Word: timor
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...near-fatal shooting of East Timor President José Ramos-Horta on Feb. 11 shocked average East Timorese as well as the foreign governments that midwifed the birth of the new nation. Ramos-Horta needed eight liters of blood to stabilize his condition before being airlifted to a hospital in Darwin, Australia, where he is in serious, but stable, condition...
...shootout in the capital Dili should not have been such a surprise. When most multinational peacekeepers flew out of Dili in the years after East Timor's formal independence in 2002, the world considered the country a victory of U.N. nation-building. The U.N. chief in East Timor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was asked to duplicate his work as special envoy for Iraq (he was later tragically killed in Baghdad), and East Timor's former President Xanana Gusmão (now Prime Minister) declared that his country could be a model for other young, developing countries. Yet the billions poured...
...Since independence, East Timor has lurched from crisis to crisis. It has been plagued by grinding poverty and constant, often violent, political infighting. Many of the country's leaders, in exile in Portugal or Mozambique during Indonesia's occupation, have aggravated the situation by failing to connect with the majority of their compatriots. Senior government officials live lives of relative luxury, in stark contrast to the lot of the vast majority of East Timorese. (Because Dili is a small town, it's not uncommon to see such officials dining in trendy Portuguese cafés situated near the poor...
...those early warnings, including riots across Dili in 2002, did not convince foreign peacekeepers - desperate to proclaim success and not to appear as occupiers - to stay longer. By 2005, most Australian soldiers went home, even though East Timor's leaders, including Ramos-Horta, had begged them not to leave too quickly. By 2006, the cracks in East Timorese society were impossible to miss. I visited the country that year and as I drove its length, passing pristine white beaches, lonely scuba divers and dilapidated Portuguese mansions, I met intensely angry former guerrilla fighters, some of whom had been sacked from...
...After taking power in last year's presidential election, Ramos-Horta laid plans to address East Timor's many problems. He vowed to focus on reconciliation after the 2006 riots, and promised to remake the security forces to make them representative of East Timorese from both the east and west ends of the country - an acrimonious ethnic divide. But rogue militias are still around, and the police are still drawn mainly from just the west side. Moreover, unemployment is rising ever higher, the judiciary remains weak, and thousands of refugees who fled past fighting continue to languish in makeshift camps...