DILI, East Timor -- When tiny, battered, low-teledensity East Timor officially achieves independence May 20, Dublin Internet service provider manager Martin Maguire will merit a footnote in the country's sovereignty struggle.
"It's been a long journey," Maguire says. "I'm just glad I could help."
In 1997, as East Timorese pro-independence guerillas harassed Indonesia's occupying military forces on the tiny Pacific half-island for a fruitless 22nd year, the Dublin-based Maguire tried a different strategic tack.
He declared East Timor independent -– in cyberspace.
Referring to a musty United Nations list from which the Internet's two-letter country codes were assigned, Maguire noticed East Timor had its own two-letter designator: tp.
That dated back to when East Timor was an overseas possession of Portugal, which it was until 1974. While unusual, the listing wasn't unheard of. A number of one-time colonial outposts, and even uninhabited islands, also have country codes to go with top-level domains. This was primarily due to quirky factors such as the presence of weather stations or scientific instruments on their territory.
In compiling and maintaining the list, the United Nations and, subsequently, the International Organization for Standardization, made clear they didn't intend the list to necessarily delineate U.N.-supported political boundaries. But when Internet country codes began being assigned from it, such extrapolations became unavoidable.
After conferring with members of East Timor's resistance movement, Maguire in 1997 applied for East Timor (dot-tp) to be set apart from military occupier Indonesia (dot-id) -- on the Net, at least. And in a further symbolic poke at Indonesia, which had invaded and annexed East Timor in 1975 after the Portuguese pulled out the year before, Maguire registered East Timor's independence leader Xanana Gusmao as the country's top-level Internet domain manager.
At the time, Gusmao was under house arrest and had no access to a computer. Maguire listed Gusmao's contact address as that of his jailers, East Timor Indonesian military commanders.
Maguire's act was obviously symbolic -- particularly in a place with only about 8,000 telephone lines for 800,000 people, virtually no computers, and greater than 50 percent illiteracy in the general populace.
But dot-tp did provide a platform for raising East Timor's political profile internationally, mostly through the website www.freedom.tp. The site provided a resource of media and background material to tell the wider world of what was going on in the Connecticut-sized half island located between Australia, Papua-New Guinea and Indonesia itself.
In early 1999, the dot-tp domain came under sustained cyber attack, causing Maguire's ISP, Connect Ireland, to temporarily disconnect dot-tp.
Maguire suspects Indonesian military-linked hackers in the attacks. But others doubt Indonesia had the sophistication to mount such an attack –- and believe it more likely came from apolitical hackers seeking an easy strike. To this day, no one really knows.
After the 32-year rule of Indonesian strongman Suharto ended in 1998, caretaker Indonesian president B.J. Habibie decided he wanted to be rid of the political thorn of East Timor, announcing an independence referendum for August 1999. The decision led to political mayhem in East Timor, as pro-Jakarta militias attempted to intimidate voters. Nonetheless, East Timorese voted by a 4-to-1 ratio for independence, leading infuriated militias to burn much of the country to the ground.
Now, after more than two years of United Nations administration, East Timor will become the world's newest nation on May 20 in a ceremony held in the capital, Dili. At that point, Maguire says he'll be happy to hand over East Timor's cyberspace national flag –- represented by management of its country code.
But the reality is, it could take some time. East Timor's economy is in ruins, and it has almost no skilled workers.
Subsistence fishing, subsistence farming and international aid are its only sources of income; East Timor's total economy has been estimated at about $400 million. With a per capita income of roughly $300 per year, East Timor now ranks among the poorest countries in the world.
However, Maguire believes East Timor could have an ace up its sleeve. Just as Tuvalu's dot-tv can be construed as "television," and Moldova's dot-md can be construed as "medical doctor," Maguire believes East Timor's dot-tp could become a income earner through its meaning of "telephone."
Maguire believes a universal, worldwide directory of everyone on Earth might be compiled through a system such as "firstname.lastname.tp," or "phonenumber.tp" in which they could keep updated contact details about themselves for the world to see.
So far, Maguire has had little contact with members of East Timor's new government. And indeed, some members of the new government are keen to change dot-tp anyway.
Given that dot-tp means "Timor Portuguese," they believe it denotes a colonial legacy. Ideally, they were hoping for dot-et, for "East Timor," but Ethiopia already has that one.
Thus, one idea is to change dot-tp to dot-tl," for "Timor Leste," which means "East Timor" in Portuguese, the official national language, says Pedro Braga, the U.N. transitional government's telecommunications director.
But Braga says such a change will take awhile. Braga says his first priority is to award a $15 million tender for reconstruction of the national telecommunications system, which he hopes to do by independence day.
