Sydney – The United Nations should cut the number of foreign police in East Timor to encourage one of world's newest countries to manage its own affairs, an influential security think tank said Thursday.

"The government has for years ignored UN advice on undertaking difficult reforms in the security sector and pursuing formal justice for crimes," International Crisis Group South East Asia analyst Cillian Nolan said in a statement.

"Real risks to stability remain, but these will be best addressed by the country's political leaders rather than a continued international police presence."

The Brussels-based Crisis Group said that since 2008 the East Timorese have handled internal threats without the help of the world's third largest foreign police contingent after Darfur and Haiti.

"A reduction would align the UN mission's size with reality, as the local force has long answered to its own command rather than UN police," Nolan said.

"As talk of 'right-sizing' the peacekeeping mission begins with an eye towards its withdrawal by December 2012, it is clear that such a large mission is not tailored to the country's needs."

Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975 and its occupation continued until 1999, the year Australia led an international force that helped guide the nation of 1 million to independence.

East Timor, which achieved formal independence in 2002, should be able to do without foreign peacekeepers by 2012, according to President Jose Ramos Horta.

"We cannot continue by then to ask the UN to keep a significant police force here and a big political presence, so we have to consolidate the gains in two or three years next, so that by 2012 we can be fully self-supportive and the UN can move on to help other countries in need," Ramos Horta told the German Press Agency DPA in an interview last year.