Global Policy Forum

By John McBeth

The problems of building a new East Timor, where many locals feel the United Nations is leaving them out of decisions on their future, and where past violence casts a long shadow on the next generation.

It's been more than a year since the United Nations descended on the ruins of East Timor in a brave pioneering effort to rebuild a country from ground zero. By general agreement, the UN has achieved a lot, restoring the former Portuguese colony to life in the face of continuing violence and against a backdrop of years of neglect.

But among East Timorese, there has been frustration over the failure of the UN Transitional Authority in East Timor, or Untaet, to involve more local people in drawing up a comprehensive blueprint of what they want their new nation to be.

"We are not interested in inheriting an economic rationale that leaves out the social and political complexity of East Timorese reality," said independence leader Xanana Gusmao--East Timor's probable future president--in a rare broadside in early October. "Nor do we wish to inherit the heavy decision-making and project-implementation mechanisms in which the role of the East Timorese is to give their consent as observers rather than the active players we should start to be."

Other East Timorese agree. "The first thing the UN did wrong was to run the country by itself," says Joao Carruscalao, minister of infrastructure. He's a member of the eight-member cabinet formed six months ago in response to mounting calls from the National Council of Timorese Resistance, or CNRT, for more direct involvement in the nitty-gritty of governance.

Outsiders, too, are worried about the East Timorese being left out. "There's no economic model, in fact there's no modelling of the country at all in the way the East Timorese want it," says one independent Western consultant, who has spent most of the past 12 months in Dili, the territory's still-devastated capital. "If the East Timorese don't participate, then they don't own the future." Still, he admits, it isn't always easy to tie down East Timor's leaders on what they want done. "CNRT policies are like clothes on the line--they're just hanging loosely with nothing to bring them together."

Most of the criticism of the UN arises from the culture of the organization itself and the institutional necessity of involving so many different nationalities in its operations--the 840 UN civilians represent 114 countries. "Ideally, the UN would have been better off landing with 100 good men, who would have been forced to use East Timorese and whose jobs would have been on the line if they goofed up," says the consultant. "Right now, there are no consequences for failure."

One area of criticism is--perhaps not surprisingly--money and how it's being spent. Donor nations have pledged as much as $545 million for East Timor's recovery, which includes $187 million for bilateral projects and $166 million for a trust fund administered by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank for community development and infrastructure improvement. So far, however, the trust fund has disbursed only $10.6 million. Says one UN official: "It takes time for a big structure like this to spend money--but even then this is the fastest it has ever been spent."

The bubble economy created by the UN's presence is also a point of continuing resentment, given that much of the $592 million earmarked for Untaet's 2000-2001 budget will flow right out again into offshore bank accounts, either in the form of repatriated salaries or as profits from foreign-run businesses catering to UN workers. About $230 million of that is earmarked for military personnel, leaving $230 million for civilian administration and salaries and the remaining $130 million for operating costs.

All that compares starkly with the East Timor's first consolidated budget: just $59 million, including $15 million for modest capital projects. Future budgets are likely to remain conservative. UN officials want to maintain a self-sustaining budget that drives home the importance of fiscal discipline at a time when revenues are limited; significant receipts from Timor Gap oil, for example, will only begin to enter Dili's coffers after 2005.

WAITING FOR WORK

For some in East Timor, the contrast in resources is illustrated by the spectacle of highly paid UN staffers tooling around in luxury four-wheel vehicles and sipping cafe lattes in tree-shaded cafes. "We are not interested in a legacy of cars and laws," Gusmao declared in his October broadside. "Nor are we interested in a legacy of development plans designed by people other than East Timorese."

Only 1,800 Timorese are employed by the UN, including 25 district court judges who recently went on strike over poor wages and even poorer facilities. Overall, though, the East Timorese have been "extraordinarily tolerant," says veteran diplomat James Dunn, an Australian consul in Dili in the 1960s who has acted as unpaid adviser to the UN.

Despite the disappointments, Gusmao and other East Timorese leaders have been appreciative of much of what the UN has done to get the country back on its feet. "East Timor is not Namibia, where the UN found the country totally intact. It is not Zimbabwe in the 1970s," says CNRT vice-president and Nobel peace laureate Jose Ramos Horta. "Just the fact that they had to bring desks and chairs tells you of the magnitude of the task the UN faced. If you take this into account, they have done a wonderful job."

Much of the credit for what the UN has achieved goes to the Australians for providing the professional military backbone for the 7,800-man, 26-nation UN peacekeeping force. But the UN and other agencies also acted with admirable urgency and cooperation early in the crisis, spending $157 million on emergency food and shelter for tens of thousands of people made homeless in last year's militia rampage; supplies of seeds and pesticides from world bodies have ensured a quick return to productive rice-fields, with some officials predicting a return to pre-independence crop levels by the end of the year.

Then there's the role of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian who gets high marks from almost everyone for his leadership of Untaet, midwife for the world's newest nation. On top of his enthusiasm and diplomatic skills, officials say de Mello's big advantage is that he speaks Portuguese--important in putting the Portuguese-speaking Gusmao at ease in the early days.

De Mello acknowledges that the Timorese should have been brought into the process much earlier, and that it wasn't enough to rely on the the National Consultative Council--effectively the local counterpart of Untaet. "It took me as a Brazilian, with an affinity for East Timor and 30 years of experience in things of this kind, until April to decide that working through the National Consultative Council wasn't enough--they were feeling patronized and that we were imposing an international superstructure on them," he says. "I had to get them off the fence where they were sniping at us and get them involved." Hence the creation of the eight-man cabinet earlier this year, although it hasn't solved all the Timorese complaints.

For Dunn, the retired diplomat, the lesson once again for the UN is that it desperately needs to put a permanent structure in place capable of quickly sending a "well-oiled team" into places facing similar crises. Few are likely to be as challenging as East Timor, which on top of everything else marked the first time the UN has taken over a country without a public service to rely on. "It's been slow," says de Mello, "but when you think of what there was I don't think we could have moved faster."