WORLD BANK SETS TWO-STAGE EAST TIMOR MISSION.
A World Bank mission to East Timor will include an emergency relief phase followed by long-term reconstruction, Reuters reports a Bank spokesman said today. "Everything is to be done. East Timor is to be rebuilt from scratch," said Graham Barrett, the Bank's spokesman in Australia and New Zealand. "The first priority is obviously humanitarian, and that involves getting people back in their homes," Barrett said in Darwin, from where a multi-agency mission led by Klaus Rohland, the Bank's director for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, will head to East Timor on Friday.
The World Bank understood half of East Timor's roughly 800,000 people had been displaced, either internally or to West Timor refugee camps and elsewhere in Indonesia, Barrett said. "Everything flows from there, but the World Bank as a development institution is focused on long-term needs," he said.
Barrett declined to put an estimate on either East Timor's short-term emergency needs or on the Bank's wider involvement, the story says. "Money is not really the problem with East Timor, given that it is a country of moderate size," he is quoted as saying. "We're confident that there will be enough money to fund East Timor's needs," he said, adding that the Bank would focus in the longer-term on using credit schemes to encourage private enterprise, possibly in areas such as coffee exports and tourism. East Timorese membership of the World Bank and the ADB was also part of the long-term plan, Barrett noted.