Joe Leahy and Tom McCawley – When the veteran United Nations official Sergio Vieira de Mello went to Tokyo in late 1999 to lobby donors for funds to rebuild East Timor, he had no inkling of the task that lay before him.
UN security council resolution 1272 authorising the Timor mission had given the charismatic Brazilian full executive and administrative control over the tiny half-island, which had formally voted to separate from Indonesia only a few months before.
But the document provided few other details. It did not say, for instance, that he would have to build a nation from scratch – from recruiting an army to seeing that the rubbish is collected in the capital, Dili.
"I often joke that [resolution] 1272 is two-and-a-half pages long. It tells us we're responsible for everything but it didn't come with an instruction manual," says Mr Vieira de Mello.
This month he and other officials involved in the international aid effort in East Timor must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. On May 20 the territory and its population of 740,000 became formally independent for the first time in more than 400 years. That followed the peaceful election of Xanana Gusmao, the independence hero and former guerrilla leader, as president a month before.
Full independence for East Timor marks the pinnacle of what has been one of the world's most comprehensive and more successful reconstruction efforts. A former Portuguese colony, East Timor was invaded by neighbouring Indonesia in 1975. When Jakarta lost a UN-supervised referendum on independence for the territory in 1999, angry Indonesian troops and militias destroyed 80 per cent of the new nation's infrastructure and displaced up to a quarter of its population. Now people are moving back, most public services are up and running and there are courts, a central bank and a parliament.
The aid effort in East Timor owes part of its success to the territory's small size and its stable internal security situation. Unlike Afghanistan, which is plagued by ethnic divisions, East Timor's war was with an invader.
East Timor also has more than its share of world-class leaders for a small country. Aside from Mr Gusmao, these include Nobel peace prize winners Jose Ramos Horta, the territory's former ambassador-in-exile, and Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, its spiritual leader. The strong leadership enabled better co-operation between international aid agencies and local people throughout the mission.
The process began in October 1999, when the donors conducted a joint assessment of East Timor's needs that partnered international and local experts from each sector. The reconstruction effort also benefited at the beginning from a co-ordinated response from donors. In Tokyo in 1999 the donors agreed to set up the Trust Fund for East Timor to handle about $500m (£342m) in pledges. "One of the disasters in these programmes like this is to have a huge number of fragmented, separate programmes," says Sarah Cliffe, the World Bank's head in Dili.
Another success was the use of "quick-win" initiatives. The World Bank, for instance, supported elections of village councils and then gave them grants for local schemes, such as repairing water systems, as a way of getting things moving.
"Aside from the material benefits of these programmes, they're important for security and for hope in the population, so that people see something is getting going," Ms Cliffe says.
One of the mission's key difficulties, however, has been recruiting and training the East Timorese, or "capacity building", in development jargon.
East Timorese leaders commonly complain that locals were not given more jobs in the UN administration earlier. "I believe that the real capacity-building will start on the first day of independence," says Mr Gusmao.
Part of the problem was a lack of senior technical expertise among the Timorese, who had never run their own state before. Most senior civil servants under Jakarta's rule had been Indonesian. When the UN began casting around for judges for the new judicial system, for instance, the highest qualified East Timorese were undergraduate law students. Today, only about 50 per cent of senior managers in the civil service are East Timorese.
Another shortcoming was that while the mission set up a working judicial system, it did not build a systematic case against those ultimately responsible for war crimes, argues Sidney Jones of Human Rights Watch.
The mission also suffered from the red tape that makes the UN notorious.
Ultimately, though, the fact that people feel safe enough to complain demonstrates that the mission achieved its main objective: to end the cycle of war.
Ordinary East Timorese have been able to enjoy peace for long enough now that they've nearly forgotten the value of it. That's what the UN came to achieve," says a former UN worker.