ETimor votes in parliamentary elections

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Electoral workers unload ballot boxes from a truck at a counting centre in Dili under the supervision of United Nations soldiers.

DILI, June 30 (AFP): Voters in East Timor went to the polls on Saturday to choose a new government tasked with uniting the population of the tiny fledgling state, shattered by violence, poverty and soaring unemployment.
The election, the first legislative polls in the mainly Catholic half- island nation since independence in 2002, is pitting the ruling Fretilin party against a new party founded by former president and independence hero Xanana Gusmao.
Neither party is forecast to win the absolute majority of the parliament's 65 seats required to govern, meaning a coalition will need to be formed with some of the 12 other parties contesting the polls.
Observers say Gusmao's National Congress of East Timor's Reconstruction (CNRT) is likely to form a government with several smaller parties, largely on the strength of his personality rather than the young party's vague policies.
The polls opened under the watchful eye of dozens of foreign observers, as well as the Australian-led international peacekeepers that have been here since last year, when deadly unrest rocked the capital Dili, leaving 37 people dead.
The unrest forced some 15 percent of East Timor's million- strong population into refugee camps, where they largely remain, too afraid to go home or with no homes to go.
"These elections are seen by everyone as the solution to the crisis," the head of the European Union's observer mission, Jose Javier Pomes Ruis, told AFP. "There is a strong wish here for these elections to take place in peace."
The United Nations, which beefed up its mission in the wake of last year's unrest, is providing security for ballot boxes distributed across the rugged nation. Some were taken by helicopter and horse to more remote locations.
The month-long campaigning period ahead of Saturday's polls was mainly peaceful, but was marred by the shooting deaths of two of Gusmao's supporters and persistent low-scale violence including gang stand-offs and arson.
The elections will be the third in as many months in East Timor after two rounds of presidential polls in April and May saw the former prime minister and Nobel peace laureate Jose Ramos- Horta voted in to replace Gusmao.
Ramos-Horta, an independent but a political ally of Gusmao, easily trounced the Fretilin candidate in the second round with 69 percent of the vote, showing the general disillusionment with the party.
Fretilin dominated the previous parliament, which was voted in several months before East Timor formally gained independence.
Whoever forms a government will have a tough task ahead for their five-year term, with the nation still mired in poverty after the bloody rule of Indonesia, which ended in 1999.
Preliminary results of the polls are not expected until July 7, raising the spectre of further violence in a nation where tensions inflamed last year are still simmering just below the surface.