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Living Timorously: Kose-Kose
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John M Miller
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Jun 08, 2007 09:22 PDT
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Living Timorously
Friday, 8 June 2007
<http://livingtimorously.blogspot.com/2007/06/kose-kose.html>Kose-Kose
One of my favourite Tetum words is 'kose-kose',
which literally means 'wipe-wipe', but translates
as creepy-crawly, toady, or sycophant. I never
thought I would ever use it to describe José
Ramos Horta in his dealings with Indonesia, but it seems very apt.
Do I have a problem with East Timor having close
links with Indonesia? Not at all. What I do,
however, find distasteful is the way that the new
President has been behaving as a 'kose-kose',
ingratiating himself with his hosts in an
undignified and entirely unnecessary way. When he
was in exile, Horta wrote of how he was offered
the chance to return to East Timor as an
Indonesian-appointed governor of the '27th
Province', yet the way he has been behaving in
the last few days is more befitting of the
pro-integration East Timorese in the 1970s.
Recently Horta has started learning Indonesian.
Nothing wrong with that, he should have done it
years ago. Funnily enough, Mari Alkatiri, blamed
for the Portuguese language policy, was one of
the few people in East Timor who spoke it before
the invasion, as the small Arab Muslim minority
spoke a Malay dialect. Xanana Gusmão only learned Indonesian in prison.
However, with all the zeal of the convert, Horta
now says "I intend to push for greater use of
Bahasa Indonesian [sic] in public
administration", adding that the East Timorese
should use it in official communications.
"Slowly, gradually, I will push for it to be used more and more".
My concern is not that this will have a negative
effect on Portuguese, but that it will have a
negative effect on Tetum, which, since 1999, has
developed as a written language. This has been a
very positive development, but you would be hard
pressed to read anything about it in the foreign
media, which find disagreements over language more newsworthy.
The previous government's practice of not
recognising Tetum as a fully fledged official
language, and only having documents and signs in
Portuguese was an embarrassment. But using
Indonesian would be even worse for Tetum, which
would once again be relegated to the same
inferior status as Indonesia's regional
languages. Of course the move would be popular
with Indonesian-educated people, but it would be
a huge disincentive to promote and develop Tetum
as a modern written language, and undermine its
position as the national lingua franca.
Horta also said that Indonesian television should
become available in East Timor's districts. By
all means, but in case he hasn't noticed, people
already watch it via satellite, not least outside
of Dili where there is no live terrestrial
television signal at all. (As a result, people
know more about goings-on in their giant
neighbour than in their own country.) Shouldn't
increasing the availability of East Timor's own
television and radio service outside the capital
be a greater priority, not to mention increasing
local programming, in local languages?
Those with a fetish for realpolitik point out
that East Timor does most of its trade with
Indonesia, to which my answer is: so what? Why
should that mean that East Timor should just
become a cultural satellite of Indonesia?
The mini-state of Andorra, wedged between France
and Spain, is totally dependent on its neighbours
for trade, transport and defence, yet has always
maintained Catalan as its official language, even
when the Jacobins in France and Franco in Spain were trying to wipe it out.
Luxembourg has a customs union with Belgium, but
proudly maintains its own language,
Luxembourgish, alongside French and German.
Luxembourg's multilingual education system,
incidentally, would a good model for East Timor:
in addition to learning the three official
languages, children learn English and another European language.
Sure, Indonesian products are readily available
and cheap to buy, not only for people in East
Timor, but even people in the UK. In a
supermarket in the English Midlands, I saw
bottles of shampoo produced in Indonesia,
complete with price tag in rupiah, on sale. (I
can't remember what the price was, but the
importer must have made quite a mark-up.)
Personally, I look forward to the day that
labelling and packaging will be in Tetum. Not
economically viable? Tell that to people in
Iceland, who buy local products with labelling
and packaging in Icelandic, despite their country
having only 250 000 people. And even if it isn't
viable, at least not yet, who cares? After all,
not many people in Derby, apart from my brother,
can understand Indonesian, but there's not much
risk that they're going to mistake shampoo from Indonesia for salad dressing.
East Timor's relations with Indonesia are already
in very good shape, so why must José be a 'kose-kose'?
etanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetan
ETAN welcomes your financial support. For more
info: http://etan.org/etan/donate.htm
John M. Miller Internet: fb-@igc.org
National Coordinator
East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN)
PO Box 21873, Brooklyn, NY 11202-1873 USA
Phone: (718)596-7668 Fax: (718)222-4097
Mobile phone: (917)690-4391 Skype: john.m.miller
Web site: http://www.etan.org
Send a blank e-mail message to in-@etan.org to find out
how to learn more about East Timor on the Internet
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