East Timor asks UN for 800-strong police force

KUALA LUMPUR, July 27 (Reuters) East Timor has asked the United Nations to deploy more than 800 international police to ensure stability in the troubled Southeast Asian state, Prime Minister Jose Ramos-Horta said today.

He said the police would be needed for two to five years, along with a separate UN peace-keeping force as a deterrent against renewed violence.

''We are requesting over 800 international police, many civilian advisers as well as peace-keeping,'' he told a news conference during a meeting of Asian foreign ministers in Malaysia.

Tiny East Timor plunged into a political crisis nearly three months ago when former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri dismissed around 600 troops after they protested against discrimination. At least 20 people died in the clashes and arson that followed.

Australia is leading a 2,500-strong UN-endorsed peacekeeping force, which also includes troops from Malaysia, New Zealand and Portugal, that was brought in to restore peace in Asia's newest state.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said he hopes UN-led police and troops can join the Australian-led troops in six months and eventually take over the peacekeeping operation.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, also in Kuala Lumpur for talks with Asian states, said the request for 800 international police seemed ambitious.

''He's right to be focusing on police,'' he told reporters. ''I think to get 800 of them is very ambitious.'' But Ramos-Horta said the United Nations should not repeat the mistake it made in 1999-2000. Then, it was slow to act as pro-Indonesia militias fought a bloody backlash against the territory's struggle for independence, which it gained in 2002.

A wave of systematic violence and destruction swept over East Timor, forcing most of the population from their homes and destroying much of the country's infrastructure.

''Nation-building is a long-term process,'' Ramos-Horta said.

''When the United Nations commits itself to a post-conflict situation and the wish is to assist, it must not be guided only by cost-cutting calculations,'' he added.

East Timor is one of the poorest and most fragile states, with massive unemployment, but it sits beside one of the region's richest gas reserves beneath the Timor Sea.

It has a petroleum fund worth 700 million dollar and swelling fast, fed by revenue from a joint gas field called Bayu Undan in waters between East Timor from Australia. The two nations share revenue from the field, with East Timor receiving 90 per cent.

The fund should hit 1 billion dollar by year-end, Ramos-Horta said. It also stands to receive another income stream worth nearly 15 billion dollar over 20 years from a new, larger joint field.

But Ramos-Horta said his country needed skills as well as cash and that Malaysia had offered today to assemble a team of economic advisers to help formulate a long-term economic development plan for East Timor.

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