UN presence in East Timor to last longer than expected

Claire Harvey and A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The United Nations' reconstruction effort in East Timor will continue for at least the next decade, a military expert said on Monday.

Canadian Colonel (ret) Peter Leentjes, the former training chief of the UN's global Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said the magnitude of the task in East Timor was often underestimated.

"Creating a secure environment was easy but the political aspects and the longer term development of the state and its infrastructure are going to take years, and people don't realize that," he said. "It's going to take 10 years minimum."

"(The operation in) Timor has been reasonably successful in terms of actually conducting it, but it suffers from the typical problem of these operations: not having enough resources to do the other parts."

Colonel Leentjes, who was chief of staff operations for the UN's Bosnia-Herzegovina peacekeeping operation in the early 1990s, was speaking at a peace operations seminar in Jakarta.

The five-day seminar, jointly sponsored by the Indonesian government, the UN and the United States military, is coordinated by the Hawaii-based Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance, which employs Colonel Leentjes.

The seminar is being attended by senior military officers, diplomats, Red Cross activists and government officials from 17 Asia Pacific countries, including Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, the United States, Bangladesh, Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand.

The purpose of the seminar is to increase the ability of participating countries to deal with the modern and complex problems of peacekeeping missions.

"The key thing in East Timor is getting a government. There are so many things you can't do without a government -- health, construction, reconstruction," Colonel Leentjes said.

"There will be people working there for at least the next 10 years."

The UN Security Council sent peacekeepers into East Timor in September 1999 to quell a wave of violence sparked by the UN- sponsored independence referendum the previous month.

Pro-Indonesia militias, allegedly backed by the Indonesian Military, went on a rampage across the territory after the vote. Four Indonesian Army officers and a district police commander are currently on trial in Jakarta, accused of failing to prevent the massacre of civilians in a Covalima church in September 1999.

The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), created in 1999, is responsible for administering the territory and creating legislative, executive, judicial and humanitarian frameworks.

East Timor's first presidential election is scheduled for April 14, when former guerrilla leader Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao is widely expected to defeat the only other candidate, Fransisco Xavier do Amaral.

Colonel Leentjes told the seminar better planning and preparation were needed for future UN operations, which were likely to be more than simply "keeping the peace".

"The majority of peacekeeping operations today are going to be given some authority to use force to ensure you can achieve your mission," he said.

Many previous UN peacekeeping operations were "disasters" because forces were ill-prepared and given insufficient mandates to deal with warring parties, Colonel Leentjes said.

The peacekeepers sent to Somalia and Bosnia were unable to cope with the civil conflicts still raging when they arrived, he said.

"(The UN operation in) Somalia was a disaster, a guaranteed failure because they weren't prepared," he said. "The operation was a tremendous success in terms of stopping the famine, but they (peacekeepers) were never mandated to deal with the political or military situation."