DILI, East Timor (CNN) -- As the presence of an international peacekeeping force in East Timor grows, so do the hopes of pro-independence East Timorese after weeks of terror and violence.
After a 24-year Indonesian occupation, a referendum in East Timor had voted four-to-one in favour of independence.
And in times of crisis -- from the Bali bombings to East Timor to relief after a tsunami -- Darwin has been a hub, moving out aid, caring for victims, making sure that we do right by the people of this region.
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It was Mr Howard who had written to Mr Habibie in December suggesting a process of self-determination for East Timor.
One of Mr de Mello's final acts was to launch East Timor 2020, an easy-to-understand version of the government's development plan, drawn up with input from East Timor's 13 districts.
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But they seemed to symbolise one thing now within East Timor's grasp - real hope for the future and with it peace at last.
Nobel Peace Prize laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and East Timor president Jose Ramos-Horta have signed an open letter calling on Iran to unconditionally drop the charges against the Baha'i educators.
On March 14th, Indonesia finally convened the first of its special human-rights courts on the 1999 East Timor violence.
UN-run referendum that led to East Timor's freedom, so her presence indicates an attempt to heal the relationship between the two countries.
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Whereas Mr Suharto was sternly authoritarian, Mr Habibie has been ready to reform: he has given freedom to the press, emptied the jails of political prisoners and offered self-determination to the people of East Timor.
Habibie, Mr Suharto's little-liked and hand-picked successor, has said that East Timor could instead be granted independence.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush was able, time and time again, to cite specific international hot spots -- literally, from Sierra Leone to East Timor.
Gen Richards has extensive operational experience in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and first-hand knowledge of the challenges in Afghanistan, gained as commander of Nato coalition forces there between 2006 and 2007.
South Sudan will tread a path already navigated in recent years by East Timor, Eritrea, Slovakia, and the ex-Yugoslav and ex-Soviet republics that had big-country blessings on their birth.
Tokyo has differed from similar pledging conferences of recent years in one important respect: unlike in the cases of Bosnia, or Kosovo, or even East Timor, no formal international structure is being set up to co-ordinate the reconstruction effort and to shoulder much of the burden of administering a country that, after more than 20 years of strife, has only the most rudimentary governmental mechanism of its own.
UN's secretary-general, has said that, if Indonesia cannot keep order in East Timor, then other means will have to be found.
It is hard to see why tiny East Timor, with its separate history, should provoke fears of the break-up of Indonesia.
The United Nations has never recognised Indonesian rule there, leaving East Timor as one of the unfinished items on the world's post-colonial agenda.
East Timor may need international peacekeepers for years, and Falintil's 1, 000-plus troops (compared to the PKF's 8, 500) are not about to replace them any time soon.
For one thing, the 1, 500-strong "Task Force 72, " part of the international peacekeeping operation in East Timor, has been receiving plenty of favorable reports from the U.N.
In eastern Slavonia, Cambodia and East Timor, where a single transitional administrator was responsible for both military and civilian affairs, co-ordination was much easier.
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