Hot off the press: Bob Howarth trains Timor reporters on laptops in sauna conditions during the first day of production of the world's newest newspaper.

Building a new newspaper from ashes in war-torn East Timor

Dili, East Timor -- On Aug. 30 last year the 800,000 citizens of East Timor, the beautiful divided topical island nation just 300 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia, voted 98 percent in favor of independent from Indonesia. At first there was jubilation as the tiny nation's votes were counted under United Nations supervision.

Then a massive orgy of destruction and killing began. East Timor had been a sleepy Portuguese colony for nearly 300 years when socialist Portugal hurriedly abandoned its colonies around the world in the mid-'70s. As various leftist factions struggled for control, the corrupt but right-wing neighboring Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 as the Western world turned a blind eye to the ensuing brutal suppression.

Last September after the independence vote, most editors and journalists in Dili, the beautiful harbor capital, were given a clear message by the Indonesian military and their puppet local ragtag militias: "We blame the press for this vote. We well destroy your papers and kill all of you."

They almost did. The daily Voice of Timor newspaper was burnt to the ground and every single piece of equipment, including the press, destroyed. Most of the editors, like Hugo Da Costa, played cat and mouse with militias who had put a price on their heads. In the height of the unchecked burning and killing in Timor, before Australia spearheaded a United Nations peacekeeping force, Da Costa was smuggled to the airport to flee on a special flight chartered by the Japanese consul.

The militias recognized him in the departure lounge and dragged him outside to kill him on the sidewalk. Two local cops who knew Da Costa arrested him for his own safety and rushed him back to police headquarters. With the militias demanding he be handed over, the police allowed Da Costa to slip out a back door and he was whisked away to safety across the Timor border hidden on the roof rack of a car carrying a mattress and canvas covers.

East Timor's other leading editor, Virgilio ("Gill") Gueterres, spent six years in the mountains with Timor freedom fighters before he was jailed for three years for his sin of preaching independence.

In early February I met both of these brave editors in my home base of Brisbane, Australia, when they were flown from Dili by the Reuters Foundation of London to attend, with 10 other Timor journalists, a special "post-conflict" reporting workshop run by Reuters' chief Kosovo correspondent, Australian expatriate Colin McIntyre.

As the end of the course at the University of Queensland's Centre from International Journalism, the organizers rang the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association to ask what help our industry could provide. Somehow my name popped up because of my heavy involvement in Y2K and systems disaster recovery planning for our group, News Ltd. and Queensland Newspapers.

Whipping up a pre-press system
An hour after meeting the Timorese, my boss John Cowley gave us the all clear to do everything possible to help. Our information technology manager, Alan Calder, whipped up overnight a small pre-press system of 12 surplus PCs running Windows 95 and PageMaker (the only pagination process the Timorese knew.) They found an A3 laserproofer and we scrounged seven modems and half a dozen old Olivetti and Toshiba laptops from our editorial armory.

I drove a company truck to Brisbane Airport the following day as the Timorese checked in to board an Ansett Airlines flight to Darwin, then onto Dili via the military. We unloaded nearly 1000 pounds of computers, which they checked in as personal baggage and Ansett generously waived all excess charges.

Then the fun business of getting their papers restarted began. I flew to Darwin in mid-February to complete a News Ltd. group task of rolling out nationally our new text archive system called NewsText. I had three days of intensive training of the staff of the local daily, the Northern Territory News. Then I watched in horror the TV news, which showed the UN's C130 I was due to fly on to Dili, as it crash-landed with its wheels up in Darwin. Instead, I boarded a local private charter flight and landed in Dili on the day the terminal caught fire. "Situation normal, mate," the guy seated next to me commented, Crocodile Dundee-like.

I had two days seeing Dili and meeting with the local journalists as their half ton of computers traveled by barge from Darwin to Dili. East Timor will be a wonderful country to visit someday. The people, mostly devout Roman Catholics, are as friendly and welcoming as the Balinese. Dili is 80 percent destroyed, but just a 20-minute drive west my News Ltd. colleagues took me snorkeling at a beach renamed "Anzac Cove" in the clearest water I've seen outside the outer Great Barrier Reef. The only distraction was an Aussie soldier sitting on the roof of a Landrover with a sniper's rifle and scope. "That's for the crocodiles," our Dili-based photographer Rob MacColl told me. "The Timorese regard salt-water crocs as sacred animals." Bloody hell, I thought.

That night our pallet-load of gear arrived and at 7 a.m. on Feb. 28 we started unpacking and testing our PCs and laserproofer in the offices of the world's newest newspaper, the Timor Post. It was frustrating yet rewarding in this former Indonesian military command post. The Timorese journalists, led by their new Chief Editor Da Costa, wanted to get their first edition out the following day when Indonesia's President Wahid was making a highly controversial visit to the city his military commanders had deliberately trashed.

Aussie army
With constant power failures threatening production, I walked across a dusty lane from the Timor Post's new offices and tracked down the commanding officer of the neighboring Aussie Ninth Force Support Battalion, Lt. Col. Barry McManus. He readily volunteered all kinds of help including running army power cables to our newspaper offices. Later this support included security backup in case the rebel militias, who are still shooting at UN peacekeepers on the West Timor border, try to sneak back into Dili.

