Abstract
This chapter describes the experiences of the author and his Indonesian and Timorese partners to create an international partnership to design a new dispute resolution system to resolve housing, land and property (HLP) disputes in Timor-Leste. The disputes resulted from violence after the population’s vote for independence from Indonesia and years of Portuguese colonialism and Indonesian occupation. To resolve the disputes, the United Nations, and later the Timor-Leste Ministry of Justice, created a Land and Property Directorate (LPD) that was mandated to settle highly contested and potentially volatile HLP disputes in cities, towns and rural customary communities. The chapter presents procedures used by the partners to develop LDP dispute resolution capacities. It describes approaches used to decode Timor-Leste customary dispute resolution practices, multiple training programs that utilized both elicitive and prescriptive teaching/learning procedures, steps in the design of the new system, training methodologies to prepare LPD staff as mediators and negotiators, and procedures developed to educate the public about available services.
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Notes
- 1.
Cohen (2013) is a highly useful reference on establishing partnerships to promote peacebuilding.
- 2.
Land in Timor-Leste is held either customarily and administered under customary law, or under a statutory legal system in which owners hold private titles. Statutory land was historically held by Portuguese colonists, Indonesians during the Indonesian occupancy, some citizens of Timor-Leste or by people of mixed race. After independence, the government determined that land could not be owned by foreigners and had to develop a law that detailed how land would be owned and whether any compensation for loss by foreign owners would be paid.
- 3.
Tensions also remained between pro-independence and pro-autonomy actors, some of which were related to HLP issues.
- 4.
At this time, there were four categories of potential claimants: (1) customary occupants of land (commonly held by a community), (2) those claiming land under Portuguese title, (3) those claiming land under Indonesian title and (4) current occupants of land.
- 5.
Generally, conducting training for large groups of people without a strong institutional base and strategic plan that details how procedures and skills learned will be coordinated and applied to on-the-ground problems is neither effective for capacity-building nor service delivery.
- 6.
In the past, CDR staff had been hired by GTZ, the German government’s technical assistance agency, to work with the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law, an Indonesian NGO that is the sister organization of ICCT, to provide dispute resolution training for staff of Indonesian government agencies and NGOs during the time of the Suharto regime. After this initial working experience, CDR and ICEL/ICCT became partners in the presentation of many training programs in Indonesia.
- 7.
Trainees were to be LPD staff, all of whom were citizens of Timor-Leste and many of which had attended university in Indonesia and studied land planning, management or administration.
- 8.
For several years prior to being contacted by the UN for assistance in Timor-Leste, CDR staff had been providing dispute resolution systems design assistance and experimenting with conducting ‘designshops’—highly participatory collaborative meetings in which clients participate directly with consultants to better understand the conflicts they want to resolve and jointly develop institutions, procedures and personnel capacities to address and settle them.
- 9.
Similar flexibility in the application of diverse standards and criteria to guide decision-making and the ability of parties to craft customized solutions based on issues in dispute and disputants is also common in Western mediation practice.
- 10.
Other names for these individuals, depending on the communities in which they are members, are gase ubun, bei or nauzuf.
- 11.
During colonial times, subdistrict heads (chefes de sucos) or hamlet chiefs (chefes de aldieas) were often appointed from families that historically provided customary political authorities. Chefes were involved in dispute resolution activities and performed functions similar to the liurai, witnessing and, in some cases, making decisions. They did not, however, provide customary information on kinship or family ties or rules of the ancestors.
- 12.
Prior to the CDR/ICCT consultation, an Australian NGO conducted a brief mediation training program attended by some LDP staff members. The seminar presented a facilitative mediation approach and used Western family disputes as case studies and simulations. LPD staff noted that while this training did introduce them to mediation, it did not provide adequate information on approaches, procedures and strategies to effectively mediate HLP disputes in the cultural context of Timor-Leste.
- 13.
Involving multiple levels or all of an organization’s staff in dispute resolution systems design is fairly unusual in cultures with more hierarchical orientations. The Director’s openness to broad staff participation was exemplary. Additionally, he participated throughout the workshop as a peer with his other staff members and encouraged active and vocal participation.
- 14.
Priority was determined by participants’ assessments of whether there was a significant potential for positive broad social impacts if the kind of dispute was settled, and the potential contribution of resolutions to increased social peace and probable enhancement of economic development. The two categories of cases that were seen by the group to be of the highest priority to address and settle were illegal occupations of private and government land, and public access to natural resources.
- 15.
Simulations used early in workshops generally focus on issues that participants are likely to be familiar with or ones that they can imagine happening in their social context. The topics selected, however, are not situations that they will become so engaged in and ‘hooked’ on the content that they will not be able to learn about the process. The goal of early simulations is to explore concepts and a range of approaches and procedures commonly used in collaborative problem-solving. Those approaches and procedures that participants believe may be appropriate for use in their context are then further explored, and adopted, adapted or used to develop entirely new culturally appropriate methods before being applied to real-life problems.
- 16.
Ultimately, the Minister of Justice approved the majority of recommendations for the new system, with the exception of the arbitration and LPDRB components, because she wanted unresolved cases to be sent to government courts. Implementation of her decision, however, was severely constrained by the fact that few government courts were in existence or functional due to lack of trained judges, lawyers, facilities or resources. For this reason, there were a number of HLP cases that could not be settled until the country’s courts became more functional.
- 17.
Interestingly, the senior Ministry official made a long closing speech in Portuguese, the newly adopted language of Timor-Leste, which was spoken primarily by Timor-Leste officials who had left the country during the Indonesian occupation. Portuguese was spoken by only a small minority of Timorese, and by very few LPD staff members who were participants in the workshops.
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Moore, C. (2018). Dispute Resolution System Design and Mediation Capacity-Building: Partnering to Resolve Post-Conflict Disputes in Timor-Leste. In: d'Estrée, T., Parsons, R. (eds) Cultural Encounters and Emergent Practices in Conflict Resolution Capacity-Building. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71102-7_11
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