WB mission to visit East Timor this week
WB mission to visit East Timor this week
DARWIN, Australia (AFP): A World Bank mission will travel to East Timor this week to evaluate the costs of rebuilding the devastated territory, starting from what resistance leaders call "below ground zero."
The team will arrive in Darwin, northern Australia, on Tuesday where it will meet an East Timorese contingent led by Mario Carrascalao, a former governor of East Timor under Indonesian rule.
The mission is a first step in the arduous task of rebuilding a territory whose basic infrastructure was virtually obliterated in the wave of violence in September that followed East Timor's vote for independence.
"The houses have all been destroyed, the administration buildings destroyed, there are no telecoms, water supply or electricity," Carrascalao told AFP.
Carrascalao, who served as governor from 1982 to 1992 under the Soeharto regime, was also appointed a member of the seven person Transitional Commission headed by East Timorese resistance Xanana Gusmao that will work with a transitional United Nations administration which will run the territory before full independence.
The commission, whose composition was announced on Friday, has said the escudo of former colonial ruler Portugal will be the official currency, though Carrascalao said there would be no drastic measures to take the Indonesian rupiah out of circulation.
The World Bank mission will assess both the economic and humanitarian needs of the country's 800,000 people, including some 250,000 refugees who have not yet returned to their burned and destroyed homes.
The task will be enormous, say resistance leaders.
"After the independence vote, we were planning to start above ground zero, but now we are starting below ground zero. We don't know how much it will cost," said Abel Guterres, a member of the National Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRT).
Guterres, who is working to ensure that East Timor will have trade unions when reconstruction begins, says hundreds of thousands of workers could be involved rebuilding schools, bridges, homes and government buildings.
"Everything is starting anew. We want the unions to be a part of the rebuilding of East Timor," he said.
Estimates of the cost of rebuilding during the first year range from between US$30 million and $100 million, all of which East Timor's resistance leaders say must come in aid.
The results of the World Bank mission, which concludes on November 16, will be presented to a donors' conference in Washington scheduled for December.
Joao Saldanha, executive director of the East Timorese Study Group think tank and a member of the CNRT team aiding the mission, said the first task was to build an East Timorese bureaucracy.
He envisions a leaner civil service of 15,000 people, roughly half the size of the Indonesian administration which operated with a budget of $116 million per year.
"That alone will cost a lot," he said.
The country's builders must also recruit more professionals. Under Indonesia, between 60 and 70 percent of the teachers were Indonesian, while there were only 20 East Timorese medical doctors, many of whom fled the country.
Once the country starts to get back on its feet, the CNRT plans to base development on agriculture and tourism, which has been almost non existent since Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976, Saldanha said.
Currently the country's sole export earnings come from coffee, and the plantations are suffering from neglect.
Carrascalao says coffee earnings could be boosted to $50 million within a few years, and that cultivation could double to 100,000 hectares within 10 years.
Agriculture accounts for 30 percent of gross domestic product, which was about $200 million before the regional economic crisis in 1997. The figure is equivalent to $230 in per capita income.
Another big developmental challenge will be to address East Timor's skewed income distribution. Currently the top 5 percent of the population controls more than 80 percent of the wealth.