Lisbon – East Timor's deposed prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, rejected Thursday a report by a conflict-prevention group which recommended that he and President Xanana Gusmao sit out next year's general election to reduce tensions in Asia's newest nation.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group blamed deadly clashes between rival armed factions which swept Dili in April and May partly on a longstanding rivalry between the two men in the report released Tuesday.

The report said internal divisions pose the greatest threat to the elections and that "the most important guarantor against violence might be for the more controversial figures in the capital to sit this election out voluntarily."

It advised Gusmao and Alkatiri "to think the unthinkable – foregoing any role in the 2007 elections so new leaders can emerge."

But in an interview published in daily Portuguese newspaper Publico, Alkatiri said the report's findings were "a simplistic way to understand what happened in the past in East Timor." "I don't want the conflict to be reduced to two people – me and Xanana Gusmao. Or that today's situation be seen as the result of old conflicts," he added.

Alkatiri resigned as prime minister under pressure in June following a wave of unrest in which more than 30 people were killed and an estimated 100,000 people were displaced.

The violence erupted after Alkatiri sacked over a third of its armed forces and it led to the deployment to East Timor of more than 3,200 international peacekeepers from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Portugal.

Alkatiri was replaced as prime minister by Jose Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and East Timor's representative abroad during its struggle to break free of an Indonesian occupation that lasted from 1975 to 1999.

A neglected Portuguese colony for hundreds of years before the Indonesian occupation, East Timor is one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of income terms but has considerable oil and natural gas resources that are just beginning to be explored.