East Timor's ruling party Fretilin and an alliance led by ex-president Xanana Gusmao have agreed to form a unity government after last month's legislative elections, the country's president said yesterday.

Oecussi – Sika and Siska were not born prematurely and yet between them the twins weigh a little over four kilograms (nine pounds), a testament to food shortages gripping impoverished East Timor.

Dili – East Timor's president said Monday he was pushing political parties deadlocked since elections last month into forming a unity government but they were disputing who would be prime minister.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – Australian troops have surrounded East Timorese military rebel Alfredo Reinado in an attempt to head off deadly clashes with disgruntled supporters of the former ruling Fretilin party.

Jill Jolliffe, Baucau – A top-ranking Indonesian official at the centre of a bitter diplomatic dispute last month has been identified as a key figure in the systematic torture of military prisoners after the invasion of East Timor.

East Timor's president Jose Ramos-Horta met Friday with political parties deadlocked over forming a government in the wake of elections last month and set a date for their first parliamentary session.

Paul Cleary – A potentially unstable coalition government with few detailed policies and weak administrative ability is now certain to emerge after East Timor's first post-independence poll resoundingly rejected the party which had championed the country's long struggle for independence.

Sebastien Blanc, Dili – With a new president and parliament, East Timor is poised for reconciliation after more than a year of simmering political tension. But one schism remains: language.

Fabio Scarpello, Dili – Democracy is taking hold in East Timor, but the inconclusive result of recent parliamentary elections is raising the specter of new political confrontation rather than resolution.

Tito Belo, Dili – East Timor's ruling party, Fretilin, plans to form a minority government if attempts to link up with coalition partners fail after recent parliamentary elections, the party's secretary general said on Monday.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – East Timor's court of appeals will ratify today the results of the country's parliamentary election, setting the stage for a potentially brutal showdown between former ruling party Fretilin and the powerful coalition opposing it.

Damien Kingsbury – When the people of East Timor went to the polls for the third time this year, they completed a political cycle that has been remarkable in part because of its relative success, but in part because it has happened at all. Yet a little over a year ago, many people thought that East Timor's fledgling democracy had failed.

Vote counting from East Timor's parliamentary election neared completion Wednesday, showing no political party will be able to clinch an absolute majority needed to govern in its own right, making a coalition government most likely.

Peter Boyle – East Timor is holding parliamentary elections on June 30. Many commentators predict former president Xanana Gusmao's new party, the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT), will form government, ousting the current ruling Fretilin party.

Karen Michelmore, Dili – East Timor's Court of Appeal has been asked to decide if a controversial new law which grants widespread amnesties for most crimes committed in the past year violates the tiny country's constitution.

With about half the vote counted in East Timor's parliamentary elections, the crucial role of the minor parties has become more clear – and the head of the small Democrat Party is emerging as the potential key to Xanana Gusmao's future.

Dili – For the third time in as many months, East Timor's people lined up and voted in high numbers. But the show of democracy could not mask mounting challenges facing Asia's newest nation five years after it proclaimed independence.

Nancy-Amelia Collins, Dili – East Timor is suffering from food shortages caused by floods and plagues of locusts that cut the harvest of the country's most important crop, corn, by 30 percent this year.

Rice, cassava, and other cereal crops have also been hard hit. Aid officials fear the situation will worsen as heavy rains continue to cause floods in parts of the country.

Karen Michelmore and Jill Jolliffe, Dili – Almost 30 years on, Zulira and Adelino Coelho are still waiting desperately for news on their son.

Like thousands of East Timorese, whose family members were killed or disappeared during the nation's turbulent past, they are also still waiting for justice.

[In the final of our series on East Timor politics, Fabio Scarpello speaks to Bishop Alberto Ricardo da Silva.]

As East Timorese vote for a new parliament and pundits predict a close race between the country's historic leaders, the outspoken Bishop of Dili slams the old guard and calls for a generational change at the top of the political echelon.

Criminal charges should be laid over alleged corruption within a government ministry, East Timor's new independent watchdog said, on the eve of parliamentary elections.

The Office of the Provedor for Human Rights and Justice (PDHJ) said it had recommended that the Prosecutor General lay criminal charges over alleged corruption within the Ministry of State Administration.

Seth Mydans, Dili – During the past week, convoys of vans and trucks have wound through the streets of this tiny seaside capital loaded with chanting, cheering men and women. When people threw rocks at them, they ducked.

Geoff Thompson

Mark Colvin: It's been a long year for East Timor. The crisis which erupted violently 12 months ago culminates tomorrow in a poll electing a new parliament and eventually a new Prime Minister.

In East Timor, half a million people will cast their votes on Saturday to elect their second government since gaining independence just five years ago. If no single party emerges as a clear winner, it could take weeks to negotiate the coalitions needed to form government.

The only Indonesian jailed over the violence surrounding East Timor's 1999 vote for independence has launched a legal challenge against the court that convicted him.

Former militia leader Eurico Guterres has asked Indonesia's Constitutional Court to review the legality of the Indonesia Human Rights Tribunal which found him guilty of the violence.

[In the first of a series on the issues surrounding East Timor's upcoming elections, Fabio Scarpello reports from Dili, examining the differing proposals on how to spend the nation's rich oil revenue.]

