The Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Timor-Leste met the country’s President today for talks focusing on political and humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the country out of its current crisis, as United Nations agencies stepped up efforts to provide relief assistance to the more than 100,000 people internally displaced by the recent violence.

For the second time in two days, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Timor-Leste, Sukehiro Hasegawa, flew to the west of the tiny Southeast Asian nation to try and end the unrest in the country, this time to meet the leader of another armed group that has demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister.

The United Nations was poised to begin an emergency airlift to Timor-Leste today with urgently needed supplies for tens of thousands of displaced people as radio and TV stations continued to broadcast a videotaped appeal from Secretary-General Kofi Annan for calm in the violence-torn country which the UN shepherded to independence from Indonesia four years ago.