By David Fox
DILI, June 1 (Reuters) - The
Pintos are everything that ordinary East Timorese aspire to be.
Francisco works as a driver for the national hospital and his wife Ligia is a teacher at a school in the capital.
Apart from their joint monthly earnings of around $250 per month, they also have a small neighbourhood kiosk selling basic household goods and a minibus which plies a lucrative daily route through the countryside.
But on Thursday the Pintos were camped on a grassy verge at the entrance to Dili's airport, everything they owned piled up in boxes inside their bus.
"We have been here for six days," said Francisco, bottle-feeding his youngest daughter under an awning he had put up to give some protection from the scorching sun.
"We had to run away because we were told loromonu (westerners) were coming to get us".
Pinto's story is typical of dozens heard every day from ordinary Timorese caught up in an orgy of looting and arson by youth gangs loosely allied to feuding factions of the country's armed forces.
Around 600 of the 1,400-strong Timorese army rebelled after being dismissed when they protested against discrimination against easterners.
The police split along similar lines and also clashed with the army until the government ordered them all out of the capital and called in an Australian-led force to restore order.
"We are lororese (easterners) in a loromonu (western) area," Pinto told Reuters. "We have lived in Maliuana since 2000."
That was the year after Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia following a bloody referendum campaign that split the country.
Although ethnically and linguistically identical, easterners are considered to have been more ambivalent about independence.
EAST-WEST DIVIDE
They are also considered to be more loyal to Prime Minister Mari Alkatari, criticised for his handling of the current crisis, than President Xanana Gusmao, the independence war hero.
Unsure of the fate of his property, Pinto returned to his home with a Reuters team on Thursday, only to find it and an adjoining property belonging to his cousin, had been torched.
Too frightened to look more closely, he ducked behind the seat of the vehicle when he saw groups of neighbourhood youths.
When Reuters returned to the property without Pinto, those same youths denied Pinto lived there and said the house had been used as a weapons store by trouble-making easterners.
But lying among the charred contents of the house were dozens of school exercise books that Ligia had been marking and letters addressed to the family.
"Ok, I know them, but we didn't do it," said Martino Adel, keeping guard at the entrance to the neighbourhood beneath a white shower curtain on which was scrawled "We don't accept easterners here".
The neighbourhood chief, a brawny, tattooed man who refused to give his name, said he had no idea who the Pintos were, but "if they are easterners they are trouble-makers".
Timor's political leaders have denied the country has been on the verge of a civil war and say talk of an east-west divide is political mischief-making.
Many ordinary Timorese also express ignorance at a national split, but it is clear that the gangs rampaging through the capitals suburbs and the vigilante squads that have sprung up to protect neighbourhoods are aligned on an east-west basis.
"I don't think we will return to our house," Francisco told Reuters as he returned to his family parked near the airport.
"We will try to find an area where it is safer for us.