Lawrence Bartlett, Sydney – The explosion of violence in East Timor was the result of an accumulation of ethnic, economic and historical grievances in the young country and the failure of the government to address them, analysts say.

With the army and police fractured, gangs rampaging through Dili and tension between president and prime minister, the conflict has dismayed supporters of the young country which gained its independence in 2002.

"This is multi-layered: it's east versus west, there's a political dimension to it, there's the animosity between the defence force and the police," said Peter Abigail, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

"There's 40 percent unemployment and a whole bunch of young kids who can't get jobs and are now the cause of the problem," Abigail told AFP.

Protesters in Dili on Thursday demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri over the violence. But analysts cautioned against seeing his apparent rift with President Xanana Gusmao as central to the problem.

"It's important to note the split between Gusmao and Alkatiri is not at the base of this particular problem," said Damien Kingsbury of Deakin University. "(But) it is certainly responsible for the problem not being resolved more quickly or more easily than it has been."

The tension between the president and the premier could be traced back to 1999 when Gusmao resigned from the independence movement Fretilin, which Alkatiri now leads, Kingsbury said.

Gusmao is a folk hero among East Timorese after spearheading the impoverished nation's bloody struggle for independence from Indonesia while Alkatiri was in exile. Gusmao quit Fretilin because he wanted to be a unifying figure, he said. "Alkatiri's personal style is also a bit authoritarian, while Gusmao is seen to be very much a man of the people."

The rift between the two men, both from the Dili area, had nothing to do with the ethnic divide between those from the east and the west of the tiny country, he said.

That divide was behind the eruption of violence last month after westerners in the army complained of discrimination against them by easterners and were sacked.

"The divide between the military and the police is largely an east-west divide also, because the majority of the army comes from the east (and) the majority of the police from the west, although there are also internal factions along those lines," Kingsbury said.

During the Indonesian occupation from 1975, police were recruited mainly from the west and the militias which went on the rampage after the vote for independence in 1999 were also stronger in the west, he said.

"Westerners were very much in favour of independence but because there were a few bad people there, militiamen and police and so on, they've been tarred with the same brush by easterners, essentially as collaborators."

The government had failed to deal with these rifts and overreacted to any challenge to its authority, he said. "That's what happened about a month ago and the soldiers headed off for the hills and that's when you saw the situation really starting to get out of control."

The arrival of troops from Australia last week put an end to the fighting within the army and police, and between the two forces, but gang violence then erupted in the streets of Dili.

This was not directly related to the east-west divide, said Ross Babbage, adjunct professor at the Australian National University.

"The gangs are really a product of deeper seated problems rather than a major ethnic cultural divide," he told AFP.

"If these people had good ongoing jobs, a broader commitment to society and thought the government was doing a lot of the right things, I don't think this would have degenerated into this violence. There is an element of ethnic stuff in the gangs, but much more they are gangs of opportunity – or lack of opportunity."

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer supported this view in an interview with commercial radio Thursday.

"It's a case of gangs – often criminal gangs – just running rampant. There might be an element of payback in what they're doing, settling old scores, I don't think it's necessarily ethnically based," he said. "I don't think in other words, as some people say, the country is descending into civil war."