Tense Times in Dili

Image of Fundasaun Mahein

The Irrawaddy News Magazine - July 2010, Vol.18, No.7

by Matt Crook

Ozorio Leque stands accused of inciting a riot in Dili, the East Timorese capital, on April 28, 2006, when he publicly berated the government before a mob went on the rampage, attacking the government palace. The crisis that followed over the next two months led to 37 deaths and the displacement of 150,000 people.

One of the leaders of Colimau 2000, a resistance group comprising former freedom fighters, youths and farmers, Leque, 29, insists he was acting merely as an activist and that the real perpetrators of the crisis remain untouched. Meanwhile, frustrations among an increasingly disenfranchised youth demographic are now the country’s biggest social challenge.

“Now it’s more calm and more quiet and peaceful than before, but that does not mean that we don’t have conflict among the youths, among the leaders, that could lead to another social conflict in the future, particularly with martial arts groups,” he said.

In the crisis of 2006, a split in the armed forces over promotions led to clashes in the streets of Dili between the army (F-FDTL), police (PNTL) and martial arts groups. Rivalry between the army and the police remains a source of tension, but with an average age of 22 among the population of 1.1 million, the biggest threats to security are evident among the nation’s troubled young.

“This country is composed mostly of youths, but the major challenge that they are facing at the moment is the lack of skills and job opportunities. This is one of the issues that could lead to another social clash,” said Leque, whose trial at Dili District Court was again delayed on June 8.

The Indonesian military’s illegal occupation of Timor-Leste between 1975 and 1999 led to about 200,000 deaths and culminated in the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure. Shifting a nation’s mentality from resistance to development is key to maintaining stability, Leque said.

“We were coached to use violence against the Indonesian government to achieve our goal of independence or to demonstrate to international societies that we were refusing the Indonesian presence in our country, and most of these youths who were involved in the conflict in 2006 were involved in the violence against Indonesia,” he said.

“It is time for this generation to think for themselves and then their society, their family and their country. It makes no sense when you talk about development if you don’t start from yourself. Human investment is one of the most important issues,” he said. “Creating job opportunities and facilitating youths is one of the priorities in this post-conflict situation.”

But while the streets of Dili are mostly calm, especially compared to 2006, there are still bust-ups between youths in some parts of the city. The government meanwhile has discounted reports that tension between rival martial arts groups is smoldering to the point of destabilizing the country.

Secretary of State Agio Pereira said in a statement that Timor-Leste has one of the lowest crime rates per capita in the world and that reports of serious crime continue to decrease.

But not all crime is reported and the government’s knee-jerk defenses have drawn flak.

Aniceto Neves of the HAK Association, a human rights organization that works with members of martial arts groups, said a balance between sensationalist reporting and defensive posturing is needed.

“The martial arts situation is not something which is dangerous for the security of Timor-Leste,” he said. “It is about social jealousy. It is about social frustration. It is not really affecting the stability of the situation in Timor-Leste.”

Australian gang specialist James Scambary said in his latest report, “Sects, Lies and Videotape,” that fighting, “sporadic but at times intense, sometimes involving over 300 people at a time, is taking place in eight neighborhoods across the city.”

But Neves said “outsiders” have a tendency to exaggerate.

“You cannot consider most places in Dili as dangerous. You cannot consider most of the youths located in different places as dangerous or threatening to others. It is not true. If there is a threat, then the fighting would be very often,” he said.

Nelson Belo, the director of Fundasaun Mahein, a local NGO focused on security sector issues, said Dili is stable, but the problem of unemployment must be addressed or else it could pose a serious threat.

Gainful employment is hard to come by in Timor-Leste, which has only been formally independent since 2002. Subsistence farming is the norm and half the country remains illiterate.

“The problem is language,” Belo said, adding that many Timorese feel unable to get top jobs in the country because they are unable to speak Portuguese, one of Timor-Leste’s official languages, or English.

“Many Timorese only apply for jobs that are insecure,” he said. “They only apply for jobs as security staff or cleaners, and so many of them are not in the decision level and this creates jealousy.”

The government should review its language policy so that Timorese who are unable to speak Portuguese and English can have the same opportunities as those who can, said Belo.

“Many internationals have good jobs and so people start to feel like they are guests in their own country,” he added.

The key to maintaining stability in Timor-Leste is greater involvement of people at the community level to shape future policies on security and better reflect the needs of the population, he said.

Another significant problem is the lack of coordination between Timor-Leste’s army and police force and the UN Police (UNPOL). The PNTL have been re-assuming policing duties from the UN on a district-by-district basis. To date, six of 13 districts have been handed over.

Cillian Nolan, a Dili-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, reported in February that it remains a “fiction” that the UN is in charge of policing Timor-Leste.

“The reality is a lot murkier. A formal handover of ‘executive policing responsibilities’ is progressing on a district-by-district basis, but response to recent events resembles a collective abdication of responsibility,” he wrote.

Recent allegations of excessive use of force have been leveled at the police over the beating of an unarmed man during a fishing competition and the fatal shooting of an unarmed youth in Dili last year.

In its latest “Security Sector Reform Monitor” for Timor-Leste, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) warned against the current militarization of the PNTL under police commander Longuinhos Monteiro.

“This situation underscores the need for a review of paramilitary policing and a drastic reduction in the number of PNTL weapons in a country with few illicit firearms.

