At the Toko Lay hardware store in central Dili, Charles Tan was checking a newly arrived generator to sell to the burgeoning construction industry. "We will close the shop for the election but we are not expecting any trouble," he said. "Everything is safe here now and we only want it to continue."

Mr Tan represents a business which has been in Dili since 1959, having survived Portuguese and Indonesian rule. The outer shell of the shop and inner walls of the large, attached godown bear the dark scars of fire. He has only just replenished his stock from the looting and burning of his shop, which was hit like many others in the Indonesian revenge rampage through East Timor in September 1999.

He and his family were forced to flee Dili on September 4, 1999, and many of his 30 local staff fled to the hills. After travelling through West Timor to Surabaya, East Java, Mr Tan returned in May last year, restarting the business last September. He sells Vietnamese rice, Chinese generators and construction materials – and says business is now improving.

"I can't be angry at what happened here to us. Everybody suffered, many people much more than me. But it was so very sad to see all the damage. Now we can only rebuild," he said.

The over-riding need to get small business back on its feet and to find a viable economic future for East Timor are tasks which today's election cannot solve.

Whoever wins will instead inherit a poisoned chalice – a territory not yet an independent nation which faces problems so daunting that many fear it cannot survive.

"This is not the election to win if you are a political party here today," said a diplomat. "This place faces some immediate, tough choices over how to survive economically, and whatever decisions are made, such as how to cover the national budget, how to unite these very traumatised people, there's one hell of a job ahead."

East Timor will need about US$60 million in annual budget support for several years, until oil and gas revenues come on line from the Timor Gap, the diplomat estimates. Even with the Timor Gap revenues, it faces a dark future, he and many others believe.

"We are not talking about Ground Zero here, but something below zero," said an international medical worker. "It is not just the physical destruction which you can see all around you still. What bothers me much more is the shattered hearts and minds, the desperate lack of basic skills and education, the near-impossibility of repairing the wounds inflicted here."