So it's my pleasure. Welcome today to bring Back to Life and Oxford one of our visiting fellows from last academic year,
Ola Offset, who's going to be talking about peacebuilding and conflict analysis mainly in East Timor,
but also drawing on a couple of other experiences and more generally the efforts of the Peacebuilding Commission.
But all have had a very interesting career. He's not just a researcher, although that's what he's doing and he spent his time here,
but he's also more generally a consultant in the field of conflict management and development and humanitarian assistance.
He's trained as a lawyer and worked as a diplomat at Norwegian embassies and nor at in Pakistan and India,
also with UNHCR in Bosnia, the Norwegian Refugee Council in Serbia, and with the Red Cross movements in Asia and the Balkans.
And more recently, he was responsible for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies International Disaster Response Law Program in the Asia Pacific.
And as I say, his focus today is going to be on peacebuilding failures in East Timor,
where he was head of delegation for the ICRC during the 2006 crisis,
which is going to talk about, although he's also going to talk about 1999 as well.
And then perhaps we'll get you to talk about your exciting new assignment the first time at Good.
So I will turn it over to you to talk about your paper and more generally, and then we'll just open it up to discussion in the time that we have.
I thank you, Jennifer. Um, I think given the timeframe, it may be a little ambitious to aim for a discussion that includes my Africanews.
Yes. Yeah, we can. We can see at the end what what time we have.
But when I realise how little time I have to present East Timor,
I think I found that I will probably spend all the time doing that we can see afterwards.
But, but at least I'm starting out with, with East Timor.
As you may have understood, my interest in conflict management stems from my early life as a legal person,
as a lawyer, public prosecutor, deputy judge.
Such positions caught my interest and I took that interest with me when I later sold my law practice and went abroad to do humanitarian work.
Doing so, I was lucky to have some very interesting experiences in different parts of the world,
and some of these experiences are going to stay with me forever.
The East Timor experience is this is one such event.
Even if I was not directly involved in the peacebuilding process.
I was in East Timor from October 2003 to May 2006.
The head of Delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and I was watching
the process from the sideline not being allowed to get involved because a Red Cross has to be absolutely neutral.
I was watching tensions and crises coming and going.
At one stage I evacuated our office because it was getting very tense and these
things would come and go and normally pass with without serious violence.
But in 2006, things changed dramatically.
This spring, a major crisis was developing and no one seemed able to contain it.
I was watching with horror what was happening and things were simply going out of control.
And I became very curious as to who's doing what's here.
How is the U.N. handling this? What tools do they have to handle it?
How does it look from the inside? So I decided that one day I wanted to go back and try to try to find out about it.
And that's what I was doing last year during my my fellowship here.
But so what I'm focusing on, what I have focussed on in this research is the conflict management component of the U.N. operations in East Timor.
And with that, I mean conflict resolution and reconciliation.
And I'm looking at the period from 1999 when the U.N. came there until mid 2006.
But the most important time period in many ways was the early years, the two first years, and then, of course, the year when the crisis happened.
But question for you, are you all familiar with with the East Timor peace building and the collapse that took place in 2006?
Some are some background. Yes, everyone is.
Maybe just a little bird's perspective so that we're all in line to the U.N. peace operations started in 1999,
when the Timorese decided in a U.N. supported referendum to break loose from Indonesia.
After 24 years of occupation. Indonesia friendly militia responded with massive violence and destruction.
And some 1400 people were killed.
Hundreds of women raped and some 250,000 people fleeing their homes after withdrawal
of the Indonesian army and the deployment of an international peacekeeping force.
The international community decided to make a comprehensive peace and state building effort.
The U.N. and the World Bank, supported by some 50 international donors, contributed roughly 4 billion U.S. dollars to this effort.
And the effort was for the first time in history, to build a new nation from scratch.
So this was the UN's challenge.
The transition period in two years was planned, meaning that East Timor would be independent and take over from May 2002.
Although the UN stayed longer than foreseen, the operation was widely considered a success for the longest time.
