This Land is My Land

From a June 1 editorial in the Wall Street Journal Asia on events leading up to the recent violence in East Timor:

“[Former Prime Minister of East Timor, Mari] Alkatiri entered into a kind of siege mindset, centralizing power and implementing a series of decisions that alienated wide swathes of his political base. Most unpopular was the decision to make Portuguese — a language of the exiles, but not of the nation — the official language. Fretilin also adopted the national flag as its party symbol, a not-so-subtle claim to absolute power.”