Dili: The UN winds up its peacekeeping mission on Monday after 13 years in Asia’s youngest nation East Timor, with the country hoping to overcome its bloody past and rampant poverty to stand on its own feet.
East Timor this year conducted largely peaceful elections, voting in a new president and parliament, as the country marked a decade of formal independence and paved the way for the foreign forces to leave.
But as the last remaining UN police and troops trickle home, the fragile democracy is still struggling with widespread malnutrition, high unemployment and maternal mortality rates that are among the worst in the world.
East Timor was occupied by Indonesia for 24 years, with some 183,000 people dying from fighting, disease and starvation before the half-island state voted for independence in 1999 in a bloody referendum, prompting the first UN mission.
There is little concern about renewed violence in the immediate future, yet few employment opportunities, crushing poverty and a rapidly expanding population could still threaten peace in the long term, analysts say.
“There’s always in this situation the potential for something serious to go wrong,” George Quinn from the Australian National University said.
More than 40 percent of young Timorese are jobless, according to AusAID, and although the predominantly Catholic nation has a small population, the fertility rate of 6.5 per woman is the world’s fourth-highest, UN data shows.
Despite $1.5bn of aid pouring into the nation of 1.1m people over the last decade and abundant offshore oil and gas reserves, some 41 percent of the population live on less than the local poverty line of 88 cents a day.
In and around Dili, barefoot children can be seen eating scraps from the ground in slums, and the pace of life remains slow, with vendors making a pittance at fruit and vegetable markets.
World Bank data from 2010 showed 45.3 percent of children under five were malnourished.
Afp