In 2006, however, as I've indicated, this was after several reductions of the U.N. presence and staff.
The peace building process collapsed in internal ones.
The crisis started with a big number of soldiers from the Timorese army going on strike.
These were mainly from the west of the country and they claimed that they were being discriminated against.
Next to my disbelief, 591 soldiers, meaning 42% of the entire Timorese army, were simply dismissed.
Miners followed were army and police were killing each other.
Were people from the east and people from the West were attacking and killing each other?
Minimum, at least 32 lives were lost.
And again, a huge amount of people fled their homes.
Estimated at least 150,000. So why did this happen?
Why did this success story all of a sudden turn into such a dramatic failure?
The UN Independent Inquiry Commission came to assess the causes of this failure,
stated that the situation can only be fully understood in historical and the historical and cultural context of the country.
So before we look closer at the UN conflict management,
let me just take a quick recap or look at the conflict history of East Timor, which I think is important to start with.
There was probably never a time of peace and stability in East Timor.
It seems that from the moment different tribes from different parts of Southeast Asia starting developing, that started settling there.
They were in conflict and the stronger ethnic groups would push the weaker ones
away from fertile land near the coast towards the more arid mountainous area,
meaning also eastwards. So they had conflicts of that kind from a very early stage.
Then came the Portuguese to the island in 15, in 15, 13.
Then after some time they started colonising the area, doing so.
They used these differences between the different ethnic group to split and rule.
And according to one of the anthropologists who have spent time studying this policy success,
they virtually split the island into east and west with made the part the capital
Dili and monitored to us what you call a brokerage area between the two parts.
During the Portuguese era there were virtual wars where the Portuguese would engage huge amount of Timorese to fight their countrymen,
to call them land, and to crack down on on freedom initiatives.
And in some locations, several thousand lives were lost.
So it was quite dramatically dramatic and obviously deepening the the divide among the people of East Timor.
Then if you if we move a little further ahead and get to the Second World War, we get another element of divide.
The Second World War was quite dramatic for East Timor population.
Some 40,000 people were killed. Many of them fought alongside the Australians who were in the island, in the island.
But some live rice or small kingdoms also sided with the Japanese.
So you had another version of the split where part of the population sided with the foreign power.
Then if we move one step further, in 1975, the scene was again set for dramatic events.
We had had the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which seemed to open up for possible freedom to East Timor.
We saw the establishment of the first political parties and one of them nudity staged a coup.
Immediately afterwards, another party, left wing SD, staged a counter coup.
You had what was called a civil war with some 3000 people killed.
It lasted only roughly three months. But as the tea, who later took the name Fretilin prevailed and they declared independence.
The response from the others, meaning all the other political parties had been established and I think there were four others.
The response was to go to Indonesia and proclaim integration within with Indonesia.
And what did Indonesia do? They have their own designs and moved in and occupied East Timor.
And this was in 1975, and this was the beginning of the 24 years of freedom struggle for the people of the island.
During these 24 years, there were atrocities on both sides, lots of lives lost, but there were also conflicts between the Timorese.
Many Timorese sided all the time with the Indonesians despite atrocities, despite suppression, despite comprehensive loss of life.
And there were internal political conflicts among the Timorese.
Some of them seem to exist still today. There were also violent conflict inside the freedom movement.
But some states, it seems that I think there were some 200 people that were killed.
Many also were tortured members of Fretilin, including their leader.
And so it was it was a and another illustration, but that we were not talking about a united people.
We were talking about a people in conflict with another outside power player, but also a conflict with itself together the Civil War of 75,
the 24 years of freedom struggle, and the 1999 event caused some roughly 100,000 lives.
And in my view, clearly rendering East Timor a divided, a deeply divided and traumatised society.
Contributing to the divide was also very a special feature of East Timor, which was about the martial arts groups.
The marginalised groups was a phenomenon that had existed for many decades.
But they came to play a an active role in the events in 1999 as sorry, in 2006 and.
