Role
The constitution of East Timor assigns the F-FDTL responsibility for protecting East Timor against external attack. The constitution states that the F-FDTL "shall guarantee national independence, territorial integrity and the freedom and security of the populations against any aggression or external threat, in respect for the constitutional order." The constitution also states that the F-FDTL "shall be non-partisan and shall owe obedience to the competent organs of sovereignty in accordance with the Constitution and the laws, and shall not intervene in political matters." The National Police of East Timor (or PNTL) and other civilian security forces are assigned responsibility for internal security. In practice the responsibilities of the F-FDTL and PNTL were not clearly delineated, and this led to conflict between the two organisations.
The East Timorese Government has broadened the F-FDTL's role over time. As what have been designated "new missions", the F-FDTL has been given responsibility for crisis management, supporting the suppression of civil disorder, responding to humanitarian crises and facilitating cooperation between different parts of the government.
Read more about this topic: Timor Leste Defence Force
Famous quotes containing the word role:
“A few [women] warrant our attention not because they have the answer but because they have rejected the mentality that insists there must be one answer. What makes them role models is not how much or how little they work, how many or how few hats they wear, but rather how well they understand, and accept, that for all rewards there will be commensurate sacrifice; for all gains, some loss; for any pleasure, some pain.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Where we come from in America no longer signifies—it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways were not like ours, but because they simply did not work.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)