UN official admits crime hard to handle in East Timor
UN official admits crime hard to handle in East Timor
DILI (AP): Crime is on the rise in East Timor, still recovering from the lawlessness that followed its break with Indonesia, and an international police commander said on Tuesday his force is being overwhelmed.
"We are worried about the increasing level of violence that the staff are encountering on a daily basis," said Graeme Cairns, commander of the UN civilian police in the capital, Dili.
Cairns says his force faces an uphill battle against criminals because they do not have the numbers it would take to combat rising crime.
The number of murders, rapes and robberies has been on the increase since tens of thousands of refugees streamed into Dili in the aftermath of the Indonesian withdrawal, he said.
Officers were threatened on a popular beach near Dili recently when a man accused of belonging to a pro-Indonesia militia gang was attacked by a group of toughs.
Soldiers of the international peacekeeping force were forced to shoot into the air to disperse the attackers.
Pro-Indonesia militias are blamed for the violence and destruction in East Timor that followed the Aug. 30 referendum in which the overwhelming majority voted for independence. Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975.
When international peacekeepers arrived on Sept. 20 to restore order, most militiamen fled to neighboring West Timor.
The UN mission guiding East Timor to independence plans to bring in 1,640 international police in to keep order. So far, only 260 have arrived.
"We normally work in pairs, and on more than one occasion we've had a patrol arrive at a confrontation that involves a hundred people with weapons," Cairns said.
Even aside from the difficulty of protecting the public, officers themselves face the danger of attack, mainly from large groups of unemployed young men preying on civilians, Cairns said.
"It hasn't reached the stage yet where our officers have been seriously assaulted, but it's changing," he said.
The United Nations is working to reconstruct a functioning judiciary system. It effectively collapsed after the exodus of all Indonesian civil servants.
The Transitional Judicial Service Commission is scheduled to appoint on Wednesday two investigative judges, two prosecutors, a panel of three criminal law judges and a panel of three civil law judges.
"We won't have a jury system," said Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, the UN's principal legal advisor. "The previous Indonesian court system ... simply had professional judges (and) we intend to continue this system."