Up till then, they were known for their gang wars, burning houses,
attacking villages and creating havoc that would would influence the whole society where they were operating.
One study says that as much as as many as possibly 70% of Timorese men were at some stage affiliated with one of the most large groups.
So it was a major factor in the in the conflict landscape.
So this was a brief history, a brief conflict history.
And this this was, you can say, the backdrop.
When the UN came there in 1999, they faced a traumatised and deeply divided people and a very complex conflict landscape.
So how was this handled? When I was due to study this, I found that four different aspects seemed interesting to look into the first the mandates.
What for the UN mandates in terms of conflict management?
What plans did they have for conflict management? What conflict analysis did they have?
And what what practical, practical conflict management activities did they conduct?
So these were the four elements I was looking into. I also did a comparison with two later U.N. operations in Africa to see how things
changed after the introduction of the new peacebuilding U.N. structure of 2006.
But like I said, I doubt that we will have much time to discuss that here today.
But the mandate, the first U.N. mission was in on it, that their role was to hold the referendum period so we can pass that one.
Then it was the mission that would take care of the important transition period up to
the time when the Timorese would take over an entire it had a comprehensive mandate,
including security, law and order, establishment of administration,
development of civil and social services, coordination, delivery of humanitarian assistance, rehabilitation and development assistance,
capacity building for self-government, the establishment of conditions for sustainable government.
So it was a lot. But as you will have noted, there was nothing in it on conflict management, nothing on conflict resolution or reconciliation.
Let me say that which followed and tied in when East Timor became independent in 2002
had reduced staff and the mandate limited to assistance the court administrative,
administrative structure and the provision of law enforcement and security.
Again, nothing on reconciliation, conflict resolution.
Then after then we set in 2005, came up with further used staff and military personnel, only meant for the operations own security.
Its mandate were to support critical state institutions, provide human rights training and monitor the progress.
And again, no mentioning of reconciliation or conflict resolution.
Then the next mission was for finished, which was appointed after the disaster in 2006.
And then the mandate changes.
The opening term reads to support the government in consolidating stability, enhancing a culture of democratic governance,
and facilitating political dialogue among Timorese stakeholders in their efforts to
bring about a process of national reconciliation and to foster social cohesion.
So we have said that this came about only after the disaster had happened in 2006.
It is hard to say whether it had any practical implication that it wasn't mentioned
earlier as some important conflict management activities were conducted.
But my point here is that the need for reconciliation was clearly there just as much in 1999 as it was in 2006.
And if the wording of U.N. mandates have a meaning, it should, in my opinion, clearly have been included from the start.
So much for the mandates. If I then turn to the planning, although my focus was conflict management,
I was very curious to learn about the overall planning of the daunting task of building a new nation from scratch.
This is because I've been responsible for a lot of development work and plans were always essential to my work.
And I first saw that this developing a proper plan for these operations would be a demanding, comprehensive task.
I was very curious to see what they had done. However, it turned out to be difficult to find any such plans.
After doing all the research, I could run my desk myself.
I requested help from the library and they tried their best to help me and came back after some time and said, Are you sure there is a plan?
And I was smiling overwhelmingly. And look, here we are talking about building a new country.
You know, you don't do that without a plan. But I didn't get anywhere even when they contacted the UN Documentation Centre in Geneva.
Nothing substantive came out of that and we started to become sceptical myself.
But then I came across one document that seemed to contain a plan, and that was the secretary general's,
the U.N. Secretary General's report to the Security Council on October the fourth 99, which outlined a number of objectives for insight.
So I was thinking, Oh, that's my plant. Even if if comic camouflage does a report, some of the objectives, although they were worded as activities,
actually some of these objectives were definitely relevant to reconciliation and conflict resolution.
I mentioned to develop mechanisms for dialogue at the national and local levels,
to undertake confidence building measures and provide support to indigenous processes of reconciliation,
to create conditions of stability through the maintenance of peace and security,
including through programs for disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration as may be necessary.
