The American State Department says the main priority in East Timor has moved from peacekeeping and humanitarian aid to reconstruction of the social and economic infrastructures.

The assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs, Stanley Roth, told Congress in Washington that the bulk of East Timorese people no longer faced the daily danger of hunger and malnutrition, which had been common during the violence that followed last year's referendum on independence from Indonesia.

Mr Roth said more than one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand people who fled the fighting had now returned -- about half of those who had been displaced.

But most of those returning had virtually nothing with which to rebuild their communities.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service