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Chinese
civil police in East Timor
In the peacekeeping area of the East Timor, a helicopter with
the mark "UN" began to land, the strong wind stirred up by the propeller
battered against the bushes and plantain leaves.
The cabin door opened, two civil policemen wearing Chinese police
uniform and a blue UN beret and a badge with a five-star red flag
jumped down the copter with several other UN peacekeepers and soon
disappeared into the thick jungles.
The two civil policemen were Wang Changhong and Guo Baoshan. As
members of the Police Office of the Bobonaro region, they were carrying
out a mission with UN peacekeepers.
The responsibilities of UN peacekeeping civil police are to maintain
the law, public order, and helped train the local police team.
Luo Xiaoyu, a police officer from the Beijing Public Security
Bureau, did three kinds of jobs in the one-year mission. At first,
he worked at a prison; then he was transferred to the investigative
team under the Police Office of Dili, the capital of East Timor;
later, he entered the Police Office's another team which was in
charge of major and severe cases of the violation of law.
When Luo came to East Timor, his first difficulty was language.
As a police officer from a non-English speaking country, the listening,
speaking and writing of English put him at a disadvantage. What pushed
him into a more awkward position was that the police officers from
different countries had different accents.
But Luo was not deterred. He recorded the voices of the colleagues
with different accents and listened to them again and again. His efforts
finally paid off. In less than a month, he became familiar with the
accents of all his colleagues.
When he was with the investigative team of the Dili Police Office,
he and his colleagues worked on three shifts. At 10:40 PM on one night,
it was nearly time for Luo to be off duty, but a man arrived at the
office hurriedly, saying that his child had been kidnapped and he
knew where the kidnappers were.
Luo thought that the investigation of the case would be undermined
if he just put the case down in writing and left it to be dealt with
the next day. But it would be dangerous and violating the regulations
if he took on the case single-handed. So he decided to wait for the
four colleagues on the next shift.
After the four arrived, they immediately left for the village the
kidnapper lived, captured him and questioned him. As the prison did
not accept suspects at night and the police office had no detention
house, Luo managed to find other on-duty police officers to look after
the suspect. When he returned to the dormitory, it was nearly 3 AM.
Among the Chinese civil police in East Timor, there were three
women. Chen Xun from the Heilongjiang Public Security Department
was one of them.
She worked in the special cases investigative department of the
Dili Police Office and mainly dealt with such cases as sex harassment,
rape and child abuse. Her colleagues came from four different countries
but they got on well with each other.
When she first arrived, as most of the houses in Dili had been burnt,
they set up their office by putting a iron-sheet on a burnt house.
During the rainy season, the rain wet almost everything in the office.
Their work conditions improved later after they moved in a simply
built house.
Chen encountered several dangers during her work. Once, she and
an American partner went to arrest suspects in a village. After catching
one suspect, they got to the house of another one. After intensive
search, they found the suspect was hiding in the nearby woods. Chen
asked the partner to face the suspect from the front and she outflanked
the suspect, shouting "don't move, hands up". Kicking down the weapon
of the suspect, she took him prisoner.
Chinese civil police officers' excellent work won them praises in
East Timor. Some foreign police officers said that it was impossible
for them to work with Chinese police ten years ago. The participation
of Chinese civil police in East Timor indicated that China was changing,
taking part in international affairs and playing her role in the world.
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