Word: timor
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...years ago, East Timor's police and military fractured along political and geographic lines, leading to bloody street battles in Dili. The conflict left 37 dead, including eight police officers, and displaced 150,000 people, most of whom have only recently returned to their villages. It also led to the dissolution of the Fretilin government...
...back to their villages and it will be every man for himself." Australian academic Bu Wilson has just completed a review of the PNTL's capability. She fears that "rather than rebuilding the PNTL, the U.N. mission may be instead bequeathing a weak and unstable police force to Timor-Leste...
...Some U.N. police are reluctant to speak on the record butprivately agree with Wilson's claims. Senior officers acknowledge some shortcomings but remain confident the force will be able to handle security duties. "This is a very young police service," says acting U.N. East Timor Police Commissioner Juan Carlos Arevalo Linares. "We cannot expect to have a police service like Australia's when this country has only had a police service for a little more than six years...
...Faction Victim The force is disunited as well as over-stretched. Edward Rees was a former adviser to Ian Martin, the special envoy to East Timor who was sent by the U.N. to assess the situation after the violence of 2006. Now living in Dili, Rees says there are factions in the PNTL that have not forgotten the fighting. "They are trying to work together now, whereas in 2006 they may have been trying to shoot each other." All the same, he worries that the force lacks the cohesion to deal impartially with a large protest or riot, an ever...
...duty PNTL task-force officer brings in a drunken man who has been terrorizing local market traders with a machete. Says an admiring UNPOL district commander, Paul Harvey: "There are PNTL officers here I would rather work with than some officers back home." The long-suffering people of East Timor hope his confidence is well founded...