East Timor's independence victory vote still looks Pyrrhic. A 44-strong World Bank team of visiting experts has predicted a drop in GDP of up to 45 per cent in 1999. But amazingly, seeds have already been sown in many areas by gradually returning peasants, and the perennial coffee crop, a major staple of the former Portuguese colony, is assured.
I recently asked a representative of the victorious National Council for Timorese Resistance (CNRT) about plans for the long-term future. They are exemplary, but short on detail. I asked about a new judicial system. "I know of one judge," he said.
Though the country is in ruins, the August 30th triumph does leave the way open for a resumption of Timorese political life arrested and distorted during 24 years of brutal occupation.
But some international helpers and observers see politics among Timorese leaders as only dangerous in-fighting likely to alienate belated, but unprecedented, international support. That translates into perhaps $300 million in grant aid pledges. It is not clear whether this will restore East Timor to its previous level, where GDP per capita was a mere $431 and 30 per cent of households lived below the poverty level. Some CNRT people think $600 million will be needed to make a real difference. But everyone, including the UN, seems to be making it up as they go along.
Others think competing international do-gooders are heavy on planning and light on cash and people to put plans into action, like engineers and builders. And the presence of over 8,000 foreigners has contributed to a skewing of the economy, at least in the municipal market in the capital, Dili, where inflation of up to 300 per cent leaves the plain people unable to compete. Food aid has even turned up on market stalls.
The Brazilian head of the UN Transition Administration (UNTAET), Sergio Vieira de Mello, decided early on to continue Indonesian law, except that on human rights. And he has set up a commission to involve CNRT leaders during a two- or three-year transition.
Portuguese is to be the official language and a form of Tetum, the main local tongue, will be a second language. Portugal has agreed to a change to the escudo from the Indonesian rupiah, though UN assent is needed. But the bright future of independence is a far-off place in a land where the World Bank and other UN agencies have confirmed that 75 per cent of the population fled from home and 80 per cent of buildings - homes, schools, power stations, phone exchanges, courthouses, police stations, health centres, records and all banks - were destroyed or looted by the Indonesian army's proxy militias in their evil-minded systematic and plunderous leave-taking.
For thousands of the victims of torture, rape and other horrors, victory over trauma may never come. Perhaps reflecting this, Timor Lorosae's leaders have already begun to divide on old fault lines.
It can be seen as a sign of political health returning. Or it might be viewed with alarm, as it is by the new country's second Catholic bishop, Basilio do Nascimento, who has appealed to the collective leadership of CNRT to end "factional disputes".
He was referring particularly to two figures: Mario Carrascalao, whose coffee plantation family belongs to the pre-1975, conservative, pro-Portuguese aristocracy, and Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel laureate who belongs to the left of the leadership. Carrascalao and Ramos-Horta have been sparring for not just weeks.
Ramos-Horta, who returned briefly to his homeland in December for the first time in 24 years, led the independence cause on the international diplomatic circuit. Carrascalao thinks he became "out of touch" with home. Thousands rapturously welcomed Ramos-Horta, whose political home is Fretilin, the left-wing resistance which he is proud to say was social democratic before Eastern European "ex-communists" so styled themselves.
Carrascalao told me that his small party, the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), feels that Ramos-Horta lately "has the tendency to only use the people close to him and this leaves Xanana [Gusmao, the former guerrilla commander and likely future president] isolated. Xanana is the leader of everyone. He is not any more a Fretilin man." Here Carrascalao is reflecting that Gusmao's rebel mountain guerrillas include some UDT followers too.
The two sides, once united in a brief independence government, fought a short "civil war" largely fomented by Indonesian military intelligence to justify its 1975 invasion. Only in the 1990s did they reunite, eventually under the CNRT umbrella. Carrascalao says his problem is not with "the main target of everyone - the independence".
He sees as over hasty a determination by Gusmao and Ramos-Horta to push reconciliation with militia leaders who chased a quarter of the population of about 850,000 across the border with Indonesian West Timor, where many thousands still languish as hostages this Christmas.
"For UDT it is too soon to have a dialogue or any kind of understanding with the pro-integration people if it is just intending forgiveness," says Carrascalao.
Ramos-Horta's approach to reconciliation and building the future did not, however, restrain him from biting the international hand when it came to the choices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, for a panel of investigators.
But Carrascalao is not just a maverick voice. He is the co-leader, for the CNRT, of the Timor mission of the World Bank (which he is reputed to have once called "a neo-colonial institution"). He is also a former occupier of the (now roofless) Portuguese colonial governor's seafront residence - under the Indonesians. Regarded by some as "a collaborator" he was nevertheless a popular governor.
Threatening that - with his two brothers, Joao (brother-in-law of Ramos-Horta) and Manuel (a former Portuguese assembly member in Salazar's days) - he may withdraw from the collective CNRT leadership, Carrascalao also dared question the use of CNRT funds administered in Lisbon. Ramos-Horta tartly replied that the person in charge of the funds was "above questioning" and had furthermore never been an "Indonesian civil servant".
"Gloves-off" talk like this can be seen as a mere prelude to legislative elections which are planned within the coming year, after which CNRT may be disbanded. Carrascalao may form his own vaguely Christian Democratic party, as a counter to what he sees as the Marxism-Leninism of Fretilin. Ramos-Horta, CNRT's vice president, has said the elections will sort out who is who, adding: "It will become clear who is representative."
David Shanks can be contacted at dshanks@irish-times.ie