Seth Mydans – People here have got used to the scene: a mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive multinational police contingent.

"Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has become a theme for critics – both foreign and East Timorese – as the United Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new nation.

As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still lie burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that followed East Timor's vote last August to end 24 years of Indonesian rule. As many as 80 per cent of the territory's 700,000 people have no jobs. Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian West Timor, too afraid to return.

The desperation of East Timor's unemployed, and the first spasms of violence it has spawned, are the sharpest signs of a swelling discontent in this physically and emotionally traumatised land.

Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to lawlessness and political disarray, and could open the door to trouble from the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to West Timor after laying waste to the territory last September.

Despite an invasion of peacekeepers, bureaucrats and aid workers in the months since, much of this battered land remains, as officials like to say, at ground zero. There is still no working police force or justice system, no government structure, few schools, no working water or power or transport system, no post office, not much of an economy, little reconstruction.

The slow pace of recovery has called into question the capacity of the UN, with its lumbering centralised bureaucracy, to address urgent needs and operate as the government of a nation in crisis.

Dili today does not present a pretty picture, with a separate expatriate world superimposed on a scene of destruction and poverty. The foreigners are rich, with cars, offices, hot running water, Sunday barbecues. The East Timorese have almost nothing.

"They can't take a table out to the side of the road to sell things," one UN official said, "because not only do they not have anything to sell but they don't have a table."