“Everyday sightings of armed F-FDTL soldiers and PNTL officers, including paramilitary police units with semi-automatic assault rifles and district task force units in riot gear have increased substantially since the 2006 crisis,” according to the CIGI report.

Earlier this year, the police and military launched a six-month joint campaign after unfounded reports surfaced of “ninjas” terrorizing locals in the western districts. The heavy-handed response was widely criticized and cited as Monteiro’s way of justifying the gun-toting Public Order Battalion he created last year.

Monteiro’s show of strength may have had more to do with winning popularity points than hunting ninjas, but the stunt backfired as a torrent of complaints about human rights violations rained in on Monteiro’s men.

Then, in May, reports of a shoot-out between an illegally armed group and police in Ermera District spread through local media and triggered another wave of ninja talk, with Monteiro once again talking up the need for police action.

NGO Fundasaun Mahein on June 7 released a report casting doubt over Monteiro’s claims that there was an illegal group of gun-toting menaces on the loose, citing conflicting police reports and a lack of evidence.

“The alarmism raised by the general commander, Longuinhos Monteiro, is no different from the invention of the ninja situation in Bobonaro and Suai,” the report found.

“The rumors of illegal groups are strongly connected with PNTL’s militarization and have the potential to create competition between PNTL and F-FDTL.”

But for all the criticism, there have been improvements in the country’s police force, said Silas Everett, the country representative of the Asia Foundation in Timor-Leste.

“The police have been undertaking a transformation here, and in terms of community policing, there has been a real growing acceptance of it as an appropriate policing strategy. Officers are going out there and engaging with communities and all of that doesn’t make it into the media,” said Everett.

“In Timor-Leste, stories pick up on the violence, the poverty, and not enough is said about the good things that are happening, especially in regards to the security sector,” he added.

Yet even if security is bolstered, Timor-Leste’s ineffective justice system needs significant investment.

Neves added, “During the crisis in 2006 until present times, there are a number of people who suffered damages, who lost their houses, lost their families, had things stolen—there were people who killed—but what people face now is the absence of justice.”

A lack of qualified prosecutors has led to a backlog of about 5,000 cases at the Prosecutor General’s office.

“There is no responsibility. The ones who are suspected of killing are just free, just going around and walking freely. It makes people frustrated. Very easily they can turn to violence,” he said. “Social frustrations regarding the justice system are provoking people to be angry with each other and then they are fighting.”

Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr

By ERIK ECKHOLM

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his “homeboys” in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.

One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

“We all got drunk after Gaylord’s burial, and I started rapping,” said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. “But I teared up and couldn’t finish.”

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson’s, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother’s ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. “It’s just like living in a ghetto,” he said. “Someone’s getting beat up every other night.”

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults — including sexual assaults — and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.

“Tenants are calling in and saying ‘I’m scared,’ ” Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.

“It seems that every day we’re getting more violence,” Mr. Iron Cloud said.

Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called “commod-squadding.”

As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade, the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to 20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island, said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe’s judiciary committee.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.

Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and federal agencies, has noted the “marked increase in gang activity, particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the Southwest” over the last five to seven years.

The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.

One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, Mr. Grant said.

Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies and records.

Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.

“We’re trying to give an identity back to our youth,” said Melvyn Young Bear, the tribe’s appointed cultural liaison. “They’re into the subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of.”

Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals, including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.

Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying sweat lodges, “I was able to turn myself around.” He is emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native traditions.

Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations found that the approach might be helping.

Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about his own future.

“I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to,” he said.

His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and says he wants to go to college.

But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party any chance he got — “for the rush, the thrill.” As he spoke, he was dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in “Scarface,” and he wore a black bandanna.

He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu performance.

Ever since birth

I been waitin’ for death ...

Taking It to the Streets - Harvard Magazine

Image via Wikipedia

by Nell Porter Brown

DaviD C. grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With no father around and a drug-addicted mother, he moved through foster homes, gathering a fragile sense of worth from a gang of friends. “All I aspired to was being important on the street,” he says. “There was nothing about a future.” He spent five years in juvenile detention and a few in prison, and still has a reputation among local cops for living up to his nickname, “Devious,” for once escaping through the police-station roof.

At 37, he is still hanging out with the kids—in the schools, at their homes, the hospital, or the mall. But as a street worker with the city’s Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, he now prevents the very violence he once provoked.

Like David, most of the street workers are ex-gang members or former local criminals, says Teny Oded Gross, M.T.S. ’01, the institute’s founding executive director. Their backgrounds make them uniquely suited for what it takes to thwart a single act of violence: hours of face-to-face counseling of kids during their most heated, impulsive moments—when they might otherwise pull out a gun and do irreversible damage. “My job is not pretty—it’s not sending kids to Harvard, or anything fancy,” Gross explains. “It’s about keeping kids in this city alive between the ages of 14 and 23.”

The kids are even willing to die for their housing projects. “These beefs are territorial, not ethnic or racial,” David explains on a drive through the darkened streets to visit kids at the Chad Brown Housing Development. A group of teenagers eyes the passing car. “They look at every occupant, every car,” he says. “If you see one slow down with people inside wearing hoods, then you worry. That makes your hair stand on end.”

This fall, gunmen on foot shot a six-year-old boy, reportedly while aiming for his mother’s girlfriend because she was in a rival project—an accident racked up to “the cost of the game,” David says. “I tell them, ‘You’re willing to go down for something that doesn’t even belong to you—a building made of bricks, and land owned by the government—nothing you can even pass on to your kids. Why would you do that? Does that make sense?’ But it gives them a sense of purpose when there is nothing for these kids to do. If it were not for Teny and the institute, there would be no role models or people to help kids like I was.”

