Okay, phase two, the crisis worsens.
Remember as they were in crisis, there was nothing working in this country when they
took it over because it had been razed by the militia and the Indonesian military.
So things got worse.
80% unemployment.
They weren't making a dent and the unemployment.
The UN didn't have the expertise, it turns out to do many of the things that they
needed to do to rebuild this country as one staff member put it.
UN Staff was good at diplomatic cables, not laying electrical cable.
The same thing could be said basically everywhere you turn.
They just didn't have the skills to physically rebuild a country.
There were multiple missteps with some very important issues.
So, for example, the guerilla army.
The army that had resisted Indonesians for 24 years.
The army that had essentially provided leadership for the country for 24 years
had to be honored in some way, while at the same time they had to protect.
In other UN situations, those kinds of armies had been sources of problems and
so de Mello was very reluctant to give them any leeway.
Tried to keep them very tightly leashed and that was a real issue for them.
Especially given the role they had played in the resistance.
And then the whole effort was hampered by UN regulations that were highly
restrictive and in many cases in appropriate.
So for example,
there were restrictions on what funds could be used, what funds can be used on.
So the UN staff had a huge budget, 600 million or something like that.
While the budget couldn't be spent directly on the Timorese though.
The whole East Timor budget was something like $60 million.
So that all these funds were flowing into the UN staff,
couldn't spill over into the real needs in the country.
So for example, there were 500 UN cars in East Timor and
the miller had to work to get even 10 of those allocated to the Timorese leader.
So you can imagine how this goes over with the local populace when all these new
cars are coming in, flooding the country and
yet none of the UN staffers have access to it.
As spring 2000 rolled around, remember they just got there in November.
This is just a few months later.
They were really on the brink of failure, physical security was breaking down.
There was more and
more threats from the militia that hadn't quite melted away as much as they thought.
The economy was still in ruins.
And the Timorese began viewing the UN as quote a second occupation,
which is about as big an insult as you could give.
Given it was the UN that negotiated the end of the first occupation,
the 24 year occupation.
So this is the situation de Mello finds himself in after his best efforts and
about 6 months of work there.
Which leads us to Phase 3, where de Mello really had to reset his priorities and
double his efforts.
In this case, his highest priority was emphasizing security.
He revised the peacekeepers', rules of engagement.
The peacekeepers are the UN military people there
who were intended initially to be merely passive.
They couldn't initiate engagements.
In fact, they had to fire warning shots before they fired on anybody.
But, in order to tighten up military security,
the safety of the people, he allowed them to initiate.
He allowed them to be more actively involved.
A couple of large police and military sweeps to drive out the militia.
And then some important strategic decisions.
They had a repatriation office in West Timor.
And they had to shut that down because it was threaten people's lives or
threaten out there, it meant they couldn't bring people back from West Timor.
East Timorese citizens who wanted to comeback, they had to let that go and
leave it there because it was too much of a security threat.
So really emphasizing security was his number one priority and
not his inclination.
He is a man who had spend his career advocating for humanitarian effort
It wasn't his inclination but he considered it the priority here.
Number two, he created a co-government.
So for the first time on the mission,
high-paid foreigners would work directly under the Timorese.
In particular, he had eight Secretary, so department heads, essentially.
He made four of them internationals, as the initial plan was.
But then four were East Timorese.
He literally allocated half of the government to East Timorese.
This was before the government was formed.
This was before elections had happened.
This was before the constitution was created,
all of which was against the rules.
The UN officials hated this.
That was not the mandate.
He was supposed to run the country for two years.
But he recognized it wasn't going to work if he ran the country.
He had to give these guys more power and it had to be substantive power.
It couldn't be superficial power.
He gave, literally half the cabinet to the Timorese.
Some of the folks didn't like this.
Even local staffers, UN staffers didn't like it.
They said we came to work for
the Secretary General not this department head from the local folks.