This document 15 pages thing was quite sketchy on how these conflict management objectives would be reached,
and it offered nothing on leadership, very different from other aspects of the same planning document and nothing on the capacity.
But it was at least something I thought. However, my my happiness was short lived, and as I got in touch with a.
S deep kale head, I was told that sorry, this is no planning document.
So next question then. What is where is the plan for this operation?
I turned every stone that I can think of. I got in touch with a lot of people, and I did find that there were other planning efforts taking place,
like when DeMello and Senator Gusmao met and agreed on the number of priorities.
There were also an initiative from the U.N. Secretary-General who demanded the development of some benchmarks.
And according to the U.N. secretary general's briefing to the Security Council on November 28,
2000, there was a political calendar for the final phase of transition.
When I came to East Timor to pursue my research, I met, among others, Mari Alkatiri,
who had been the Prime Minister since the beginning and to the crisis in 2006.
And he said, Yes, I've seen some kind of a calendar and that was all.
I I've never seen a proper plan for peace building or state building.
Eventually, I got in touch with Major General Michael Smith involved in the International Force for East Timor, the early INTERFET,
who had been doing planning work in New York and later developing the military component of tight in cooperation with de Mello in the field.
And I got hold of a book that he had written, which I hadn't known about till then,
which said that Tight was unable to start its mission with a coherent strategic corporate business plan.
Once deployed in the day to day problems further hindered the development of such a plan.
I had some email exchange with General Smith.
And he explained to me that he had even suggested a model for a mission strategic plan,
but it met with little enthusiasm because there was simply not any capacity in the mission to do this.
So this means we had a $4 billion state in peace building operation.
With the humanitarian world jumping up and down, contributing with support and money.
And there was no overall plan for the first two years.
It's quite thought provoking.
But but that has to be a fact.
Now, what about planning or conflict management, which was my focus, after all, the secretary general's report that mention of October the fourth.
This, to my understanding, the only planning related document touching upon reconciliation and conflict resolution.
But since this was no planning document, one has to conclude that there was never any substantial plan for reconciliation and for conflict resolution.
So what next? No overall plan, no plan for conflict management.
But I thought surely there must be some conflict analysis providing a basis for conflict management activities.
To find out about that employed a similar process.
I turned all the stones that I could think of. But as you might have guessed, there was no comprehensive conflict analysis either.
There was some internal U.N. reporting that included analysis, but this would be either situational or subject based.
Nothing comprehensive. So the conclusion was that the U.N. was facing an extremely complex conflict landscape that traumatised
people who had been fighting with one another in the world since the beginning of human life on the island.
And there was no analysis of the challenges that this represented.
What should have been done in terms of analysis.
My opinion is that these buildings should always be based on mapping of needs, and conflict management is about one such set of needs.
A look at later efforts by other actors, non-U.S. actors,
to analyse the conflict landscape in East Timor, provide some ideas, I believe, as to what it takes.
The report of 2004 from the Colombian university called Timor-Leste the conflict assessment offers a number of valuable insights,
but it is brief on historical perspectives and only divide in the Timorese population and also on relevant socioeconomic factors.
This almost simultaneous report from Columbia University and the Norwegian File Film
Institute provides comprehensive baseline data on socio economic conditions for development,
but does not establish a link for a connection between these and the conflict equations.
In 2004, U.S. conducted a conflict assessment with a strikingly accurate prediction of some conflict scenarios.
But they missed out on ethnic divisions and they term the Timorese as a generally unified people.
So that support wasn't quite there either.
Josh Trinidad and Brian Castro presented in 2007 an analysis with relevant demographic factors.
For instance, the apparent connection between young people moving from rural areas in East Timor to the urban centres,
and the fact that that's where where the violence mainly took place in 2006.
And this has to do with statistic evidence that or at least the basis for the
suggestion that violence is more likely where you have concentration of young people.
An interesting observation.