Gross is a philosophically minded, longtime street worker himself. During the 1990s anti-violence campaign known as the Boston Miracle, he was active in the Dorchester neighborhood, doing community outreach, gang mediation, job creation, and skills training. He also taught kids to document their lives with photography. Building partnerships—with the police, for example, despite local animosities—is a particular strength.

Being a former Israeli Army sergeant helps. “I’ve been both a victim of violence through [the legacy of] the Holocaust and then was top dog when it came to the Palestinians. I’m part of the weak and part of the strong; that’s a very humbling experience,” says Gross, who moved to Boston to be near his sister in 1989. “I always see things through the eyes of the kids and through the eyes of the police. Keeping those tensions in your head—some people would say that is what makes you good at this kind of work.”

The institute where he works now was established in 2001 by Father Ray Malm and Sister Ann Keefe, the pastoral team at St. Michael’s Church, in the poor neighborhood of South Providence. Catalyzed by growing youth violence and the death of 15-year-old Jennifer Rivera—shot in the head in front of her house to prevent her from testifying in a pending murder case—they drafted a broad mission: “To teach by word and example the principles of nonviolence and to foster a community that addresses potentially violent situations with nonviolent solutions” based on the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Gross has built the nonprofit organization from a few unpaid nonviolence trainers into a $1.2-million agency with a 28-member team. By the end of the year, he plans to open a four-story headquarters in St. Michael’s vacant convent, with tutors, a gym, art and theater classes, and plenty of musical outlets—including a sound- and video-recording studio—thanks to $4.5 million in contributions from private donors, foundations, the city, and the state. “We’re really good at going in and intervening,” Gross says, “but to do the work of really transforming someone takes a longer time. This building will focus on youth development.” Besides running the street crew, institute staff members operate a nonviolence training program (Gross has worked with young people from as far away as Belfast and Guatemala) and a victims’ support center; they also mediate conflicts in families and schools and coordinate a summer-jobs program.

“Teny is the single most important partnership we have to fight crime and violence,” says Providence police chief Dean M. Esserman, a former prosecutor and Dartmouth graduate. “Everywhere I go—to every shooting, the ER, in the classrooms, to every wake, to every funeral—I see Teny, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. He and the street workers are about building sustained relationships of trust. The kids know that they love them—they don’t get that from many adults.”

With a diverse population of 175,000, Providence is a small city in a tiny state. But it has the third-highest child-poverty rate in America (tied with New Orleans); more than half the city’s public-school children qualify for free lunches. Moreover, the state topped the nation for unemployment this fall, with an 8.8 percent rate, and reported a record number of home foreclosures. “We are two cities—one of wealth and one of poverty,” Gross says, “and they rarely meet.” Violence, he asserts, is sparked by environmental, not biological, factors: “In my mind it’s very clear: There is not a lot of opportunity—economic or otherwise—and these kids see failure all around them all the time. It’s traumatizing. They feel pushed into a corner and sometimes violence is the only way they feel they have some control over their lives.”

Violent crime in Providence fell overall between 2002 and 2007; Esserman attributes that to community policing, increased accountability—and the work of the institute. The hottest spot is in the West End, where most of the city’s 40 gangs (with their estimated 1,600 members) stake out their claims among the largest concentration of poor and minority families. “The problem is not all gangs—that is just the People magazine view,” cautions Esserman. “The problem is that the new drug in American culture is violence. Our children are growing up with it all around them—the media, the video arcade, in their neighborhoods. Their homes are not sanctuaries.” With the economy spiraling downward, Gross worries about the coming year. “Every day we see people just out of jail, trying to get out of gangs, and it’s extremely desperate for them to even find work,” he says. “We’ve got our finger in the dike now, but the pressure could be too much.”

Gangs aren’t the sole focus. Plenty of kids need helping staying in school and coping with family troubles. One night in November, a mother came to the institute with her 12-year-old son, who was being bullied by his older half-brother—recently returned from the Dominican Republic and on the cusp of joining a gang. As she met privately with David, Gross talked to the boy about cartoons and art, and they went through a book of photographs of Rhode Island’s civic and community leaders. “He’s hungry for this kind of interaction; he’s very sensitive,” Gross says later. “He would probably do well in a middle-class, artistic life. But he’s being harassed, and if you fail to protect him the way adults are supposed to, he could become very tough very quickly.” (Gross has since contacted the chairman of the board of the community art center to get the boy into some classes.)

He believes in the redemptive powers of art and culture. Just as Gross used to ferry Boston youth to hockey games, then over to Harvard Square’s bookstores and cafés, now David routinely takes his charges to museums, concerts, and to Brown University events. Often, a simple jaunt to suburbia “can be a revelation for these kids,” says David. “I like to show them how people can get along and shop in stores and feel free and happy without looking over their shoulders and worrying about getting shot at. To the kids, this life is like TV.” Adds Gross, “Becoming middle class and learning just takes thousands of interactions. It’s all about exposure.”

