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Downer tells East Timor to sort out its own problems

East Timor must find its own way in the world and not look to others to sort out its problems, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday on the eve of flying to Dili for meetings with the tiny country's leaders.

"They have to learn to find solutions to their own problems, not just expect the international community indefinitely to solve all those problems for them," Downer told reporters in Adelaide.

"We have been, as a people, enormously generous to the East Timorese and will continue to provide them with support, but the East Timorese have to accept responsibility now, because they're an independent country, for their own affairs," he said, clearly frustrated by the barrage of criticism from Prime Minister Jose Ramos Horta and other East Timor leaders.

Downer was commenting on claims that foreign peacekeepers didn't stop a mass jailbreak that saw the country's most wanted man, renegade soldier Alfredo Reinado, and 56 other prisoners walk out of the front gate of Dili's Becora Jail -- a jail guarded by East Timor prison officers.

Reinado, who was in jail awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder, led an insurrection in May that sent 100,000 people to makeshift refugee camps. It was the worst civil unrest since independence from Indonesia in 2002 and led to the deployment of a 2,500-strong peacekeeping force made up of Australian, New Zealand, Malaysian and Portuguese soldiers and police officers.

"You cannot blame Australia or New Zealand or Portugal or Malaysia or the secretary-general of the UN for all the problems of East Timor," an irritated Downer said. "No country has been more supportive of East Timor than Australia and to blame Australia for everything that goes wrong in East Timor -- that's part of the problem."

The UN Security Council has approved a resolution for at least 1,600 international police to be stationed in East Timor as part of a peacekeeping force led by Australia.

The current round of troubles began in March when soldiers went on strike complaining of ethnic discrimination within the ranks. In the power vacuum, ethnic gangs took over the streets.

It was a reprise of the street violence that followed the UN-supervised independence referendum in 1999 that ended 24 years of Indonesian occupation. East Timor was a Portuguese colony for 400 years before Jakarta sent in troops in 1975 and declared the impoverished half island part of its territory.
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