Diaspora talks upset Timorese

JAKARTA (JP): A group of East Timorese pro-integration leaders warned yesterday that a meeting of exiled East Timorese in Portugal could endanger the future of a UN-sponsored forum to bridge the opposing camps in the integration debate.

Participants of the East Timorese National Convention in Diaspora, as the meeting in Lisbon is called, "are destroying the spirit of reconciliation and endangering the continuity of the All-Inclusive East Timor Dialog (AIETD) forum itself", the leaders said in a statement.

The convention, it said, was a political forum aimed at undermining the efforts of the United Nations to find a just, comprehensive and internationally acceptable solution.

"We express serious doubt about the continued validity of the AIETD forum," it said.

The April 23 to April 27 meeting, sponsored by the Portuguese government, has brought together East Timorese leaders in exile opposed to the territory's integration with Indonesia.

Many of them have participated in the AIETD, which has convened on at least two occasions in Austria as part of the process organized by the UN to help find a settlement to the question of East Timor's sovereignty.

The UN also has been coordinating a parallel tripartite dialog involving the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Portugal, which ruled East Timor until 1975, to settle the issue.

The prointegration figures, led by senior politician F.X. Lopes Da Cruz, criticized the Portuguese government for supporting the East Timorese in exile, whom they said constituted a minority group among East Timorese.

They also appealed to the UN secretary general to bring up the matter of the Lisbon meeting at the next tripartite dialog meeting as a priority issue for discussion.

They recalled that the secretary general had specifically asked that participants of the AIETD refrain from engaging in activities that could disrupt efforts to create an atmosphere conducive to dialog. (emb)