26 February 2007

Dili, Timor-Leste: In the face of occasional violence, UNV volunteers are delivering much-needed development support to the people of Timor-Leste.
 
United Nations Volunteers Support Officer Ms Remedios Vestil-Mondigo deals regularly with security threats like stone-throwing incidents on the road from the international airport, to which she travels twice or three times a day to greet incoming UNV volunteers.

Today’s experience was more challenging than usual, when riots started outside the airport. “I heard gunshots and explosions and saw smoke when I was already on the tarmac,” Ms Vestil-Mondigo said. While a security detail fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the trouble-makers, Ms Vestil-Mondigo rushed the latest UNV volunteers off their plane.

“I briefed our new volunteers that this is not a normal situation and I tried to ensure that they will not be too shocked by their experience,” she said. “The airport is full of women and children and represents a safe haven from this temporary mayhem”.

Although the violence has been sporadic, the UNV team has taken the security of UNV volunteers very seriously. “During earlier arrivals we had to use an armored convoy and, despite torrential rain, the UNV volunteers were asked to wear helmets and bullet-proof vests as we transported them from the airport,” Ms Vestil-Mondigo said.
 
Mr Atul Khare, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Timor-Leste, who heads the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), has appealed to the local population for calm, and he reassigned security forces to put more personnel on the streets.

The incoming volunteers are among a total of 430 international UNV volunteers scheduled to work in Timor-Leste. Already 50 are working on development projects and 200 more have arrived to provide general support to the UNMIT and supervise Timor-Leste’s presidential and parliamentary elections starting on 9 April. The new arrivals are being met by a support unit staffed mostly by UNV volunteers.

Mr Kevin Gilroy, Chief of Special Operations at UNV, noted that although UNV volunteers can, and sometimes do, face security and other challenges, they are backed by professional support in the field and by UNV and its administrator, the UN Development Programme. “There are no more important times but these, for UNV volunteers and their partners to have strong and supportive field management and they do it so well, despite working in the same tense situation as those they are trying to support,” he said.

UN Volunteers Executive Coordinator Mr. Ad de Raad said the valiant efforts of the UNV volunteers and their support crews was “a good example of the unique and inspiring aspects of civic engagement of global citizens that alone the UN can bring to the table through its UNV programme, and an illustration of what UNV’s surge capacity delivers.”