Gross’s home is filled with etchings, paintings, and sculptures from his family, friends, and wife, Julia Clinker, a photographer who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and takes primary care of their two young sons. It was while earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1990 that Gross, who had plans “to photograph how the police treated people,” first met Boston community activist Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III ’83; he ended up teaching art to kids through the Azusa Christian Community (begun as a Harvard student group in the 1980s), where Rivers was pastor, and its affiliated Ella J. Baker House, which serves high-risk families in Dorchester. During the next decade, he was based primarily at Baker House as a teacher, street worker, and community organizer.

The work was faith-based, but “whether you believe in God or not was (and is) not critical,” says Gross, who is basically agnostic after years of studying religion. “I believe that people are capable of living up to their potential if given love and attention and opportunities. I connect with the communities of faith because they are dedicated around principles that I agree with—that every human life is worth something and worth doing something about.”

Divinity School “was a great place for me to ask new questions; I’m a much more lethal debater thanks to Harvard,” he says. He was especially drawn to professors Harvey Cox and Kevin Madigan and former faculty member Father J. Bryan Hehir. He took “Justice” with Bass professor of government Michael Sandel and still listens to the lectures through his iPod while jogging. “Harvard was a respite from the streets,” he continues, “and it renewed me to come and do this”: move to Providence (where his wife grew up) and take on the job of building up the nascent institute.

Gross’s own religious background is complicated. His mother, a Serb, deplored organized religion. His father, a Croatian Jew, once aspired to become a Catholic priest largely because he was hidden in a monastery during World War II (his mother died in the Holocaust); his eventual move to Israel was to be near his sole remaining relative, a sister. “My father’s the one who taught me all about Jesus,” Gross says. “It was not an observant Jewish household; we also celebrated Christmas. But in Israel, you begin to absorb the culture and I did. I still love the slowing down on Fridays. I really miss that.”

Though far from being a violent young man, Gross says he has always tended to “question everything” and was somewhat rebellious. He recalls breaking a window, slapping a teacher, throwing a kid over a table—“typical, aggressive kid stuff”—and says fighting at school and on the playground was the norm. “In the U.S. now, these juvenile actions would have resulted in a criminal record,” he adds. “But I was also full of life and was interested in philosophy and ethics and the world. I read literature and studied in school.”

Childhood, he thinks, should be about making mistakes, and about adults helping you learn. Tightening the grip of authority rarely helps. “The British got tough on the Irish—and you got a rebellion. We got tough on the Palestinians and we got a rebellion,” he asserts. “You put someone to the wall and usually they will have to act back.”

Violence and aggression are inherently exciting, he notes, especially to young men. He recalls driving a van-load of Boston kids home once: they saw their enemies out the window and “It was like a battalion reaction—they got all excited and started talking about who they were and what they did, and how they were going to get them,” he reports. “These crews challenge each other like military units. They have their enemies and their friends, their fights, and their girlfriends, and the drugs and the drinking—it’s these same things that excite people all around the world.”

In such an environment, how does nonviolence compete? Gross mentions the case of one 19-year-old in Providence, “VA,” a suspected murderer assigned to David. VA’s mother is in federal prison on drug charges and his best friend was ambushed and killed last summer while sneaking up on a rival crew. “VA is a real leader,” Gross points out. “What would he be if he’d grown up in an affluent suburb? A jock, a star athlete, captain of the team. The kids who go to Harvard are not passive wimps—they’re very aggressive, very driven.”

But for street kids, he says, that sense of power too often “comes through mowing people down with an Uzi. I think what we’re pushing for is a more evolved form of aggression.”

Suburban Ghetto

Sarah Garland | August 17, 2009

Jessica stood in a clearing in the woods where the ground was strewn with used condoms and broken bottles. Cicadas hummed in the country club grounds edging the campus of the Hempstead High School, a brick fortress with narrow windows and a weedy green lawn. Beyond the trees that separated the high school from the golf course, commuters from Eastern Long Island zipped along the expressway on their way to work in New York City. It was September of 2000, Jessica's first week of seventh grade, but she would not be going to class.

She felt both anxious and excited as one of the older boys standing next to her pulled out a black-and-white marbled notebook from his backpack and handed it to her. Scrawled inside it were the secrets of his gang, Salvadorans With Pride -- its handshakes, history, and symbols, and even some photographs of its teenage enemies. She was instructed to memorize it. She had 15 minutes, and then she would be quizzed. If she passed, she would move on to the beating.

She answered every question correctly and was even able to recite the gang's prayer before she was pushed into the middle of the circle. One of the boys looked at his watch and gave the signal. Two boys and three girls lunged at her, kicking and punching. A couple swung sticks. She fought back. She was supposed to. Jessica was small, but she was tough. She eventually succumbed to the beating and curled into a ball on the ground as their sneakers and fists rained down on her. At the end of 15 seconds, they picked her up gently. One of her attackers put his arm around her and lifted her into his car. Mercy Medical Center was a few blocks away. They dropped her off at the door.

After the nurses had bandaged her cuts, they left her lying in the emergency room bed alone. Her decision to join the gang was supposed to have severed her ties with her family, but the only person she could think of to call was her mother. She dialed, and her mom answered. She already knew what had happened. "Call a taxi," her mother said. Jessica walked home.

Until middle school, Jessica had lived in a house that neighbors dubbed the "crack house" for its often drug-addled residents and visitors. Her uncles were members of Mara Salvatrucha, a gang originally formed in Los Angeles by refugees of Central America's civil wars, and Jessica's living room was one of their main hangouts.

