The Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Mr. Mark Malloch
Brown, who is the third highest ranking UN official after the
Secretary-General and the Deputy Secretary-General, will visit East Timor
from Saturday February 10 to Monday 12. The main purpose of his visit will
be to encourage donors and the UN system to throw more weightbehind
building the skills and government institutions of the East Timorese in
the lead-up to independence.
"There is no more important task," the Administrator told the UN
Security Council in the lead?up to the visit. He said that while the UN
had started bridging the gap between emergency work and longer-term
rehabilitation and development, there had been difficulty making real
progress in the area East Timorese need most now ? helping build the
institutional capacity to manage their own country and meet the needs
oftheir people."For a nation that started with just 60 qualified
secondary school teachers, 20 doctors, not one judge and little in the way
of effective systems of governance that is clearly still an enormous task.
But, it iswhere the UN development focus must now be turned", he
said.
UNDP has been designated by the Special Representative of the
Secretary-General (SRSG) as the lead agency for building institutional and
human capacity in support of the East Timor Transitional Administration.
Work has already begun through direct support ranging from building human
resources in numerous areas, to electoral assistance. In the vital area of
justice, UNDP has supported the training and induction of the first cadre
of East Timorese judges.
According to the Administrator, however, adequate resources are not being
made available to the critical area of capacity building. "I
wouldurge the Security Council to help seek out new ways of either
adapting current funding arrangements or establishing new ones as this
(capacity building) needs to be at the heart of preparations for
independence", he said.During the visit, the Administrator will meet
with the East Timorese leadership, senior UN officials and the donor
community to discuss how support for this key area can be strengthened to
ensure that an efficient, representative and responsive, independent
government can eventually pull East Timor from the ranks of the poorest
nations on earth.
