship to rival politicians. Once again, MAGs were involved in many episodes of communal violence. In the end, the most intense period of the crisis led to hundreds of deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

While Timorese society slowly recovered from the conflict, public attitudes toward MAGs did not. In 2013, Parliament – under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao – passed resolution No. 16/2013: the Extinction of Martial Arts Groups. The law permanently outlawed the martial arts groups KORK, PSHT and Kera Sakti. Public opinion strongly supported the ban, with one survey finding 78 percent agreement. In 2014, at Gusmao’s urging, nearly one thousand police officers surrendered their MAG uniforms and pledged loyalty to the police force.

Yet the ban on MAGs did not end communal violence. In 2014, Belun, a Timorese NGO, noted that while the number of violent incidents involving MAGs decreased after the ban, youth violence in general increased. In part, this is because MAGs were never a root cause of conflict. Instead, MAG rivalries grafted onto existing communal disputes over land and resources, some of which date back to Indonesian and even Portuguese times.

As Scambary puts it, “People aren’t fighting each other because they’re in different MAGs. They’re in different MAGs because they’re fighting each other.”

What’s more, while the ban drove martial arts groups underground – and sometimes, as Timorese NGO Fundasaun Mahein notes, pushed them toward involvement in organized crime – it did not drastically curb their numbers. Young people continued to join MAGs for the reasons they always have: social connection, economic and physical protection, and family identity. According to Scambary, there are today some 15 to 20 MAGs with a registered membership of 20,000 and unregistered membership approaching 45,000. It is thought that as many as 70 percent of Timorese young men are members of a MAG.

The Rise of KHUNTO

In the last decade, MAGs have not only persisted – they have moved into the political mainstream. Their shift into the public spotlight is largely down to the actions of Jose Dos Santos “Naimori” Bucar, the leader of the martial arts group KORK. A messianic figure hailing from the mountainous region of Ainaro, Naimori believes that he received a secret language from the archangel Gabriel in a dream, in keeping with KORK’s syncretic doctrine that mixes indigenous rituals and Christian symbolism. In 2012, seeing an opportunity to translate KORK’s organizational power into formal clout, Naimori created the youth party KHUNTO.

While the notion of a martial arts group-turned-political party might seem strange, it is not uncommon globally for informal sports organizations to make the leap into politics. In Russia, for example, the uralmash gang went from a group of gym enthusiasts to protection racketeers to political party; in Iran, practitioners of the ancient sport varzesh-e bastani have served as enforcers for various political factions.

Naimori’s own sojourn into politics began inauspiciously. In the 2012 election, KHUNTO fell short of the 3 percent threshold needed to gain seats in Parliament. However, in the 2017 election, it did considerably better, winning five seats. In part, KHUNTO’s success could be traced to its use of “blood oaths,” which were designed to prevent supporters from defecting to bigger parties and to assure young voters that its candidates would refrain from corruption once in office.

Upon entering Parliament, KHUNTO joined with Gusmao’s CNRT and Taur Matan Ruak’s PLP to form a governing coalition, the Alliance for Change and Progress (AMP). Fretilin and a number of smaller parties made up the opposition. KHUNTO was given control of the Ministry for Social Solidarity, which manages Timor-Leste’s social welfare system.

From the start, however, the AMP seemed to teeter under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The coalition was largely held together by Xanana Gusmao’s personal appeal as the former leader of the Timorese independence movement, and especially his distribution of patronage to key supporters. This patronage took the form of infrastructure “mega-projects” bankrolled by Timor-Leste’s petroleum fund. While the government maintained that these projects would create jobs, critics have argued that they have primarily served to line the pockets of connected individuals – while providing little benefit to the Timorese population, which is among the poorest in Asia. Gusmao’s focus on infrastructure expenditure always sat uncomfortably both with the PLP’s platform, which promised spending on basic development indicators like education, health, and agriculture, and with KHUNTO’s anti-corruption message.

In January, these tensions boiled over into the latest political crisis. The split between CNRT and PLP ostensibly arose from a disagreement about the annual budget. In reality, Gusmao had become increasingly frustrated with Taur Matan Ruak’s failure to install CNRT members to key ministerial posts. These appointments had for years been blocked by President Lu Olo Guterres of the rival Fretilin party, who had cited ongoing corruption investigations of the nominees. The posts had come to be occupied by junior PLP members, who dragged their feet when it came to approving Gusmao’s infrastructure projects.

