A British UN official who resigned his post in East Timor out of frustration, said Monday that setting a date for full independence could now be the only way to salvage the UN mission there.
Professor Jarat Chopra also charged he was not alone in throwing in his job because top men in the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) were using "Stalinist tactics" to prevent him doing his job as director of district administration.
UNTAET, he said, was obsessed with bureaucratic empire building, had lost contact with, and the trust of, the East Timorese people and had tried to sabotage grass roots programs designed to give the people more control over their own lives.
These men had smothered UNTAET's mission, which was to prepare the East Timorese for full independence, and had not woken up to crucial problems until too late, Chopra said.
The smiles that welcomed the peacekeepers had now turned into resentment, he said, speaking in a telephone interview with AFP from the East Timorese capital of Dili.
Chopra, a Briton, is considered one of the most experienced of the UNTAET administrators.
He designed East Timor's district administration policy on a strategy developed for the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. A research fellow at Brown University in the US, he has worked as a special assistant in peacekeeping at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
In his resignation letter March 6, he charged that without a date and strategy for independence set, nothing meaningful could be done.
"Without a meaningful timetable and methodical stages for a transfer of power, this mission will drift, hold an election as an exit strategy next year and leave the Timorese with no genuine capacity built. We will have replicated the overnight decolonisations of decades past."
Chopra told AFP the straw that broke the camel's back was that he could no longer work.
"I had made a commitment to come out here for two or three years."
But when he had finished fighting top UNTAET officials from stopping a long-planned and World Bank-funded community empowerment project (CEP), he found he had no telephone, no computer, no mailbox, no desk and no vehicle.
"Puniative Stalinist depersonalization," was how he characterized the fate of anyone who spoke out.
The battle for the CEP was won, but only at an enormous price, he said -- the embitterment of the East Timorese, the Xanana Gusmao-led Council for East Timorese resistance (CNRT), and of the World Bank.
"Timorese were left with the impression that UNTAET was reluctant to take the next steps ... for some sort of methodical transfer of power.
"Now they are thinking they made a mistake in accepting the UN, and will reject it."
"They are going to have to declare independence or an early election," he added, saying the UN could remain in as an assistance mission to the new government.
Under its current mandate the UNTAET is supposed to rule for two or three years until East Timor is ready for full independence, but the way things are going, the East Timorese had no chance to become involved.
Asked if he felt UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was aware of the tensions in UNTAET, Chopra said he felt he must be, because of the resignations, and because of pointed questions Annan asked on his first visit there last month.
Chopra said part of the cause of the dispute within UNTAET was an interdepartmental "turf battle," when the UN program for East Timor was derailed by the wave of violence that followed the August 30 vote for independence from Indonesia.
In addition a ruling that planning be done in New York meant that there was "no detailed UNTAET campaign plan that related to the reality on the ground."
"I think this was fatal in dealing with CNRT -- they were not involved at all, they didn't have the opportunity to understand what it (UNTAET) would mean to them."
Asked if anything would make him withdraw his resignation, Chopra said -- yes, if I could do my assigned task."