Seth Mydans, Dili – During the past week, convoys of vans and trucks have wound through the streets of this tiny seaside capital loaded with chanting, cheering men and women. When people threw rocks at them, they ducked.

It was the high point of a parliamentary campaign in this poor and crime-ridden country where rock throwing is not uncommon. Officials described the campaign as unexpectedly peaceful.

On Saturday, East Timor elects a new government that analysts say they expect to upend the political order but do little to address the paralyzing poverty and disarray in the country.

The new government is likely to be less cohesive and even less effective than the last one, said Sophia Cason of International Crisis Group.

"The challenge will be to get people to understand that things aren't going to change overnight," she said. "They might still be poor and unemployed for a long time to come."

Nearly eight years after its violent separation from Indonesia, East Timor, which was at first seen as a success story in nation-building by the United Nations, may instead be a demonstration of the limits of nation-building.

The world body administered East Timor until its formal nationhood in 2002, but this little country of one million people still clings to the helping hands of the last few hundred foreign mentors and 3,000 peacekeepers.

"The international community perhaps withdrew its support for Timor Leste a bit early," said Atul Khare, an Indian diplomat who heads the much-reduced UN mission in East Timor, using the formal name of the new country.

In any case it seems there was no overcoming the country's fundamental ailments – its shortage of resources and of skilled and educated people, its lack of experience as an independent nation, its underlying social rifts and the traumas of 24 years of war in which as much as one-fourth of the population died.

East Timor was a Portuguese colony for 400 years until it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 and now is governing itself for the first time.

When Indonesia withdrew in 1999, after East Timor voted for independence, it took with it most of the civil servants and technicians who had made the territory function. Together with local militias, the Indonesian military carried out a scorched-earth policy that destroyed 80 percent of the buildings in East Timor.

Today, more than 40 percent of the work force is unemployed, one in five people have run out of food to eat and a similar proportion is living in tents or shelters, afraid to go home more than a year after a military mutiny led to a wave of arson and killings.

"All the chaos and burning and looting, and no more home," said Ana Guteres, 45, as she sat by her refugee tent, describing a sort of neighborhood ethnic-cleansing in this multiclan city. "If we go back and repair our house, people will start burning again."

The East Timorese health, education and judicial services barely function. Illiteracy, infant mortality and disease run high. Gangs of unemployed young men loiter aimlessly in the hot sun and make the streets dangerous at night.

The shells of buildings burned in 1999 stand in graffiti-covered ruins even in the heart of this threadbare little city, an emblem of the lethargy that envelops the country.

"East Timor is like waking up from a collapse, like a paralysis," said Isidoro dos Santos Correia, 24, who works with an American aid group. "The main thing is that people are just expecting promises. The mentality in Dili is wanting to be helped." He added: "Many people are gambling. They say, 'The law doesn't exist any more.' "

The returning exiles who dominate the government have imposed Portuguese as the primary language in a nation where the police, lawyers and a large portion of Parliament mostly speak Indonesian, the language of their more recent colonizers. "You end up in a place where no one really implements the law because no one really knows what it is," Cason said.

Partly because of this, the East Timor judiciary is "a total scandal," said David Cohen, director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley. "What's wrong? Where do you start?" he said of the justice system. "Incompetence. Corruption. Nepotism. Lack of oversight. Lack of accountability. The Portuguese language. All the draft laws only exist in Portuguese, and 95 percent of the people in the country can't read them."

Another underlying issue is land ownership in a country where disputes led to violence even before most records were destroyed in 1999. These disputes are one of the roots of problems like joblessness and population displacement, said Katherine Hunter, the representative of the Asia Foundation, a nongovernmental organization, in East Timor.

The election Saturday is fratricidal, pitting against each other former allies in the struggle for independence from Indonesia.

Xanana Gusmco, the hero of independence who has served for the past five years in the largely ceremonial presidency, is expected by most analysts to become the next prime minister by defeating Mari Alkatiri, who heads Fretilin, the governing party that grew out of the independence struggle.

The campaign has been acrimonious, with both candidates breaking a pledge to refrain from personal attacks.

"He still thinks he is the commander of the resistance," Alkatiri said of Gusmco at his final campaign rally Wednesday. "His principle is to try to control everything by himself. But I'd better stop talking about Xanana."

Fourteen parties are competing for the 65 parliamentary seats, and the winner is likely to need to form an unwieldy coalition government.

In May, Jose Ramos-Horta, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his campaign against the Indonesian occupation, was elected president and is expected to be a Gusmco ally if the latter wins.

Ramos-Horta served as prime minister after Alkatiri was forced to step down following the upheavals of May 2006. Ramos-Horta's victory, with nearly 70 percent of the vote, was a defeat for Alkatiri's Fretilin party and was seen as a forerunner of a Gusmco victory Saturday.

Elections are what East Timor does best. Its revolution was a nationwide vote, in which its people defied threats and violence from the Indonesian-backed militias. The elections have not yet brought prosperity, but against the odds, they seem still to give rise to hope.

"Many political parties are talking about what they will do," said Marcos Barros, 39, a teacher, sitting by his refugee tent on the grounds of the school where he works. "We want the new government to bring peace and love and harmony."