East Timor: President Gusmão visiting Jakarta, Aceh and West Timor

Dili, Dec. 21 (Lusa) - President Xanana Gusmão will visit thousands of fellow East Timorese who opted for Indonesian citizenship and live in West Timor next week, a diplomatic source said Wednesday.

The road tour of West Timor, the diplomat told Lusa, would follow a visit by Gusmão to Jakarta and the restive province of Aceh, at the invitation of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and the opening of Dili's first Consulate-General in the West Timorese capital of Kupang on Dec. 27.

Gusmão flies to Jakarta on Christmas Day and will then accompany Yudhoyono on a visit to Aceh to mark the anniversary of the massive tsunami that devastated the area one year ago, the diplomat said.

The president will return home to Dili from Kupang by car, he added, to allow Gusmão to have contact with the largest possible number of the estimated 28,000 pro-Indonesian East Timorese who fled their country around the time of the independence plebiscite in 1999.

Some of the expatriates, now Indonesian citizens, are former pro- Jakarta militiamen who launched a bloody scorched-earth campaign across East Timor before fleeing across the border.

Word of Gusmão's trip coincided with the announcement in Dili of the conclusion the mission of the UN High Commission for Refugees that oversaw the repatriation to East Timor of some 225,000 people forcibly deported by militia gangs in 1999.

In a separate development, Foreign Minister José Ramos Horta told Lusa Wednesday that Dili and Jakarta had reached agreement on the demarcation of all land borders with the exception of a small strip - about 1% of the total - in the Timorese enclave of Oecussi.

A definitive border accord would likely be signed "in the middle" of next year, Ramos Horta said.

EL/SAS.

Lusa