| Subject: IPS: UN
Prepares to Take Charge in E Timor Received
from Joyo Indonesian News:
EAST TIMOR: UN Prepares to Take Charge By Farhan Haq
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 4 (IPS) - The United Nations stepped up
plans this week for a transitional authority in East Timor and officials expected new
administrators would take charge of the Pacific island state by late January.
UN Under Secretary-General Sergio Vieira de Mello is
scheduled to take up his duties as East Timor's first UN administrator by mid-November,
and already has held talks on setting up the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor
(UNTAET).
Alexander Downer, Australia's foreign minister, met UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other top officials here Tuesday to reassure them of
Canberra's continued role in the UN peacekeeping force.
Downer said that the Australian-led International Force, or
Interfet, would hand over authority to UNTAET by late January or mid-February of next
year.
''We will be looking to provide around 1,700 troops'' for
UNTAET, which will comprise some 9,000 troops and more than 1,600 police officers in all,
Downer said.
He noted that Australia's contribution would be a decrease
from its troop level in the Interfet operation, in which it has provided more than 5,000
of the more than 8,500 troops deployed.
Some of the slack would be taken up by Asian nations,
including Malaysia, which announced plans to send some 1,700 soldiers for UNTAET.
Yet the replacement of Australians by Asians concerned some
East Timorese officials, including Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta, who threatened ''civil
disobedience'' if Malaysia were to take charge of UNTAET.
Ramos Horta has worried about statements like those made by
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammed, who accused the Australian Interfet troops
of being ''belligerent.'
Mahathir previously had doubted the need for the Aug. 30
vote in East Timor, in which voters overwhelmingly opted for independence from Indonesia.
''We don't need them,'' Ramos Horta said last month of the
possibility of Malaysian peace keepers.
UN officials, mindful of regional politics, however were
equally worried that Australia's dominant role in East Timor peacekeeping, in the long
term, would upset nearby Asian states.
Officials reportedly were considering Malaysian command of
UNTAET although Australia still would have a substantial presence in the force.
Downer said that Annan would decide who should command the
peace keepers, adding that Canberra never intended to be such a powerful force on the
ground in East Timor. ''We were the only country that was really able to make a
significant and early contribution,'' he explained about Australia's role in Interfet.
Still, UN officials wanted to ensure that the peacekeeping
presence in East Timor remained strong, even if Australia cut back on the number of its
troops.
Before Interfet was deployed in late September, Indonesian
troops and pro-Indonesia militias destroyed much of East Timor, displacing more than half
of the state's 890,000 people.
Vieira de Mello has urged governments to provide nearly 200
million dollars for humanitarian aid in East Timor and also to press for the return of
hundreds of thousands of East Timorese who are living in camps in the Indonesian province
of West Timor.
He argued that access was still restricted to some camps in
West Timor by militias - most of whom had slipped into West Timor since the September
violence.
''There has been a trickle'' of East Timorese refugees
returning from the West in recent weeks, Vieira de Mello said last week. But so far, he
noted, there has been no major shift among the more than 200,000 East Timorese who are
estimated to be living in West Timor.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
has tried to strike a more aggressive stance in securing access to the refugees.
This week, UNHCR workers carried out several surprise
visits to refugee camps in the West Timorese cities of Kupang and Atambua,and picked up
5,000 refugees who wanted to return home to East Timor. The operations had been risky,
with militias harassing and throwing stones at UNHCR staff, the agency said.
Despite such problems, UN officials remained generally
upbeat about East Timor. The last Indonesian troops left East Timor over the weekend,
finally ending the 24-year struggle between Jakarta and East Timor's pro-independence
movement.
The withdrawal has greatly strengthened the political wing
of that movement, the National Council of Timorese Resistance, and its armed wing, the
National Liberation Force or FALINTIL.
Pro-independence leader Xanana Gusmao is widely expected to
lead the country to independence within the next two to three years.
Vieira de Mello also praised FALINTIL, which he said had
cooperated with Interfet troops and shown restraint.
As a result, when the United Nations helps set up a police
force for East Timor, it would consider FALINTIL officers for membership - but ''as
individuals, not as units,'' he cautioned. (END/IPS/fah/mk/99)
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