Gusmao decided to a form a new coalition with his party, CNRT, as its centerpiece. Retaining the support of KHUNTO, Gusmao replaced the PLP with a collection of smaller parties, including the Democratic Party (PD). By February, the “new AMP” commanded a de facto parliamentary majority and Gusmao looked set to retake his old position as prime minister. Abandoned by his coalition partners, Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak submitted his resignation in late February.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. A cross-party majority in parliament declared a state of emergency and enacted a nationwide lockdown. Citing the country’s need for a steady hand during the emergency, Taur Matan Ruak withdrew his resignation in early April. He then used the window of opportunity to join PLP in a pact with Fretilin, its erstwhile opponent. Yet the PLP-Fretilin “understanding,” as it came to be called, fell just two seats short of a parliamentary majority.

In April, the question of whether to extend the state of emergency came before Parliament. Gusmao made his position clear: While social distancing should continue, it was time for the lockdown to end. If the state of emergency were lifted, as seemed likely if the “new AMP” held ranks, then it would mean the end of Taur Matan Ruak’s government and the formation of a new government under Gusmao.

That’s when KHUNTO made its move.

In an unanticipated rebuke of Gusmao, KHUNTO joined forces with PLP and Fretilin to extend the lockdown, which has been credited with preventing anyone from dying of COVID-19 in Timor-Leste. KHUNTO’s five seats were enough to give the PLP-Fretilin “understanding” an actual majority in Parliament, allowing Taur Matan Ruak to remain prime minister. For its troubles, KHUNTO picked up the position of vice prime minister, further cementing itself as a party of consequence.

“KHUNTO has proven to be the swing vote between the two blocks,” says Michael Leach, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology who focuses on the politics of Timor-Leste. “They were instrumental in this big shift, and were a critical first mover in a political realignment that has also seen some PD members now voting for government positions as well.”

While the PLP-Fretilin-KHUNTO alliance seems secure, it might be premature to say that Timor-Leste’s political crisis has ended. On May 19, the speaker of Parliament, a CNRT member, demanded that the legislative body be dissolved, prompting a chaotic scene in which a table was overturned and MPs shouted at and pushed one another. Using a portable microphone because Parliament’s PA system had been switched off, MPs managed to hold a vote to replace the speaker with a Fretilin member.

Moreover, though Gusmao has publicly accepted that he will be in the opposition, it is extremely unlikely that he will fade from political life.

“Gusmao’s move against his own AMP alliance in January… appears right now to have gone badly wrong,” says Leach. “That said, few would consider it wise to draft a political eulogy for the master politician just yet.”

Still, KHUNTO’s decision could have significant policy implications for Timor-Leste.

“The PLP’s platform focuses on basic development indicators and good governance, and this should in theory be compatible with Fretilin’s often-expressed concerns over expensive mega-projects and the sustainability of Timor-Leste’s sovereign wealth fund,” says Leach.

Scambary agrees that a PLP-Fretilin alliance could be a “sensible, stable partnership.” While Timorese politics is often more about personality than policy, he says, “There’s a core of Fretilin that is reform-minded, which could make it a more natural bedfellow for PLP.”

At a minimum, then, Timor-Leste could see a shift in spending from the so-called white elephant infrastructure projects of the past – including expensive but unnecessary airports, highways, and casinos – to basic development projects in the years to come. This, in turn, could have tangible impacts for Timor-Leste’s most vulnerable populations, many of which are suffering from increased food insecurity and joblessness due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. While KHUNTO has often failed to enunciate a coherent policy agenda, its constituency of rural young people would certainly be among those who benefit from a renewed focus on basic development.

“Any kind of decent public spending on agriculture, health, and education would improve their lot,” says Scambary.

KHUNTO’s rising importance could also herald other changes for Timor-Leste’s democracy. For one, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which rival MAGs, observing KHUNTO’s electoral success, create political parties of their own. While this could mean greater voice for Timorese youth, the prospect of MAGs playing out their longstanding enmities within Parliament is a potentially concerning one.

Less speculatively, while KHUNTO and PLP are very different parties, their collective victory over a legacy party, CNRT, signals a generational shift in political power from independence-era veterans to young people and the politically literate middle class. While, for now, Fretilin and CNRT continue to wield great influence, their future success will depend on their ability to manage demographic shifts and the rise of new constituencies in Timor-Leste. While its ultimate direction might be uncertain, a wind of change is rustling the palm fronds of this half-island nation.