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."