In first grade Jessica was placed in an English as a Second Language class, even though she was born on Long Island and spoke English fluently. Her mother was furious when she found out, but that wasn't until the end of the year. Her mom, an immigrant from Honduras, didn't speak English and couldn't read most of the report cards and notes Jessica carried home. The next year, Jessica was moved to an English class, where she sat in the back and stayed inconspicuous by keeping her head down on her desk. She quickly fell behind. The teacher began sending her to a remedial reading class during her lunch period. Her mother only got involved at school when Jessica was suspended for fighting. She had a reputation for throwing chairs, earning the nickname La Diabla from her classmates.

Jessica shuttled between the village's decrepit elementary schools several times. The harried teachers and guidance counselors had little time or resources to deal with a problem child like her. Two of the schools were eventually closed because the buildings, plagued by water leaks, structural hazards, mold, and rodents, were declared too dangerous to house students. No one noticed when one of Jessica's uncles began sexually abusing her when she was 11. She joined Salvadorans With Pride, the rivals of her uncles' gang, as a gesture of defiance.

Jessica met Sergio Argueta, a former gang member who had founded an anti-violence organization to help at-risk youth, at the pinnacle of her career in the gang two years later. She was one of the leaders, and she had been given her own gun, which she kept tucked under her mattress. She was an expert at stealing cars, and Salvadorans With Pride had dispatched her to make friends with a gang in a nearby town that had access to guns.

Sergio arrived at her house in the company of a social worker, who had opened a case on Jessica's older brother. It was 9 in the morning, and Jessica's mother mentioned that her daughter, a freshman in high school, had just come home from a night out. The social worker and Sergio exchanged glances. They asked to meet her.

Jessica started cursing as soon as she saw Sergio and the social worker. "What the fuck do you want? Why don't you people leave me the fuck alone!" she said by way of introduction. Jessica stormed out. Sergio was stunned. He would leave this case to the social worker.

Months later, however, he met Jessica again. A police detective had called Sergio to ask for his help in dealing with a high school student who believed her life was in danger. Sergio was dismayed when he saw the student he would be trying to help. But he didn't walk away this time. They didn't have many options, he told her. There was no official mechanism for dealing with children in Nassau County who were already involved in gangs. There was a state shelter for homeless runaways, but technically she was neither.

The biggest hurdle, however, would be Jessica herself. By this time, Jessica had been in and out of court, spent time in group homes for juvenile delinquents, and was drifting through high school even though she still struggled to read. If Sergio was going to help her, she had to promise him that she really wanted to change.

She stared down at her feet. She nodded. Yes, she wanted out.

***

In 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez gave a speech to the fraternal order of police in New Orleans warning about the "expanding danger of violent street gangs." The gangs were becoming more sophisticated, regimented, and competitive, he told the officers, but, even "worse, our latest data indicates new trends in gang violence that we must anticipate and prepare for: The gangs that are migrating, spreading, and expanding are increasingly influenced by the California-style of gang culture."

The gangs brought with them "more violent and targeted techniques for intimidation and control, as well as a flourishing subculture and network of communication," he told police. In even "the quiet community of Hempstead on Long Island," he said, "we've seen drive-by shootings riddle neighborhoods and innocent bystanders with bullets."

This popular narrative of the gangs' spread -- which posited that major Central American gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street were sending out emissaries to strategically expand their territory -- was contradicted by, among others, the National Youth Gang Center, a Justice Department subsidiary. The center researchers cautioned that many of the new cliques sprouting up in far-flung cities and suburbs were copycats and that, "in most instances, there is little, if any, real connection between local groups with the same name other than the name itself." The gangs might have originated in Los Angeles and Central America, but they flourished in places like Fairfax, Virginia, and Nassau County, New York, because of specific local conditions there that facilitated immigrants' alienation and anger. According to the center, the gangs were generally "homegrown."

But the argument that the problem was coming from within was largely ignored. It was easier and more politically expedient to blame outsiders. In the 1990s, the country experienced an influx of new immigrants -- most of them Hispanic -- that matched the waves of Irish and Italians a century before. The new arrivals landed in places that previous waves of immigrants had rarely ventured, skipping urban centers and moving directly to the suburbs. By 2002, the majority of Hispanics in the United States were living in residential rings beyond the inner cities that had long acted as the country's welcome mat. In the 1980s, the number of Hispanics living in cities compared to the number in the suburbs was about the same, but after the 1990s suburban Hispanics outnumbered their urban counterparts by 18 percent. And while the suburbs of New York, Los Angeles, and Miami saw substantial increases in their already-large Hispanic populations, the growth was just as fast in places where previously only a handful of Hispanics had lived.

The immigrants were following jobs, which proliferated in the booming economy of the 1990s, and their presence helped to buoy the country's prosperity. They came to work, and the United States needed their labor. Some took jobs in manufacturing and agricultural processing in new growth centers like North Carolina and Tennessee. Others were drawn to construction work as the housing industry exploded. Many had plans to stay, and those who came legally applied to become U.S. citizens in large numbers.

Although the country was enjoying an economic boom, it was reaching levels of income inequality not seen since the first half of the 20th century. Communities and schools across the country, especially suburban ones, were becoming more racially segregated, and the opportunities the immigrants came searching for were increasingly elusive. The first generation of Hispanic immigrants on Long Island, many with battle scars from wars back home, found their presence was not just unwelcome but infuriating to many of their new neighbors -- some of whom aggressively campaigned to send them back home. Others reacted violently. Nationally, hate crimes against Hispanics rose 40 percent between 2003 and 2007. Immigrants on Long Island were victims of regular attacks that included the 2003 firebombing of a Mexican family's house and the 2008 fatal beating of an Ecuadorian man. The immigrants' children attended schools and played in streets as segregated as the Jim Crow South, and the racial achievement gap between the races, particularly for Hispanic students, was widening.

