Timor Leste: Strong Government, Weak State
Introduction On 4 December 2002 hundreds of demonstrators rampaged through Dili targeting "foreign" properties, including a supermarket and two hotels, and the homes of the Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, and his immediate family. Rioters also attacked Dili's An Mur Mosque, which some saw as an anti-Islamic or anti-Indonesian action, but may well have been aimed at the Mosque's most well-known member, Alkatiri himself. The crowd also chanted anti-police slogans. The government of Timor Leste1 is yet to release a full report on the reasons for the riot, which left two protesters dead and others injured, most likely related to the decision of the police to use live rounds to control the crowd. Rumours have abounded as to who the crowd were and what they wanted. Variously they are described as students, the unemployed, former militia men and policemen from Indonesian times, or even a rival group from Alkatiri's own party, Fretilin (and various combinations of all these groupings). While it was popular to speak of agitators, the fact that a crowd was so easy to mobilize was worrying and indicative of underlying tensions towards the government, the police, and foreign businesses. Dire predictions of widespread chaos did not, however, eventuate. Instead, the security threat to Timor Leste continues to remain a latent, but very real, threat. Pro-Indonesian militia elements still present an irritant to the border security of Timor Leste, causing concerns about the ability of Timor Leste to control its own security with the winding down of the United Nations mission. Yet a threat from within Timor Leste caused a great deal of concern within government circles, namely, the difficulties from ex-Falintil guerrilla fighters who were left out of government hiring after independence. A war of words continues with a hardcore of radical veterans insisting on a return to the 1975 Constitution, a suspension of the current government and a complete with drawal of the United Nations. Security forces have also struggled to control criminal elements that have emerged throughout the province.
The World Bank's Health Projects in Timor-Leste: The Political Economy of Effective Aid
The World Bank's health sector projects in Timor-Leste have been among the few operations it has funded in that country that have achieved any sort of positive results. This paper examines the factors underpinning their relative success and considers the wider lessons for the delivery of effective aid in the context of peace-building operations in fragile contexts. We argue that political economy factors played an important role in shaping the relative success of these projects, extending and revising an earlier analysis by Rosser. In terms of wider lessons, we argue for a more political understanding of the determinants of aid effectiveness. Specifically we suggest that aid effectiveness needs to be seen as a function not just of the technical quality of project design and the administrative competence of project managers but also the extent to which there is congruence between donor and local elites’ agendas.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.