East Timorese Need Donors' Aid Quickly, Leaders Say Fri, 4 Feb 2000 09:36:30 -0500 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Joyo@aol.com Associated Press February 2, 2000 East Timorese Need Donors' Aid Quickly, Leaders Say BANGKOK (AP)--East Timorese leaders said Wednesday that the slow arrival of humanitarian aid to their devastated homeland would fuel rising dissatisfaction among their long-suffering people. Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao and Jose Ramos-Horta told journalists in Bangkok that the more than $520 million pledged for East Timor in December at a donors' meeting in Tokyo was unlikely to start arriving before June. "We must quickly address the rising dissatisfaction of our people, who are in need of every fundamental factor in their lives," remarked Ramos-Horta, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo. Ramos-Horta and Gusmao, who led the armed resistance to Indonesia's occupation of East Timor after a 1976 invasion, are making a major tour around Southeast Asia seeking to establish relations between their nation-to-be and its neighbors. East Timor has gone under temporary U.N. administration - a steppingstone on the road to full statehood - following a referendum for independence from Indonesia last year. The vote triggered violence by anti-independence militias and Indonesian troops that left the territory in ruins and created nearly 200,000 refugees, putting the one-time Portuguese colony in desperate need of foreign assistance. Ramos-Horta said that the aid pledged in September would need to go through slow, cumbersome World Bank processing and might not arrive in time to meet people's expectations for improvement in their lives. He also expressed fears that too much could end up in the pockets of outside consultants hired to write comprehensive reports on East Timor. "I think they can be done by our students who graduated from Jakarta's universities," Ramos-Horta said. "I don't see why we have to pay thousands dollars to those consultants. I want to tell those donors not to cheat their own taxpayers." ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytpac-02.04.00-09:36:28-7815