UNTAET with Hindsight: The Peculiarities of Politics in an Incomplete State‪.‬

In the months after independence on 20 May 2002, an outside observer could have been forgiven for concluding that East Timor's new state institutions were failing. Disarray in the judicial system, which was barely functioning, was having a serious impact on the performance of the police and the prison service. The Timorese Lorosae Defense Forces (FDTL) and the East Timorese National Police (PNTL), which the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) had created, were suffering crises of legitimacy that had made them political targets. A combination of inexperience and the large majority held by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), which won fifty-five of the eighty-eight seats at stake in the Constituent Assembly elections of August 2001, placed the new National Parliament in clear subordination to a government intent on using its majority to push through its ambitious legislative program. How to assess these instances of institutional failure? Do they lead to the conclusion that "state failure" rather than "undeniable success" is the more appropriate judgment on the UN's two-and-a-half-year tenure in East Timor? If so, considering the uniquely favorable conditions that this particular transitional administration faced in carrying out its mandate, what are the implications for transitional administrations in general?