Many of the immigrants who arrived in Hempstead in the 1990s, including Jessica's family, found themselves in neighborhoods where they were easy targets for established American gangs; many were undocumented and did not have bank accounts, so they carried cash in their pockets on payday. When they were robbed, they were usually too scared of deportation to call police. To defend themselves, the men banded together. One group chose a name that borrowed the English of their aggressors: the Redondel Pride. They grew quickly.

The group was more than a gang. It also functioned as a support organization for the men, most of them day laborers. They raised a pot of money for members to draw from if they fell behind in rent or got sick, and they helped each other find work. Some members broke from Redondel Pride, which dissolved in the late 1990s, and named themselves Salvadorans With Pride. The plan was to promote themselves as a self-help group and to make it clear that they disdained violence. But as new members joined, their good intentions began to unravel. A series of altercations with other gangs escalated to a full-blown war. By the time Jessica joined, SWP was as much a gang as Mara Salvatrucha or 18th Street.

***

When news of a central American gang crisis hit in 2003, it ignited a nation well-primed to expect that violent immigrants were on the verge of invading its cul-de-sacs. The national reaction fit a well-documented pattern. Research on fear about crime has found that usually the people who are most afraid of it are not the ones most likely to be victimized. Gang members usually attack other gang members, but women and the elderly tend to be just as fearful of being targeted. Often their anxiety has little to do with actual crime levels. Instead, it stems from perceptions that a community is changing and, the fearful populace usually believes, for the worse.

Both local and federal politicians were quick to react to the national mood -- and the potential for votes. The gang problem became a popular topic on the campaign trail and the number of federal programs to combat gangs surged. Most focused on tracking down gang members and throwing them in jail. In 2005 the Department of Homeland Security started an anti-gang task force, Operation Community Shield, that carried out immigration sweeps in search of Mara Salvatrucha gang members. And in the years that followed, the federal government poured more and more money and resources into gang-prevention efforts. In 2007, the year men linked to Mara Salvatrucha shot a group of teenagers execution-style in a school playground in Newark, the Department of Justice dedicated millions of dollars to an in-school prevention program, Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.), which was modeled on D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a federally funded anti-drug program. It received mixed reviews by researchers studying its effectiveness.

Both Democrats and Republicans continued to sound alarms about the gang problem. The Homeland Security secretary under President George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, regularly listed Mara Salvatrucha among the top threats to the country. "This is not yet an ideological organization, but it is an organization which has the capability to do an enormous amount of damage," Chertoff said in an April 2008 speech.

Yet the more attention paid to them -- and the more gang members swept up and sent back to Central America or to jail under the new federal initiatives -- the more the gangs seemed to spread. In 2005, the FBI had tracked Mara Salvatrucha to 33 states; by 2008, the agency said the gang was operating in 42. The FBI estimated that by 2008 there were at least 10,000 members of Mara Salvatrucha in the United States and ranked the gang's threat level as "high." The breathless media and law enforcement reports that characterized Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street as the largest, most dangerous gangs in the world had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In June 2008, the National Conference of State Legislatures, an elected body that serves as a think tank for state lawmakers, declared that gangs were still on the rise despite half a decade of concentrated law enforcement efforts and billions of dollars spent to bring them down. Echoing Gonzales' speech from three years earlier, the group warned that "while it was once only an inner-city problem, today gangs have spread nationwide to suburbs, small towns, and Native American reservations." The conference suggested that gangs had more money and power than before and that their fancier cars and guns were luring more young people to join.

But the truth was that the gangs' rise to power revealed not what they offered to a new generation of immigrants and their children but what America did not: safety, dignity, and a future.

Five years later, Jessica accompanies Sergio to presentations in schools, where she tells other kids her story: the cold nights sleeping in the park when her mother kicked her out, the time she held a friend in her arms after he was shot. She also tells them about the times she considered suicide. She explains how helpless and lonely she felt. Young people sometimes come up to her after her speeches to tell her their own stories. The helplessness has transformed into purpose. She has been hired as a counselor at a summer camp, and she thinks about her future and saving money.

Her dream is to get off of Long Island, and out of the suburbs, as soon as possible.

This article is adapted from Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America's Suburbs, published by Nation Books, 2009. Reprinted here with permission.

East Timor: Security Sector Relapse?

Simon Roughneen | 31 Jul 2009

DILI, Timor-Leste -- Security sector reform (SSR) is a vital part of state-building, especially in Timor-Leste, a country that came close to civil war in 2006. Significantly, though, few Timorese political leaders interviewed about the issue wanted to speak about one of the highest priorities for the U.N. Mission in Timor-Leste: completing -- and, by extension, to some degree implementing -- a comprehensive security sector review.

Neither the review nor the overall role of the U.N. in SSR was raised in any of World Politics Review's meetings with politicians in Timor-Leste. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Dili-based foreign diplomat told WPR, "The Timorese will do SSR the Timorese way."

President Jose Ramos-Horta deflected the issue in a recent interview, focusing instead on the future of the army and police, in light of the imminent departure of resistance-era leaders due to retirement in the coming 2-3 years. Former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri told WPR that SSR proposals to date "are not really a reform," as what is proposed does not "have Timorese ownership."

