East Timor’s new Prime Minister Jose Ramos Horta has been warmly welcomed by Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer as a leader who could help solve the country’s political crisis. But regional analysts doubt if Horta can deliver the goods. A major reason for this doubt is the belief that Australia may have played a role in the

downfall of the former PM Mari Alkatiri, who was pressured to resign, late last month, after the Australian media claimed that he has been secretly arming the militia to eliminate his opponents.

Horta, who is known to be a close ally of Australia, was thrust into the PM’s role even though he is not even a member of Alkatiri’s Fretilin Party, which holds 55 of the 88 seats in parliament. Horta, after his installation on Monday, said his government’s immediate role was to consolidate security in the country and indicated that Australian forces currently in the capital Dili will remain until the end of the year.

Rights activist Francisco da Silva Gari speaking from Dili said that Ramos Horta will have huge challenges in the long run. He said there is a perception that Alkatiri’s dismissal was engineered by Canberra because “he was tough in negotiations with Australia on the oil and gas deals, because he was trying to defend the rights of Timorese for their natural resources”. He said that some political leaders have used the so-called conflict between people from the east and west to serve their own political goals. Damian Grenfell, of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, agrees that there is no history of an east-west conflict. “Rather this is a conflict between access to state resources and political control, that has seen parts of the community mobilised on an east-west basis,” he said. ‘’This is a potential cause for future instability”.

But, the head of the Department of International Relations at the University of Indonesia, Haryadi Wiryawan, sees it differently. He was quoted in the Jakarta Post recently as saying that “Alkatiri’s socialist outlook is seen as not in line with what Australia wants East Timor to be”, and his closeness to China did not please Canberra either.

Just before the crisis erupted in Dili, Alkatiri’s government had awarded a major oil exploration contract to Petro China and was also reported to be close to signing an agreement with Beijing to build a petroleum refinery in Dili which would have undermined Australia’s plans to build one in the northern Australia to process oil and gas resources from the disputed Timor Gap — which has an estimated $30 billion worth of resources. “The Australian media fail to realise that Alkatiri’s great achievement of getting a much better deal for the Greater Sunrise Unitisation Agreement and setting up the Petroleum Fund, is widely praised as is his bringing in of Cuban doctors to work in the rural areas and his policy of saving Timor-Leste from international debt,”Australian academic Helen Hill told IPS. ‘’If he is not re-appointed as a minister it will be very difficult for Timor-Leste to get back on this path”. — IPS