WB finds cause for optimism in E. Timor review
WB finds cause for optimism in E. Timor review
DILI, East Timor (AP): A World Bank fact-finding mission said
Thursday it has found reasons to be optimistic about the recovery
of battered East Timor.
"Our overall impression: it could be worse," said Klaus
Rohland, director of the mission that is halfway through its
work. "There are some signs of moving to the future."
After East Timor's people voted overwhelmingly in an Aug. 30
referendum to become independent of Indonesia, pro-Jakarta
militias and their Indonesian army allies went on a devastating
rampage of arson and looting.
An international peacekeeping force arrived Sept. 20 to
restore order in the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia
invaded in 1975. The United Nations is preparing to administer
the territory for two to three years until it is ready for
independence.
Rohland said the World Bank's education and health teams
arrived Thursday, and a coffee expert was heading to the
highlands growing area Friday. High-quality coffee is East
Timor's main export, and Rohland says it could be a cornerstone
of the economy.
Other experts are still arriving. The bank team is to present
its report to potential aid donors next month.
Two sectors with relatively good outlooks were
telecommunications and power generation.
Telecommunications could be re-established in 10-12 months -
"a comparatively short time," Rohland said. While electrical
transformers and switches were destroyed, generators could be
restored to operating condition relatively quickly.
Roads on the half-island territory suffered no substantial
damage, but a resumption of maintenance was necessary,
particularly with the onset of the rainy season tha already has
hit some areas, he said.
Rohland told reporters that East Timor's financial sector was
"essentially dead," with almost all banking records destroyed or
missing.
He added, however, that the effect on the local economy might
not be as bad as originally feared, because anecdotal evidence
suggested that 80 percent of the accounts and credits belonged to
non-Timorese Indonesians.
He hoped that the banks' central offices in Jakarta might
provide the missing information.
Some reconstruction of essential records and information has
been done with the help of East Timorese who worked at local
enterprises and volunteered their knowledge and insight, he said.
"What they are doing is almost an archaeological kind of work,
reconstructing East Timor on paper with a view to helping to
reconstruct it on the ground," he said.
A major short-term concern is shelter. Rohland praised the
work so far of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. He said
the agency was about to bring in substantial amounts of
prefabricated material to ease the problem.
He admitted that an unpleasant side-effect of a humanitarian
or peacekeeping operation is "you bring in a lot of people with a
lot of money, and that kind of distorts the economy and is bound
to have an inflationary effect on prices."
"So what we are looking into is to create some sort of social
fund that would mitigate the effect of this on the poor," Rohland
said. "In the meantime, we must take care in designing mechanisms
to avoid distortions of the economy."