‘The Camp’, ‘The Street’, ‘The Hotel’ and ‘The Karaoke Bar/Brothel’ — The Gendered, Racialized Spaces of a City in Crisis: Dili, 2006–2008

Abstract

Space, its perception and the relative attributes linked to it, be it danger, safety, comfort or alienation, is highly personalized and time-bound, and informed by gender, class, age and what, for lack of a better term, I will call here ‘racialized dynamics’.¹ My thoughts here are an attempt to make sense of my repeated visits to Dili, the capital of East Timor, focusing on the ‘leaden years’ of 2006–2008.² Those years were marked by an extremely visible presence of over 100,000 IDPs in makeshift camps across the city and its environs; a militarized international peacekeeping³ and national security force presence; pervasive fear, especially between April 2006 and December 2006; street-fighting emanating from gangs, martial arts groups (MAGs) and ritual arts groups (RAGs); and a large international presence in the form of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste, international agencies such as the International Organization for Migration and a plethora of international NGOs (INGOs) with thousands of expat staff, locally referred to as malae in Tetum.⁴