Lisbon, Portugal – United Nations peacekeepers maintained a tense calm Monday in East Timor, which has been rattled by riots, rapes and arson since Aug. 8, when Jose Alexandre Gusmao was sworn in as prime minister. Gusmao, a former president and resistance hero commonly known as "Xanana," was once East Timor's most popular and respected leader. However, the supporters of former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri's Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) do not appear ready to accept President Jose Ramos-Horta's decision to name Gusmao, his predecessor, as head of government.

In the wave of violence following Gusmao's appointment, young girls were raped at a convent by unidentified men, 142 homes were set on fire and United Nations vehicles became the targets of stone-throwing.

The uneasy peace that prevailed Monday in the capital, Dili, and in Baucau, the country's second-largest city, was guarded over by roughly 3,000 soldiers and police officers – mainly from Australia, Malaysia and Portugal – who make up the UN peacekeeping force.

Alkatiri's party, Fretilin, has argued that Ramos-Horta's appointment of Gusmao as prime minister was unconstitutional. The party, which has been dominant since the country became an independent nation in 2002, won the largest number of votes in the June elections (nearly 30 percent) but failed to garner the majority needed to form a government.

The National Council of Timorese Resistance took only 23.4 percent of the vote, a blow for its head, Gusmao, who led the resistance against the brutal Indonesian occupation of the former Portuguese colony. Indonesia invaded after East Timor declared itself independent from Portugal in December 1975.

Gusmao became an almost mythical icon of revolutionary struggles around the world, waging war against 22,000 Indonesian occupation troops with a band of less than 200 guerrilla fighters for two decades in the dense jungles of this Pacific island.

But what weighed more heavily on Ramos-Horta's decision was the strong "anti-Alkatiri" sentiment in the country. As a result, he based his decision on the combined total of votes taken by a coalition of parties that support Gusmao, who thus can count on the backing of 37 of the single-chamber parliament's 65 members.

When asked by IPS about his decision, Ramos-Horta said "the majorities and minorities are in parliament, not on the streets, because the people delegated power to the lawmakers to represent them."

The president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 along with Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, justified his decision by saying the coalition "at this moment represents the political views of the majority of the population."

With respect to the continuing violence and unrest, he said "the wounds are deep and fresh, and have been reopened in this latest conflict and by past conflicts."

The Indonesian occupation cost the lives of one-third of the population of East Timor, which shares the island with Indonesian West Timor.

Violence also erupted last year, when Alkatiri was forced to step down as prime minister after clashes between factions of the security forces claimed the lives of several dozen people, prompting the deployment of the Australian-led peacekeeping forces.

The most serious incidents of the last few days were described to the Portuguese press in East Timor by Reverend Basilio Maria Ximenes, the head of the convent where the girls were raped. He told reporters that dozens of attackers raided and vandalized the institution before sexually abusing the students, one of whom was 12 years old.

Although he did not refer to the fact that Alkatiri, the leader of Fretilin, is a practicing Muslim, the priest said "these people, who were mainly young men, see nuns and the Catholic Church as enemies and not only raped my students but also destroyed the school."

The Catholic bishop of Dili, Alberto Ricardo da Silva, who was an outspoken critic of Alkatiri when the Fretilin leader was prime minister, told the Union of Catholic Asian News agency that he welcomed Gusmao's invitation to the Catholic Church to help the new government work for peace and development.

There are no precise figures on how many people have been displaced from their homes by the latest wave of violence or on the number of public buildings that have been damaged. But Portuguese correspondents on the island and UNICEF reported that several schools were vandalized, leading to 50 arrests and several injuries. International observers predict that things could gradually begin to return to normal.

Alkatiri said Sunday that he believed Fretilin supporters were not taking part in the violence and urged his followers to remain calm.

"We suspect that it was not Fretilin who did this but people using the name of Fretilin to conduct violence and sully the party's name, as our members have a high level of discipline," said the former prime minister, who also offered to cooperate with the United Nations in investigating the events of the last few days.

The profound political division that has arisen from the struggle for power is frequently mentioned to explain the lack of stability in East Timor since its period as a UN protectorate came to an end in 2002.

Nevertheless, the frustrating economic conditions and especially the lack of prospects for young people are also a plausible source of the violence.

With a per capita income of just $389, this tiny island nation of 15,000 square kilometers – located in Southeast Asia on the southernmost edge of the Indonesian archipelago, northwest of Australia – is one of the world's poorest countries, according to the United Nations Development Program.

In a March 2006 report, the development program said, "Four years after gaining independence, impoverished Timor-Leste remains one of the world's least developed nations."

The UN agency reported that half of the population of less than 1 million has no access to safe drinking water; 60 of 1,000 infants born alive die before their first birthday; and life expectancy, estimated at only 55.5 years of age in 2004, is not improving.

The National Human Development Report of 2006, titled "The Path Out of Poverty: Integrated Rural Development," added that job opportunities are few, and that although "politically the country is free, its people remain chained by poverty."

That explanation, however, does not convince analyst Leonidio Paulo Ferreira from the Lisbon newspaper Diario de Noticias. Ferreira wrote a column Monday titled "He wanted to be a pumpkin farmer, but today he is prime minister."

Ferreira described Gusmao as "the national hero who became the country's first president in 2002 while spending all of his time saying that he was not seduced by power."

"Surrounded by his Australian wife Kristy Sword and their three children, he claimed that he dreamt of having time to dedicate to photography, that he was anxious to finish his term in 2007, and he even admitted that he would like to become a pumpkin farmer," Ferreira wrote.

But seven months later, "Xanana is prime minister, the leader of a hastily created party, which did not even win the greatest number of votes in the legislative elections." In the streets, "there are some who are now calling their 'big brother' a 'traitor' and are torching houses in protest."

The most bitter pill to swallow, according to the columnist, is that "Xanana traded the more than 80 percent of the vote that one day [in 2001] elected him president for the [National Council of Timorese Resistance's] 24 percent of the vote. Photographer or pumpkin farmer, he could have been a Timorese Nelson Mandela, a reference point for the entire population, which is still seeking a direction, but he chose instead to be just your usual politician."