Timor Leste needs the "active support" of friendly nations such as Ireland if it is to overcome the problems that led to violent clashes there in recent months, a Dáil committee was told yesterday.
Tom Hyland, a human rights activist based in Timor Leste, formerly East Timor, told the Foreign Affairs Committee that, although the violence came as a surprise, he did not believe it would lead to civil war.
"I don't think there will be civil war in East Timor, but that's not to say that this didn't catch us all off guard. We took our eyes off the ball," he said.
Mr Hyland suggested a number of long-standing problems had contributed to the violence which followed the dismissal in April of one-third of the country's 1,800 soldiers. Some 30 people were killed and 150,000 others driven from their homes in violent clashes on the streets of the capital, Dili. It required the arrival of a 2,500-strong Australian-led intervention force to quell the violence.
Many had underestimated the "underlying trauma" and the "culture of violence" that obtained after the brutalising Indonesian invasion in 1975, he said, while many young people felt that they had not benefited from independence, as many jobs had gone to returning emigrants.
High unemployment - up to 70 per cent in a country of some one million people - had compounded the situation.
According to Mr Hyland, "proper political leadership" and the re-engagement of the international community would be required before current problems could begin to be reversed.
Senator David Norris criticised the "precipitous" withdrawal of a UN peacekeeping force in 2002.
The Government last week announced that it would provide €500,000 in humanitarian relief for Timor Leste.