I lost about eight pounds during the 28 hours we worked to get out the first edition of the Timor Post. At one stage at 1 a.m. on Feb. 29, I counted 20 people crammed into one room with two guys building pages with the text in Tetun, the local language. The temperature soared well over the century mark and I was soaked in sweat. Even more frustrating was communications. Our reporter and photographer based in Dili had to climb onto the sand-bagged roof of their battle-scarred Hotel Turismo to get a decent cell-phone signal to file painfully at 9600 bits per second. I had the same problems with my laptop and cell phone.

The day before our big production exercise I had sweet-talked myself into the UN headquarters in Dili with my brand new UN press pass to use the only high-speed Internet link available outside the military. The foreign media's communications with the outside world had been, and still are, satellite phones and the Australian national cell network Telstra, which the Aussie military quickly set up during their peacekeeping operations.

I logged on to Mr. Gates' excellent Hotmail backup service and downloaded a half meg TIF file that our chief graphics guru had built for me back in Brisbane: the nameplate for the new Timor Post. In my laptop case I had a CD with 90 images of the leading names in East Timor as an instant photo library. During the long night I taught the local reporters how to use their laptops running Notepad and then we did sneakernet disk transfers to the page builders.

At 5 a.m. they output their first edition with the Page One head saying "Welcome Mr. Wahid" in an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation to their former oppressors. Somehow I wrote the only English column headed "Welcome to the World's Newest Newspaper." The Timor Post plans to run 12 tabloid pages when they get back to full strength: four pages in Tetun, four pages in Portuguese and four pages in English.

We have no printing press, so Bob Buschgens, the genial, Canadian-born manager of the Paximus Lodge where I'm staying in a tiny pre-fabricated hut, lets us commandeer his office A3 photocopier. Three hours later we speed through the streets of Dili in a beat-up taxi flinging out copies of Timor's newest publication to huge crowds now gathering for President Wahid's arrival in Dili. ABC Radio in Australia interviews me by cell phone and I tell them I wish that our newspapers back home could be fought over and received so eagerly as the information-starved citizens of Dili did.

'Kill me! Kill me!'
I then foolishly agree to drive News Ltd.'s Dili staff car, a Suzuki four-wheel drive Sierra, for our photographer Rob while he covers Wahid's three-hour visit. I get my instructions: Keep the motor running, point it at the best escape route if things go to crap and drink plenty of bottled water. Rob gets his arrival pix at Dili's Komoro Airport and I crash the gears to get us ahead of the official motorcade.

Rob reckons there'll be trouble somewhere and sure enough, as we drive over the big bridge into outer Dili, a mob of 300 angry protesters surges onto the road. I hit the brakes, point the car towards safety and Rob, streaming sweat, runs into the thick of the near-riot clicking his Canon digital. I get out of the car to watch the fighting between protesters and Portuguese peacekeeping troops who have replaced most of the Aussies in Dili. About five paces from me Lisbon's answer to Johnny Rambo lets fly with a bullet in the air and another soldier fires shortly thereafter. This only makes the Timorese angrier. Some rip their shirts off and scream "Kill me! Kill me!" at the Portuguese troops who are massively outnumbered by now. The official motorcade forces its way through, then Rob runs back to the Suzi and me and the chase resumes.

We get within three blocks of Dili's main square where Xanana Gusmao, East Timor's charismatic leader calms the angry mob to ensure a safe passage for the rest of Wahid's visit.

After Rob sends back his riot photos, the foreign media crews gather at their waterfront favorite, the Dili Hotel beer garden to eat amazingly good "ET Burgers" and swamp cold Aussie beers. The next day I meet my Timorese team and they are already planning another edition. I promise to get as much equipment to them as possible because they're sick of aid agencies' red tape. Just before I head for the airport, we celebrate the birth of the Timor Post with a carton of Victorian Bitter, the favorite Aussie beer on sale all over Dili. They present me with a traditional Timorese long hand-woven scarf and Deputy Editor Otelio Ote slips me a brown paper bag with a heap of American and Aussie dollars and Indonesian rupiah. "We need our own car," he tells me. Back in Darwin I use my Diners Card to make up the difference to buy a second-hand Holden Commodore, which we ship to Dili by the Perkins barge company who waive the A$800 (US$487) freight fee. The car has, in the trunk and on the seats, 10 extra PCs donated by News Ltd. in Sydney, cartons of A3 paper and an A3 photocopier donated by News Ltd.'s Group Corporate Affaris Director Aileen Berry.

Back in Brisbane I get up to six calls a day from Dili now that I've become the de facto production editor for Dili. The editor of Lalenok, an A4 magazine produced by former guerilla fighter "Gill" Gueterres, tells me he's lost an entire edition in one of Dili's many power failures. As a result we're now pricing small UPS (uninterrupted power supply) systems for the magazine and newspaper operations. On St. Patrick's Day, March 18, I ring the Timor Post with good news.

A local freight importer has donated a near-new VW Golf car that we can ship to Dili and load with another A3 proofer, more paper and four more computers. Even Brisbane's famous national rugby-league football team, the Broncos, come to our party and throw in 50 footballs for the Timor Post's good neighbors and protectors, the Aussie Ninth Support Battalion.

The story of the world's newest newspaper, the Timor Post, has only just begun ...

Viva Timor Loro Sae (East Timor,) Viva Timor Post!

-- Bob Howarth, howarthb@qnp.newsltd.com.au

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.