Larine Statham – Fresh concerns have emerged that East Timor's economy will be dealt a savage blow, leaving hundreds of people without work, when United Nations forces withdraw from the country.
East Timor's President Jose Ramos Horta has a plan to keep the country's many taxi drivers, hospitality workers, landlords and moteliers in business.
The president's office, since last year, has been developing a range of tourism events, which aim to promote East Timor as a peaceful, adventure-sport destination.
The inaugural Tour de Timor international mountain bike race, in August 2009, attracted almost 300 competitors from 12 countries.
Within three weeks of the event, Australia's travel warning for East Timor, which had since April 2006 advised people to "reconsider their need to travel" there, was reduced to a level three warning.
"One effective means to promote peace is through sport and cultural events," Dr Ramos Horta told AAP. "These events have a double effect in that they bring in foreign participants and international media coverage."
In addition to running fishing competitions, marathons and yacht races in recent years, scuba divers from around the world have flocked to East Timor's capital, Dili, this week to compete in the country's first-ever underwater photography competition.
Dr Ramos Horta is hoping UN personnel in East Timor, and their spending habits, will be largely replaced by affluent event participants and their travelling companions.
"There will hundreds of highly paid UN personnel who have left, leaving behind apartments they rented, and no longer eating at restaurants," he said.
"So we have to create new demands and you do that by promoting tourism... but also by bringing new investors. "And hopefully there will be wealthier Timorese by then."
Gyorgy Kakuk, UN spokesman for the operation in East Timor, told AAP it was not yet possible to forecast the economic impact of the UN's proposed withdrawal and that any figures would only be theoretical in nature.
Mr Kakuk said the real drawdown would only begin after the successful completion of the general and presidential elections in 2012. Dr Ramos Horta said prices in Timor, where services are limited and the local currency is in US dollars, was proportionately high compared with other countries in the region, because of the UN presence.
"They create an artificial economy that inflates prices," he said. "We know from the past when the UN left in 2003 prices started going down, so hopefully in another two years prices will start to go down, quality will improve and we will have more money spenders coming from Australia."
He said Timor could not compete with other Asian countries on cost or "Asia-ness", but that it had a lot of unique features.
"It is very unexplored," he said. "It can be a Mediterranean spot in South-East Asia because of its culture – it's mostly Catholic with Portuguese colonial architecture."
The UN began its peacekeeping operation in East Timor in 1999 as part of the country's transition to independence. East Timor is one of the poorest nations in the region.