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UN Says Disbursement of Funds For Timor Is Too Slow - UN Finance - Global Policy Forum UN Says Disbursement of Funds
For Timor Is Too SlowAgence France-Presse
March 21, 2000
United Nations - The United Nations said Tuesday it had started 18 small-scale reconstruction projects to create jobs in East Timor, but admitted that the disbursement of UN funds was too slow.
Hedi Annabi, a senior official in the UN's department of peacekeeping, told the UN Security Council that very high unemployment and high prices were "threatening social peace" in East Timor. Demand for jobs was "reflected in the very large number of applicants that respond to UNTAET's recruitment efforts," he said, referring to the UN Transitional Authority in East Timor which has run the territory since November.
At the end of February, UNTAET had 2,500 civil servants on its payroll and expected to employ 7,000 by the end of the year, he said. "A fast-track programme in education has grown rapidly and now involves some 7,000 teachers, reaching some 130,000 children," he added.
Civil servants' wages absorbed most of the money from the UN Trust Fund, which had so far received about 23 million dollars from donor countries, Annabi said. That amount was only a small fraction of the 500 million dollars pledged at a UN donors' conference in Tokyo in December, but slightly more than half the 43 million dollars which UNTAET estimated it would need this year. "The disbursement of funds from the Trust Fund is much slower than we would like it to be," Annabi said. The head of UNTAET, Sergio Vieira de Mello, had "expressed his frustration and told the press he would like a magic stick to turn donor pledges into instant public works projects," Annabi said.
"But you need partners and these take time," he added. Annabi said reconstruction would be slow because "the vast majority of skilled workers left" amid the mayhem which engulfed East Timor after it voted on August 30 for independence from Indonesia in a referendum organised by the United Nations. There had been a "continued trickle" of refugees back from West Timor, he said, "but we haven't seen any accelerated return." He said UNTAET hoped the Indonesian authorities would be flexible about enforcing their end-of-March deadline for refugees to return to East Timor or resettle in West Timor or other parts of Indonesia. About 153,000 refugees had returned, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were another 100,000 in West Timor, about half of whom would wish to return to East Timor, he said.
Annabi said UNTAET had started "18 quick impact projects" in advance of a much larger, 21-million-dollar World Bank scheme to rebuild local government and strengthen decision-making at the village level. Other decisions taken by UNTAET to tackle economic problems in East Timor included the establishment of a provisional tax regime, he said. "Collection of import duties commenced yesterday, March 20," he said, and taxes and duties would also be levied on exports and the domestic production of goods.
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