The port of Dili, once a hive of activity as migrant Indonesians found their fortunes in trading coffee, sarongs and rice, now resembles a ghost town.
Unemployed East Timorese youths lean on walls and find some cool from the midday sun crouched over shop shelters. Many of the small kiosks are closed - their Bugis and Makassar owners from South Sulawesi have fled town, fearing upheaval as the future of East Timor unfolds, exposing a violent underbelly that explodes in street shootings.
Even the military is in retreat. Military trucks loaded with mattresses and cupboards pull into the port to unload their goods on to cargo boats. Military families have fully booked the regular Friday C130 Hercules flight back to Java until April. It's the wet season here but it hasn't rained for two days. Riverbeds that curl down from the lush mountain range out to Dili Bay are dry and women shake dust from their brightly coloured blankets.
Francisco Cepeda, political spokesman for the National Council for East Timorese Resistance, says Dili was always a quiet town when the Portuguese ruled East Timor for more than four centuries. Peeling colonial buildings with fallen fancy ironwork are a testament to the colonial abandonment.
Only after 24 years of Indonesian rule did the town take on the noise and movement of an eastern island crossroads. Indonesians from the islands of Java, Bali, Sulawesi and Flores moved in, pushing East Timorese from the economy and leaving them only with the vegetable trade at the Mercado market.
All that changed in January when Indonesia announced it was willing to give independence to East Timor. Street food sellers from Java who usually hang their yellow kerosene lamps inside wooden trolleys selling goat satay and meatball soup have gone. Most traders have packed up and either crossed the border to the Indonesian territory of West Timor or boarded ships for their home islands.
Government sources say more than 20,000 people have left the bay town, slashing the population by one-fifth. Even the locally-born Chinese East Timorese have left their businesses and flown to the north Australian city of Darwin, taking a wait-and-see approach. They have rented out supermarkets to their riot-hardened Chinese cousins from the East Java city of Surabaya.
Dili residents tell me they are happy to have the city to themselves again, a city that ran with blood during the Indonesian invasion in December 1975. Taxi driver Jose Manuel had a good job last year working for a container company at the port. He was laid off in December and now drives his beaten-up blue taxi along the seaside promenade looking for passengers who don't exist.
Domingos Policarpo, manager of the local Regional Development Bank, says he has 500 million rupiah ($59,000) in small bank credits to hand out from Jakarta. So far he has lent only 20 million rupiah ($2,350) because no one is starting new projects.
"All these people leaving are having an obvious effect on food distribution networks. Farmers will not be able to get products to town and there will be fewer people to buy them," says Mr Policapo, who believes the economy is grinding to a halt.
Shopkeepers say they are running down stock levels and will not buy new products until they believe the political situation is safer.
Teresina (27), a clasdestine worker and mother of two, says rice is now nearly unaffordable. "The other day I had to go to four different shops, until I finally found a 50kg bag. I had to pay 200,000 rupiah for it," she says, nursing her three-year-old son who is recovering from malaria.
Teresina went back to the same shop this week but its rice stocks had run out. Ships carrying rice are afraid to dock at Dili Harbour.
Healthcare here is also pushing critical limits. The general hospital is running low on medicines and most non-East Timorese doctors want to leave after being abused by patients.
Nearby military hospitals are still operating for the families of the 17,000 soldiers deployed on the half-island territory. Last week a young man died of a gunshot wound in the church-run Santo Antoni Motael Polyclinic five minutes from my hotel. One of East Timor's local doctors tried to save the young man, who was shot by Indonesian soldiers. But with a bullet in his forehead and no oxygen at the clinic, medical staff could not keep him alive long enough to operate.
The Motael church choir held its weekly practice outside the bare clinic, as nurses rushed in and out the window to treat the young man because someone had lost the key to the door.
The Indonesian military is doing everything possible to provoke FALANTIL guerrillas into an armed confrontation in the mountains of East Timor and among the population, according to Mr Tom Hyland, of the Ireland East Timor Solidarity Campaign. Mr Hyland said yesterday that his information came directly from the rebel commander on the ground, Mr Matan Ruak. Mr Ruak is appealing to students for calm and to the international community to send observers to contain the situation in East Timor, Mr Hyland added.