UN praises East Timor's peaceful campaigning
UN praises East Timor's peaceful campaigning
DILI, East Timor (Agencies): United Nations officials said on Monday the campaign for East Timor's historic elections has been one of the most peaceful that the world body has supervised in many years.
Even so, UN peacekeepers said they are ready to react to any outbreak of violence and Indonesia has temporarily closed the land border with the nascent nation in case of trouble.
"The political campaign has, on the whole, been marked by exemplary civility and peacefulness," said Carlos Valenzuela, chief electoral officer in East Timor's UN transitional administration.
On Thursday, 425,000 voters will elect an 88-member assembly that will draft a new constitution and set East Timor on the road to independence after four centuries of Portuguese colonialism and 24 years of Indonesian military occupation.
Full independence is expected to be declared next year.
East Timor's first democratic elections will be held exactly two years after voters overwhelmingly opted to break free from Indonesia in a UN sponsored referendum.
In contrast to the tranquility of the current election campaign, the 1999 plebiscite was marred by an explosion of violence by Indonesian troops and their militia proxies in which hundreds of people were killed and most of the half-island's infrastructure and buildings were destroyed.
Former Indonesian president B.J. Habibie has blamed the United Nations for causing most of the violence in East Timor by breaking a promise to let Jakarta know the results of the independence vote in advance.
In an interview published on Monday with The Sydney Morning Herald, Habibie said the UN had promised to notify the Indonesian government of the outcome of East Timor's August 1999 independence referendum three days before making the results public.
Fears that Thursday's vote might degenerate into fighting among supporters of 16 rival political parties have come to nothing, Valenzuela said.
"I have been involved in 14 different election operations with the United Nations in many different countries of the world," Valenzuela said. "Not on any other occasion have I seen such a level of peacefulness and calm as in East Timor in 2001."
The sole violent incident during the campaign was the stoning of a car belonging to a political party by supporters of a rival party, he said.
Australian army Capt. Jeffrey Squire, a spokesman for the 8,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, said there had been no incidents in East Timor or on the border with the Indonesian-held western half of the island that would warrant an increased alert status.
"We have plans in place to deal with any contingency and will respond quickly and robustly to any security threat," he said.
In a related development, Indonesian police said they had closed border crossing points between West and East Timor ahead due to security fears, the Indonesia's state-run Antara news agency reported on Monday.
The agency cited border police chief Brig. Apolinario da Silva as saying the frontier will be reopened on Sept. 5.
Meanwhile, East Timor's largest party, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor -- or Fretelin -- received a strong boost when it's platform was endorsed by a popular religious movement that combines Roman Catholicism with Timorese mysticism. Leaders of the Sagrada Familia -- or Sacred Family -- said on Monday that they now backed Fretelin's candidates.
Fretelin, which led East Timor's long and bloody struggle for independence from Indonesian rule, is expected to win the largest share of the vote.