All of the politicians interviewed spoke about the "resumption" of policing responsibilities by the Timorese police (PNTL) from the U.N. Mission. This is a vital part of SSR, given the police force's implosion in the 2006 violence. Moreover, the police has historically been subordinate to the army, known as the F-FDTL. That disparity was accentuated by the temporary Joint Command for national security set up after assassination attempts on President Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao in February 2008.

The domestic security situation improved in the months thereafter, but the police remained subordinate to the army, which still involves itself in internal security. According to eyewitnesses, U.N. police attempts to intervene in a public order incident in Maliana in June 2009, near the Indonesian border, resulted in F-FDTL guns being pointed at the multinational forces.

Some police, meanwhile, are involved in smuggling and extortion, and double up as members of the country's martial arts gangs and clandestine societies. Participants in the 2006 violence are mostly still employed on the force, without any accountability for their actions.

It is estimated that over 100,000 Timorese may be gang members, itself a difficult security challenge. James Scambary, of the Timor-Leste Armed Violence Assessment (TLAVA), a research project that looks at ways to implement community security initiatives, reminded WPR that "in 2006-7, over 1,300 U.N. police and later the [Australian-led] International Stabilisation Force could not prevent gang fighting," which was an expression of both non-political and political violence.

Draft security laws recently submitted to the Timorese parliament include a civil protection component, featuring a proposed Authority for Civil Protection "to coordinate the civil protection agents at national, district and suco level." This could have the effect of legitimizing or rewarding gangs and past perpetrators of violence with official status. If carried out in tandem with focused community security work, on the other hand, the measure could yield positive results.

It remains a point of discussion whether the influence of international peacekeepers has itself been entirely positive. Shona Hawkes of the NGO monitoring group La'o Hamutuk says that giving the multinational forces immunity from prosecution sets a negative example for local counterparts. There are almost weekly skirmishes between the Portuguese National Republican Guard (GNR) and Timorese security forces, with the most recent one allegedly involving a GNR assault on the prime minister's personal security.

But SSR, in Timor-Leste and elsewhere, means more than fixing the police and army. It
is a wide-ranging concept, often difficult to implement in practice. By most definitions, it means addressing all of the "hard" -- and a good chunk of the "soft" -- parts of state power.
In Timor-Leste, according to a recent paper (.pdf) published by the Center for International Cooperation, that means addressing "important justice and rule-of-law issues, including poor judicial capacity, a long legacy of impunity, a decrepit detention system, parliamentary and civil society oversight of security institutions."

Police reform is just a part of the process and will not work if the wide range of SSR needs are not dealt with. Timor-Leste, for instance, has a backlog of more than 4,000 legal cases, and there are multiple examples of impunity at the highest political levels.

Without the following priority list, by no means exhaustive, SSR will remain elusive in the country:

- Reform of the legal system and an end to impunity;
- Adequate economic growth and development that provides jobs and education for idle youth who proliferate in the gangs;
- Transparent implementation of the proposed Land Law, which aims to clarify land ownership issues that were muddied by cycles of displacement and contradictory legal systems inherited from various occupying powers.

To put the explosive land issue in context, perhaps 50 percent of Dili's houses were "illegally" occupied after 1999. As James Scambary told WPR, "Much of the fighting and displacement in 2006 was over disputed land," with over 100,000 Timorese driven from their homes at the time.

But perhaps the key to SSR is negotiating the political interests that have yet to be untangled, accommodated, or overcome. This is unsurprising, as SSR usually comes after conflict, when politics is either atrophied or compromised by links to armed factions, whether official or otherwise.

The U.N. views SSR as both a post-conflict and a conflict-prevention issue. But as the OECD-DAC handbook on Security System Reform and Governance says, it can be "difficult to find local ownership for SSR, especially where it is most needed, for example where security forces are part of the problem or where SSR may have the potential to change current power relationships."

The U.N. inquiry into the events of 2006 highlighted fragile state institutions, weak rule of law, minimal parliamentary oversight, and deficiencies in the army and the police as contributing factors to the violence. In Timor-Leste, the security sector is characterized by personal relationships, political and regional affiliations, and old-boy networks of comradeships and rivalries built up over decades of resistance to violent foreign occupation.

It seems that whatever the government does, security forces will have considerable autonomy. The draft security laws task the heads of the military and police with proposing each force's rules of engagement, with subsequent approval in both cases by the president and the council of ministers.

Former Prime Minister Alkatiri says SSR is "not only a technical issue, and we have to depoliticize the institutions." His Fretilin government failed to do so, contributing to the 2006 meltdown. Whether its successor, led by an icon of the resistance doubling as both prime minister and defense minister, has the will to address SSR remains to be seen.

Simon Roughneen is a journalist currently in southeast Asia. His chapter on Security Sector Reform in Sudan was published in "Beyond Settlement" (Associated University Press, 2008).

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articlePrint.aspx?ID=4147

China, Uighur Groups Present Conflicting Accounts of Unrest

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 25, 2009

BEIJING -- Three weeks after the riots that left nearly 200 people dead and more than 1,700 injured in the capital of the far western Xinjiang region, the Chinese government and Uighur exile groups have been circulating dueling versions of what happened, in an emotional global propaganda war with geopolitical implications.

