Tito de Aquino started with Concern Timor Leste in 2004
Thursday, 15 June 2006
Tito de Aquino started with Concern Timor Leste in 2004
Tito de Aquino’s family comes from Luro, Lautem where Concern has a Livelihoods and Disaster Risk Reduction Programme. Tito was a volunteer with Yayasan Hak and Caritas during the 1999 crisis.
He started working with Concern in 2004. ‘I have been based in Los Palos with my wife and 2 children for the last two years but I have a family home in Dili too where my cousins have been living whilst studying in Dili.
When all this trouble started, I continued working in Lautem for Concern. I heard about the petitioner issues, that so many had been dismissed. We were so surprised but I didn’t realise that it was so serious. Even at the end of April, when the petitioners held a demonstration, I didn’t realise how serious the situation was.
It was the trouble at the end of May that made us realise how sad the situation is, how complicated the armed conflict was becoming. We heard about people in Dili seeking out groups from the East and West and the trouble that they were causing.
I was appointed to a new post with concern in Manufahi in the Western districts and I decided that I couldn’t safely go these to work. Those of us in the districts didn’t really know what was going on in Dili. I don’t know when exactly my house was burned – it was only at the end of May that I heard that from my cousin that our house in the centre of town had been burned, including our motorbikes.
There were many threats so previously some of my cousins fled as Internally Displaced Persons to the airport, whilst others tried to stay at the house but they were threatened and so they ran away too and then the house was burned and all our things were taken. I feel so so, sad. I have spent so much time struggling for independence for timor. We all worked together for this. Now the thing that I am asking myself is ‘how can this be fair, why are we victims again, will be always be victims of political manoevring – this time that have split our own national community, how can we begin to find a solution for the future of the country?’.
It feels so difficult to find a way to rebuild our spirit for the development of the country, everything we have achieved with and since independence has been blown away in a few days. But we feel driven to respond the humanitarian need now, but this drive is very different to 1999 – then we knew we were all working together with a single national spirit for the future, now we feel split down the middle, torn from within with jealousy and revenge in our own community.