Tito Belo, Dili – A number of people were hurt in clashes between rival political supporters in East Timor on Wednesday as campaigning ended ahead of parliamentary elections in three days time, police and a politician said.

Jakarta – East Timor's top UN official warned Tuesday that it would take months to resolve the refugee crisis in the troubled nation, where an estimated 10 percent of the population remain in camps.

The media was vilified at rallies and one journalist was beaten during elections in East Timor this year, according to a report by observers from New Zealand that calls for criminal prosecutions of those attacking journalists.

Flaky-skinned Jenny is two weeks old. She was born in an East Timor refugee camp, adjacent to Dili's airport, that 6,000 people have been crammed into since the unrest of April and May last year. The violence prompted the return of international troops and the UN, only a few years after they had left the fledgling Southeast Asian nation.

Jakarta – Atul Khare, special envoy of the UN secretary general for East Timor, urged Jakarta and Dili on Tuesday to enhance the efficiency and credibility of a truth commission tasked with probing the bloodshed that marred East Timor's independence vote in 1999.

Tito Belo, Dili – East Timor's President Jose Ramos-Horta on Friday urged the winner of next week's parliamentary elections to form a unity government in a bid to heal divisions in the tiny state.

Bangkok – Having lost 30 per cent of its crops this year to drought, plagues and locusts, East Timor will need 15,000 tons of emergency food assistance during the upcoming "lean season," the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.

Twenty per cent of East Timor's people need food aid after severe droughts and locust plagues battered crops in the troubled young nation, two UN food agencies say.

A parliamentary committee has criticised the Howard Government for rushing the controversial treaty on exploiting natural gas in the Timor Sea.

The Government invoked the rarely used national interest exemption to bring the treaty into force in February without giving the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties an opportunity to scrutinise it.

p>The Honorable Jose Ramos-Horta
President of Republic Democratic of Timor Leste
Palacio Das Cinzas,
Dili, Timor Leste
Email: presidente-tl@easttimor.minihub.org

Your Excellency,

(Bangkok) FORUM-ASIA, writes to Jose Ramos-Horta, the new president of Timor Leste, to remind him of the pending issues of impunity on violations of human rights that have occurred in the country also known as East Timor. Swift and immediate resolution of this matter is urged.

Yemris Fointuna, Kupang – Thousands of people gathered at Dharmaloka heroes cemetery in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Abilio Jose Osorio Soares, the last governor of East Timor before it declared independence through a UN-organized referendum in 1999.

Dili – East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta ordered security forces on Tuesday to stop hunting for an army renegade accused of involvement in last year's wave of violence.

The Territory coroner has ruled out investigating the suspected murder of a Darwin journalist by the Indonesian military.

Roger East is suspected of being killed by invading Indonesian forces at Dili's wharf on December 8, 1975, after travelling to East Timor to investigate what happened to five colleagues who were killed two months earlier. He was 29.

The news that East Timor may be considering setting up a composite defence force of some 3000 personnel has aroused a curious, and generally negative reaction here in Australia. Some of the comments border on the absurd – for example, the ridiculing of the size of the force and the need for 'such a small nation' to have a force of this size.

Australia obviously has a keen interest in the outcome of the East Timorese election, to be held on June 30. East Timor is Australia's nation-building project. Australia sent troops to East Timor in 1999 to help the tiny country on its way to independence from Indonesia and it helped restore calm when violence broke out in 2006.

[Negligent Neighbour: New Zealand's Complicity in the Invasion and Occupation of Timor-Leste by Maire Leadbeater, 234 pages, Craig Potton Publishing.]

Samantha Brown, Jakarta – The new party of East Timor's ex-president Xanana Gusmao appears likely to head a government after parliamentary polls this month despite a lack of policies to lure voters, a report said Wednesday.

Max Lane – The Socialist Party of Timor (PST) is fielding 65 candidates in the June 30 parliamentary elections, and also has 25 candidates on the supplementary list (which comes into operation if candidates withdraw or die, or vacate their position after the election). Fourteen parties are contesting the elections.

Jon Lamb – The start of the official campaign period for East Timor's June 30 parliamentary elections has been marred by violence, including killings. The most serious incidents took place in Viqueque district, where two men were shot dead on June 3.

There is little doubt that our police should have gone about their attempt to persuade retired Lieutenant General Sutiyoso, now Governor of Jakarta, to appear before the Balibo coronial enquiry differently, but in the main the apologies have been much overdone.

Anne Barker – As the Balibo Five inquest winds up, there are calls for another coronial inquiry into a sixth Australian-based journalist who was murdered in East Timor in late 1975.

Darwin-based newsman Roger East has become the forgotten man in the Balibo saga that has dragged on for more than three decades.

Greg Ansley – Balibo sits astride a road weaving through the mountains of the far west of Timor-Leste (East Timor). To the north is an ancient Portuguese fort, its ramparts placed high on a peak as protection against attack.

Loro Horta – After the relatively violence-free presidential elections in East Timor in April-May 2007, many hope that the country may finally be heading on a road to normality after more than two years of internal violence and chaos. But if the successful two-round presidential polls are an important first step, severe challenges lie ahead.