According to the version of events offered by China's Foreign Ministry and state media, the ethnic unrest that erupted in Urumqi on July 5 was a terrorist attack by Uighur separatists. Women in black Islamic robes stood at street corners giving orders, and at least one handed out clubs, officials said, before Muslim Uighur gangs in 50 locations throughout the city simultaneously began beating Han Chinese.

In the account being circulated by Rebiya Kadeer, a U.S.-based Uighur leader who has emerged as the community's main spokesman, Chinese security forces were responsible for the violence that night. According to Kadeer, police and paramilitary and other troops chased peaceful demonstrators, mostly young people protesting a deadly factory brawl elsewhere, into closed-off areas. Then they turned off streetlights and began shooting indiscriminately.

Clear Details Absent

Chinese authorities have allowed foreign reporters access to the area where the clashes occurred and unusual freedom to conduct interviews, and they have provided evidence verifying the brutal attacks on Han Chinese. But few details are clear, and many witnesses who might be able to answer other questions -- Who set off the initial violence? Why were the police unable to stop the attacks? -- are either in jail or dead.

"The narratives of both the Chinese government and outside observers about what happened are hobbled by the lack of independent, verifiable accounts," said Phelim Kine, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is calling for a U.N. investigation into the incident.

Both sides face huge obstacles in trying to convince the world of their stories.

The Chinese government, after decades of covering up and denying such incidents, has a major trust problem, many analysts say. Chinese officials have said they will release video footage of the attacks, phone records and other evidence to support their view of the events in Urumqi, but have not yet done so.

For Kadeer, a 63-year-old former business mogul from Xinjiang who was exiled in 2005 and now lives in the Washington area, observers say the main challenge is convincing people that she can give an authoritative account of events that happened in a country she has not visited in years. Uighur exile groups have declined to provide information about their sources in China, saying they fear that those people will be arrested or worse if they speak out.

Resentment has been building for years between Han Chinese, who make up 92 percent of China's population and dominate its politics and economy, and Uighurs, who once were the majority in the far west, but whose presence there has shrunk in recent decades because of migration by Han Chinese.

Although the Chinese government says its policies have improved Uighurs' educational and job opportunities, some Uighurs say its goal is to assimilate them at the expense of their language, religion and culture.

In the past, the government has linked Uighur separatism to a group known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which it characterizes as a terrorist organization and blames for some recent attacks. Some analysts say that China exaggerates the influence of this group.

When it comes to the events of July 5, Dong Guanpeng, director of the Global Journalism Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said he thinks China is being honest this time, but that doubts have been cast on the information it is releasing because Kadeer is "doing a better job than the Chinese government in public relations."

"Of course, Rebiya's statements have won sympathy in foreign countries," Dong said. "They contain beautiful lies."

Kadeer's version of events appears to have gained traction abroad. In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed solidarity with China's Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group, and described the riots as "a kind of genocide." Protesters in Tokyo, Washington, Munich and Amsterdam have descended on Chinese embassies and consulates demanding a full account of what happened to Uighurs. A top Iranian cleric condemned China for "horribly" suppressing the community, and al-Qaeda's North African arm vowed to avenge Uighurs' deaths.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism and mass communications at the China Youth University for Political Sciences, contends that the Chinese government inadvertently elevated Kadeer's status and gave her an audience that she does not deserve. Beijing has accused Kadeer of being the "mastermind" behind the clashes in Urumqi, accusations she denies.

"The government should haven't portrayed her as a hero by condemning her. She was unknown at first, and she is a well-known person in the world right now," Zhan said.

Gaps in Both Stories

Meanwhile, China has hit back by assigning some blame to third parties. The Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper said that the United States backed the "separatists" who launched the attacks. It also said that Kadeer's organization received funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is funded by the U.S. Congress. Separately, the official China Daily has played up the terrorism angle, saying that the riots were meant to "help" al-Qaeda and were related to the continuing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Some analysts say there are holes in both sides' narratives.

For instance, according to Kadeer's timeline of events, the violence was triggered by police who "under the cover of darkness . . . began to fire" on the protesters. But witnesses have said the rioting began about 8 p.m. Beijing time, when the sun was still up in Urumqi, 1,500 miles west of Beijing.

Chang Chungfu, a specialist in Muslim and Uighur studies at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, said "the two parties -- the government and Kadeer -- are choosing the parts of the stories that favor their own agendas," in efforts to win foreign sympathy.

He said he considers it "unlikely that a peaceful protest turned into violence against innocent people just because of policemen cracking down," suggesting at least a measure of organization to the Uighurs' attacks on Han Chinese that night.

On the other hand, Chang said, he is skeptical of the government's assertions that Kadeer instigated the attacks because she lacks that kind of power. Furthermore, he said, "the government hasn't released detailed information of those who were killed, such as their ages and identities, so even the number of dead is in doubt."

Li Wei, a terrorism expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which is affiliated with China's national security bureau, dismissed allegations by state media of involvement by outside terrorist groups. "I have not found any proof that points at linkage between the riot and other terrorism groups, including al-Qaeda," he said.

Li did say, however, that he believes Kadeer is in contact with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, blamed some of the tension on Beijing's failure to differentiate "between terrorists who attack and the political activities of separatists."

"If China is too hard on the Uighur people, then support of terrorism will grow," Gunaratna said. "The Chinese government must be hard on terrorists but soft on the Uighur people."

Researchers Liu Liu, Wang Juan and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.