In 2009, James, somebody rendered an incisive analysis of the dynamics of the 2006 conflict, identifying the regional actors and their changing roles.
That is particularly interesting, I find, including the gangs, the most large groups.
Paulo Castro, Texas social anthropologist,
analysed in 2011 a whole range of conflict aspects from the angle of social anthropology, including political conflicts,
the East-West conflict, the conflict between the Timorese who stayed and the ones who left, and its no linguistic divisions and more.
It's a quite interesting and incisive document.
The Timorese NGO settlement, together with Inter Peace from Geneva,
issued a report in 2009 based on hearings Countrywide, pointing out a number of obstacles to peace,
spanning from the relationship between modern democracy and the traditions of East Timor to corruptions, impunity and language problems.
My point by mentioning all of these and others is that is that I believe that if we put them together,
we begin to understand much better what the conflict landscape of East Timor was about.
Conflict landscapes in post-modern settings are, in my view, normally too pervasive and too faceted to be analysed by one or two scholars or experts.
I believe an adequate analysis requires expertise in fields like social anthropology, sociology, social psychology,
political science, economy, as well as total knowledge of the country's history, culture and traditions.
I believe a multidisciplinary team is generally needed.
The U.N., as of today, is not able to provide something like that.
But my suggestion is that outsourcing to scholars, seasoned practitioners, prominent thinktank members could be a way of addressing this.
I think the resources are out there. If we start, if we get serious about it,
can we assume that a sort of multifaceted conflict analysis would have identified the factors that led to the crisis in East Timor?
I don't think we can say so with absolute certainty,
but it appears very likely that the union would have been much better equipped for conflict management had they done this exercise.
Let's take a look at the east west rift in the population.
I think the analysis provided by senior Darva Castro and Partners takes us where
they point at stereotypes that they were able to identify in the population.
This suggests that there were detectable material out there that an analysis should be able to find myself.
I interviewed a gentleman named Mario Carrasquillo,
who founded the first political party in East Timor in 1974 and who was the governor of East Timor from 82 to 92.
And he surprised me by saying that this is an old social phenomenon.
There were all these differences.
People in the West were better off because the land is more fertile, they have better income, they are higher education.
And when they settle in Dili they live in different places.
So yes, the differences were always the. What more?
We know that the East-West issue caused a critical divide within the army.
There was another between the army and the police and also a conflict within the police on the same grounds.
And these were known conflicts. These were known.
There was a known fact that these conflicts existed.
I would say they should have been detectable.
I would also say that the rift in the population over the relationship with Indonesia was an obvious factor.
And if you started scratching that surface, you would most likely find the connection with the East West perspective,
and you would most likely come to identify and understand the perspective.
This this issue that became so important in 2006.
I also believe that a profound conflict analysis on the relationship between the various political actors would have been very useful to the UN,
who, in my opinion, seemed to take too lightly on this aspect.
I should get back to that. A third critical factor, as I mentioned, was the martial law troops and the gangs and the role they played in 2006.
If imagining that James Scambos analysis had taken place in 1999 and not in 2007,
it is my belief that the US would have got a much better understanding of this problem and the threat it represented.
So home Fitzgibbon.
Let's turn to what reconciliation, conflict resolution activities that actually took place despite the lack of mandates,
analysis and planning for the transition period.
And I did conduct a number of important activities.
The timeframe prevents me from going into that in detail, but they did a lot.
On the return of refugees cross border dialogue, civic, educational, constitutional development,
free flow of information, human rights, dissemination of dialogue with local leaders in care about communal violence.
There was a range of useful activities. You did also make some efforts to bring political actors together for dialogue.
But the value like of an indicated wasn't obvious, and I would get back to it.
But the significant effort was the establishment of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation.
The CSB on Syria have the combined mandate of investigating reporting on serious crime.
And facilitating reconciliation between victims and perpetrator of lesser crime.
See if I was active from February 2002 to October 2005.
So an interesting question here. That is, to what extent did KBR meet the needs of reconciliation despite a partly vague mandate?
