Dili – East Timor's reluctant presidential favourite, Xanana Gusmao, threatened Saturday to withdraw from next month's elections over an electoral technicality.

Gusmao, the independence hero considered a sure winner of the territory's first presidential polls on April 14, is angry over United Nations electoral authority requirements that candidates use a logo.

He called a press conference in the Timorese capital to air his complaints over the UN-run Independent Electoral Commission (IEC)'s outlines for the ballot paper, which he says require candidates to place a political party logo alongside their name.

"I give the IEC one week to change to this requirement, and if there is no response I will withdraw my candidacy," Gusmao told reporters. Gusmao, 56, agreed to be nominated for the presidency by nine political parties on the condition that he would only run as an independent candidate. Using a logo, he said, would be interpreted as having an alliance with a political party and would therefore compromise his independence.

Gusmao, hugely popular and intensely active in efforts to reconcile pro and anti-independence East Timorese, is one of only two candidates for president of what will become the world's newest nation on May 20. His sole rival, Francisco Xavier do Amaral, 66, was president for nine days in 1975 when the former Portuguese colony declared independence, only to be invaded by Indonesia just over a week later.

Gusmao, a former guerilla commander who led the fight against Indonesia for almost two decades of its 24-year occupation, has for months repeatedly expressed his reluctance to become president. On a visit to Thailand on Tuesday he told reporters that he hoped Amaral would win. When he announced his candidacy in Dili last August, Gusmao told a packed auditorium that he would rather grow pumpkins, but had agreed to run out of pressure from international leaders and the UN's Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

The UN has been running East Timor since October 1999, after Australian-led international troops arrived to secure the territory from a massive campaign of destruction by departing Indonesian troops and their proxy local militias. The orgy of looting, arson and killing was launched in response to East Timor's overwhelming vote to split from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored referendum on August 30 1999.