Police chief warns NZ team to expect tough time in Dili

New Zealand police leaving for East Timor will be under no illusions about how difficult the job will be, their commanding officer says.

"I'm cautiously optimistic things are improving there, but it's still very volatile," Tasman district commander Grant O'Fee said. "It can vary between tense and very tense."

The 25-strong police team leaves for the East Timorese capital, Dili, on Tuesday.

They will be heading for a country riven by bitter political and ethnic divisions, which has had to call in soldiers from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Portugal to restore order.

Mr O'Fee, who will carry the rank of assistant commissioner on this deployment, was part of an assessment team sent to Dili last month to determine whether it was safe for police to join the 170 soldiers New Zealand has already sent to East Timor.

When he came home 11 days ago, Australian police in East Timor were not patrolling at night. Mr O'Fee said that policy would continue, and it would be some weeks before police patrolled without military accompaniment.

He had also recommended police carry sidearms and wear body armour.

"That's a commonsense decision. It would be foolhardy to place unarmed police officers on the streets of Dili now, and it would be some time away before that decision would be made, if ever."

Several of the officers had previous international experience on deployments to the Solomon Islands, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea and Afghanistan, Mr O'Fee said.

One had also served in East Timor as a territorial soldier.

Once in Dili, the New Zealand officers would focus on developing a community policing profile to try to win the confidence of the city's population, Mr O'Fee said.

Perhaps more importantly, they would also try to restore the shattered confidence of what remains of East Timor's police force.

"No one should underestimate how difficult a job that is.

"That will be something that will take a long time, to get these police officers back on the street and to rebuild the public confidence in that organisation, remembering that eight of them were murdered by their own military."

The police are on a three-month deployment as part of New Zealand's official development assistance programme.

Yesterday a spokesman for Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the Government was set to approve more aid on top of the $3 million already given since violence broke out in Dili in April.

That money was on top of the annual $4.1 aid contribution to East Timor.

"New Zealand is likely to make a further food aid contribution to East Timor in the next week or two," the spokesman said.

"The best avenue for the funding is being assessed.

"We're getting daily reports from our post in Dili and on the overall situation as well as what the key humanitarian needs are."

- additional reporting NZPA