RECOVERING EAST TIMOR

An outbreak of rioting recently put East Timor on the map again. The world’s newest nation, on an island between Indonesia and Australia, gained independence just seven months ago. But bad news is about the only thing that brings it to world attention. It suffered through centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and 24 years of brutal Indonesian occupation before its people voted for independence in a referendum sponsored by the United Nations.

One of the few Americans who knows or cares about East Timor is a Watsonville, Calif., physics teacher named Curt Gabrielson. He has just returned from two years there and reported his findings at a meeting of the organization that sent him out, the Institute of Current World Affairs.

There was a lot of white and black in the picture he drew. Most of the 800,000 East Timorese are hard-working Roman Catholics who love their country. Offshore oil deposits hold promise for the future. But most of the people are desperately poor. The rains are late this year, and farming is at a standstill. Indonesia still meddles, and the militias it created are suspected of figuring in last week’s looting and arson. Portugal keeps pressing for use of unpopular Portuguese as an official language. Australia has signed a treaty with East Timor dividing the little nation’s oil wealth, with 90 percent of the revenues going to East Timor. But Australia’s 10 percent, valued at $20 billion, should rightly belong to East Timor under boundaries prescribed by the International Law of the Sea. Groups in both countries are protesting.

American hands are not exactly clean, either. When Indonesia invaded in 1975, killing 60,000 East Timorese, its weapons were mostly supplied by the United States. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a visit to Indonesia, had given their tacit approval and afterward excused the atrocities as a minor and inevitable matter. President Jimmy Carter, who has just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, increased military aid to Indonesia by a factor of 10. As East Timorese now come to terms with their history of slaughter and torture through a truth-and-reconciliation commission and limited war-crimes trials, former President Clinton and Mr. Kissinger have defied the judgment of psychologists and sociologists and have advised the East Timorese to forget the past and focus on a fresh start.

The odds may look bleak, but Mr. Gabrielson believes East Timor has a good chance of surviving as a viable nation. In the meantime, a corps of trainers that he organized is teaching teachers how to teach physics in a poor land with no schoolbooks. Students, in one case, use bits of wire, old light bulbs and tinfoil from chewing gum wrappers to perform experiments and learn how things work. It is a humble response to a difficult beginning.