Dili – A piece of cardboard torn from a Tiger beer carton covers the small beef satays (kebabs) to help them smoke on Emilio Gomes' grill.
They used to sell for 300 rupiah (40 cents) each stick but a 66 percent price hike has pushed the cost to 500 rupiah a skewer.
"Since independence, the price has gone up," says Gomes, one of the vendors in a makeshift food court under the trees beside a floating hotel in Dili harbor.
The floating hotel is leased by the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) for its staff.
East Timorese stop at the satay stalls here to lunch. Portuguese bread rolls are priced at 1,000 rupiah each.
A woman sells one grilled fish for 5,000 rupiah. "Singapore and Thailand people already ate here," Gomes told AFP. "Australians didn't buy here yet."
None of the satay vendors – whose own homes were destroyed four months ago and still lie in ruins – have eaten at the air conditioned, floating hotel. "You must use dollars. That's expensive," said Ermenegildo do Rosario, who works with Gomes.
This glaring division between the East Timorese and foreign economic sectors is raising concern among East Timorese community leaders.
"There is a big disparity between the international people and the East Timorese in terms of economics," said Joaquin Fonseca, of the human rights group Yayasan Hak.
Dinner on the Amos W. floating hotel costs 14 Australian dollars, roughly the same price as 112 sticks of Gomes' satay.
UNTAET brought in the Amos W. and a second floating hotel and anchored them in Dili Harbor to help solve the accommodation shortage for its foreign staff.
Most houses here were razed during the September campaign of murder, arson and forced deportation by anti-independence militias and their backers in the Indonesian armed forces.
The violence followed the August 30 ballot in which East Timorese voted overwhelmingly to move toward independence.
Under UN administration, East Timorese have moved toward political freedom, but community leaders like Fonseca worry that their economic liberty is in danger.
"We think that a dual economy is going on in East Timor, where the East Timorese are placed on the losing side of the whole process," said Fonseca.
"By nature, after the destruction, they don't have that many resources to compete with the newcomers," he said of the listless unemployed East Timorese who wander Dili's waterfront, and the sporadic demonstrations that are beginning to break out.
Some East Timorese have opened small restaurants, but Australians are operating others. One Australian restaurant is selling hamburgers piled with egg, bacon, processed cheese and beetroot for eight Australian dollars: bacon and cheese are not available on the East Timorese market.
"If there is no mechanism in place to start small-scale business, agro-business, then I'm afraid that in the long-run people will not be able to live their lives, while the international (UN) people can still survive with goods imported from Darwin," Fonseca said.
Dili's bustling city market, where few foreigners ever go, carries an increasing but still basic stock of green vegetables, small tomatoes, potatoes, rice, noodles, canned sardines, cigarettes and chillis.
"It's still expensive but if we buy from the Chinese it's cheaper," said Manuela dos Santos, an East Timorese woman who sleeps on a thin mat outside a former church compound because her house was damaged in the violence. "There's no money here yet," said the woman who wants to open her own restaurant.
Foreign-operated hotels, one of which charges 110 Australian dollars a night for a small room, pay local workers five or six Australian dollars a day. The average wage for an East Timorese UNTAET worker is 50,000 rupiah a day.
"I'm very worried," said David Ximenes, of the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) that fought for 24 years for East Timor's freedom. "The people that come from outside are developing their own economy to look for profit. That is the problem."
They should be coming to help the East Timorese, said Ximenes. Refik Hodzic, an UNTAET spokesman, said a joint CNRT-UNTAET committee was reviewing a regulation that "will deal with many aspects of business."
At the same time, UNTAET was trying to re-launch the local economy by hiring thousands of civil servants and starting road repair and other labour-intensive job creation projects. "As time goes on the situation will only improve, with the re-launch of the local economy," Hodzic said.