KBR carried out a variety of reconciliation activities.
Among them was a series of television broadcast national hearings involving victims and perpetrators, as well as politicians.
There were healing workshops, community workshops discussing the impact of the conflict.
There was an outreach program for refugees in the West and an urgent reparation scheme for victims with critical needs.
If I have forgotten something, I trust Phyllis will set me right after my presentation.
But in all, I believe Savio's work made a real difference for a big number of people in East Timor.
Otherwise you end up not even organisations.
The Bretton Wood institutions all contributed.
They contributed with institution building, employment for vulnerable groups,
community development, poverty reduction, infrastructure and entrepreneurship training and more.
And these efforts might have had an indirect positive effect on reconciliation.
UNHCR, for its part, was directly involved in the reconciliation process through comprehensive return and reintegration activities.
However, in my opinion, some reconciliation and conflict resolution efforts were missing.
Let me first look at the political context. One senior government representative in East Timor said to me,
the political actors should have got together early on and agreed on one objective, one objective only.
And I got clear, as it were, what he said national unity.
That's the main thing missing. National unity. Some efforts were made to induce dialogue between leading political actors.
But the Timorese leaders I met generally expressed that this was a largely missing element in the entire approach.
Mari Alkatiri, for his part, claimed that the Untied leadership primarily related to Santino Gusmao,
that Ramos-Horta and CNRT, the overall resistance organisation, and not to Fretilin, the biggest political party.
He believed that an initiative like the more bizarre dialogue taken by the Catholic Church in conjunction with President
Ramos-Horta in 2011 to initiate dialogue between the leaders of CNRT and Fretilin should have been launched early on.
The need for national reconciliation in Syria was a main program component.
Community reintegration 1371 perpetrators of minor crime successfully went through a reconciliation and reintegration process.
However, according to KBR, at least 3000 additional perpetrators who are eligible for this process.
This means that less than one third of the eligible perpetrators to call them that were covered.
I guess the pre-screening by a public prosecutor, which was part of the process and submission to the court for endorsement afterwards,
would be a natural limit to Syria's outreach,
as would its duty to report serious crime to the prosecutor and stop the process if serious crime was detected.
I guess this in itself can be an interesting basis for a discussion, but for my context here,
I would like to observe that these limitations, given serious recommendations in the report of October 2005, became very important.
So here we are recommended that the work needed to continue to recommended the establishment of a new entity for
a broad scale reconciliation in the communities and the recommended the pursuit of justice for the victims.
As far as I have been able to follow developments, none of this happened.
The reports from Syria, I received little enthusiasm from President Xanana Gusmao,
whose reaction apparently, apparently had a chilling effect by September 211.
Two laws of relevance to this subject, including a law on an institute of Memory, supposed to be the entity implementing this year,
though recommendations were pending in Parliament,
but facing opposition from parliamentarians but also from veterans who think they should be first in line.
Serious work started only two and a half years into the entire commission.
If an early, profound conflict analysis and adequate planning planning had taken place early on,
CMU might have started working early 2000 instead of 2002 if the needs were properly, properly, properly marked.
Part of the process might have been the national, large scale,
community based reconciliation that Kevin Rudd later suggested the possible new entity for broad scale reconciliation.
My time out of the battle for reaching out to the population at large,
including Easterners, Westerners, including economists and independents proponents.
This should, in my opinion, have been a priority in 1999 slash 2000 and not an ignored suggestion suggestion six years later.
Then a few words of the modern martial art groups. My suggestion is,
but what should I have tried with a special tried to implement a special large scale program for the large for for the most large groups,
including reconciliation among them, but also combining it with a structured set top for legal practice on most large sports as it is today.
As far as I know, this martial art fights are still happening.
And and it's it's still a fairly wild activity going on.
So analogous model took an initiative in 2005 and had some I think it was 14 groups signing a
joint declaration that they would not use violent violence against them amongst themselves,
although that is a recommended recommendable effort.
