Annan favours strong UN presence back in East Timor

UNITED NATIONS: U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan believes that U.N. peacekeepers must return to East Timor in large numbers to control a new outburst of violence in the tiny nation, a spokesman said.

Any new deployment will have to be approved by the U.N. Security Council, but Annan understands that the gradual reduction of the U.N. mission in East Timor over the last four years will have to be reversed, spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.

"The council will have to make some decision as to what the U.N. posture in East Timor will look like in the months ahead, but it is pretty clear already from here that that will have to be increased," Dujarric said.

Weeks of unrest have left at least 30 people dead and forced tens of thousands of fearful residents to flee their homes for makeshift camps and shelters in and around the city. U.N. agencies have delivered emergency airlifts of food and other supplies.

The wave of unrest is the worst since East Timor's bloody break from Indonesian rule in 1999, when retaliatory militia groups devastated much of the territory and killed nearly 1,500 people.

The United Nations ran East Timor from 1999 to 2002 and at one point had 10,000 civilian and military personnel in the country. By 2006, almost all the peacekeepers were gone and the U.N. had turned control back to the Timorese, drawing some criticism that it pulled out too soon. New York, Thursday, AP