The Humanity of the Dead: Rethinking National Reconciliation in Contemporary Timor-Leste

Over the two decades since, there has been a slow but gradual recovery; some new houses have taken the place of burnt out ones, schools have opened, a police station and health clinic provide basic services, there are a couple of general supply shops, the church has been reconstructed and there is electricity much of the time. While the development of infrastructure provides one obvious sense of recovery, small acts of peace-making and reconciliation have been occurring in important, though less immediately obvious, ways. To argue that a form of reconciliation emerges from an elite consensus between national leadership and the agendas of international organizations is not to diminish the effort, the intent nor necessarily the full effect of such initiatives. The fact that reconciliation focused on the still-living was one possible reflection of a third dimension, namely that reconciliation efforts were encased in a secular logic.