I believe that earlier and much more comprehensive action, a comprehensive action should have been taken to address the most large groups challenge.
Then if you were to monitor the need for monitoring of conflicts in East Timor
was essential from the beginning and might have been crucial at a later stage.
In fairness to the UN operations,
the two year transition period planned in 99 and the steady reduction of U.N. operations were not the proper basis for assertive monitoring.
In 2005 and 2006, when the crisis was brewing in 2006.
Security Council members had long been pressing for a conclusion of the East Timor success story,
and some Timorese leaders also wished to see the UN leave.
So for the Azores, due to sit the Timorese leaders down to discuss the crisis would probably have been anything but easy.
Still, I think one more question.
The monitoring, one example the conflict between the police and the army was brewing for quite some time before it became a factor in the 2006 crisis.
The media, unlike the UN, kept reporting on conflicts also within the police.
The UN operations kept reporting about comprehensive U.N. support towards the development of the police and the army,
but never indicated any effort to address the conflict between them.
Not even when Army soldiers detained a number of police officers in January 2004 and attacked a police station in December 2004.
Was there any U.N. initiative to address this conflict?
The Secretary-General reported that there is a need to effectively address the strained relationship between the two security forces.
But if you read the following reports,
it spoke to technical support and capacity building and nothing about a possible initiative to address this problem.
And as we know, this problem became critical in 2006.
In retrospect, one might wish to see.
The UN tried to agree with the Timorese leader on leaders on how to handle the transition period,
including a clear joint commitment that if there is a major crisis, we shall sit down together and discuss how we can save the nation.
But then you would also need an agreement with local leaders on how to do the transition period, and that was not there from the beginning.
Largely, the understanding is that.
The Timorese leaders were not participating much in the planning process.
I mentioned the Manus meeting with Janani Gusmao, but there is little else indicating Timorese political participation.
But if you were to have such an understanding, you would also need a sensible time frame, not a two year transition period, not one year mandate.
The time for the UN operations. Some team leaders I spoke to said that if there had been an agreement to begin
with on a five year transition period and we had agreed on how to do this,
this could have worked and it could have worked much better.
I think the U.N. conflict management shortcomings that I have gone through, I should be seen in the light of New York's approach.
Third quarter, the planning course was given to DP kill, which excluded DP excluded the World Bank and, as I mentioned, the Timorese.
It is perhaps not obvious that a more inclusive approach would have led to better results,
but it would have been sound, I think, to draw on all good resources, not making it an internal affair.
For the sake of balance. We should know that the UN did a comprehensive and in many ways successful job on institution building,
on security activities that were better defined and better prepared.
However, to sum up, my belief is that the East Timor operations should have included the following.
That should have been the Security Council mandate,
including reconciliation and conflict resolution from the start, not only after the whole thing collapsed in 2006.
There should have been a more realistic timeframe for the operations, but it should have been a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary conflict analysis.
There should have been a better planning process for the transition period, including the reconciliation and conflict resolution aspect.
There should have been clearly defined reconciliation objectives and activities,
including a national reconciliation program, perhaps along the lines suggested by later by Syria,
but should have been an early comprehensive dialogue cooperation project for political actors with the purpose of fostering national unity.
There should have been a national project for marginalised groups, including reconciliation and conflict resolution.
And if those should I mean, an agreement with local leaders on how to do the transition process,
including joint robust monitoring and follow up and conference.
These are my viewpoints. I'm aware that such suggestions vary, are not subject to who research and who writes about them.
I have seen a lot of suggestions. I shall be happy to discuss mine.
These were the points I had on East Timor.
I am happy to discuss what I found in Africa,
but in its 12:00 and we have half an hour so we can expect an interesting question from what you looked at in Africa.
As you know, what we can discuss is what, if anything, has addressed some of those comments within the Peacebuilding Commission.
Thank you so much for the overview of your research and the list of things to to change.
I had a couple of questions, but I'm going to save them because I'm sure there are others who do as well.