DILI - Leaders of East Timor's ruling Fretilin party are to meet on Sunday amid widespread speculation they might ditch embattled Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri.
The party hierarchy had planned to meet on Saturday, but hundreds of protesters demanding Alkatiri step down stopped key representatives from attending.
"It is now postponed because of the demonstration," party spokesman Stanislau Da Silva told reporters. "Some members of the central committee have not been able to make it."
Around 3,000 demonstrators marched on parliament on Saturday demanding that the legislature be dissolved. Under the gaze of Australian troops, one of their organisers tied a piece of string around the already-locked gates to symbolise shutting it down.
Dozens of trucks and buses packed with men, women and children patrolled the streets, chanting for Alkatiri to step down.
There was a carnival atmosphere, although one group daubed themselves in whitewash to symbolise the ghosts of those who had died in earlier violence.
The tiny Pacific nation has been rocked for weeks by clashes sparked by a split in the armed forces that was widely blamed on Alkatiri and ended only with the intervention of a 2,500-strong foreign peacekeeping force.
Thousands of protesters have taken daily to the streets, demanding that Alkatiri quit. The country's widely popular president, Xanana Gusmao, threatened to resign himself unless the premier stood down.
Gusmao retracted that threat on Friday, saying he would heed widespread calls to stay on, but in a long and sometimes rambling letter to Fretilin's leaders made available on Saturday, he accused the party of being corrupt and hungry for power.
Outdated Leftists?
Gusmao quit Fretilin in the 1970s, saying his role as head of its armed faction fighting Indonesia for independence clashed with the party's exiled political leadership.
"Today, a small group who came from abroad repeated the actions which we had experienced from 1975 until 1978," Gusmao said, referring to the period when he quit the party.
He said derisively that Alkatiri had "carried out rabbit and chicken husbandry in Maputo", a reference to the prime minister's less-than-impressive credentials from the liberation struggle, spent in exile in Mozambique.
Some Fretilin leaders who lived in Mozambique and Angola during those nations' experiments with socialism are accused by Timorese of having outdated, communist views.
Gusmao was elected president overwhelmingly when East Timor became independent in 2002 after a decades-long struggle against Indonesian rule. Alkatiri is prime minister by virtue of Fretilin's parliamentary majority.
While the two men are known not to be friends, their feuding has become very public since the violence erupted in late May.
This followed Alkatiri's dismissal of nearly half of the nation's 1,400-strong army earlier this year after they protested at alleged discrimination. The soldiers took to the hills threatening mutiny and, when the police split along similar lines, youth gangs went on a rampage of looting and arson that ended only with the arrival of the intervention force.
Some of the Fretilin leadership gathered on Saturday at Alkatiri's official residence in Dili, guarded by Australian troops. But few in the capital believed Sunday's crucial meeting would end other than with Alkatiri stepping down, possibly after a secret ballot by the party executive.
Alkatiri was re-elected Fretilin leader last month, but the vote - by show of hands, not secret ballot - outraged many party faithful. Gusmao said on Saturday it should be held again.
"All of the delegates who participated in the recent congress only knew how to raise their hands because of the fear of losing their jobs, their means of feeding their wives and children," the president said in his 17-page letter.
"Therefore, as president of the republic, I do not accept the result of the last congress ... and I urge the National Political Commission of Fretilin to immediately hold an extraordinary congress."
"I think we are reaching the end of the game," said one foreign diplomat. "I think Alkatiri has a matter of days."
Feeds