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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