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.