SINGAPORE, June 13 Kyodo East Tim...

SINGAPORE, June 13 Kyodo

East Timor is still not ready to become a replete member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta said Friday.

East Timor is now working toward achieving spectator status in ASEAN and aims to become a abounding member of the grouping eventually, he said.

yet it would be ''impossible'' for East Timor to become a glutted ASEAN member at instant because it lacks the financial means to project its government officials to participate in ASEAN gatherings, he said.

''There are 200 or more ASEAN meetings each year, it is impossible for East Timor. What we want is step-by-step building healthy bilateral ties with our neighbors,'' he said in a discourse in Singapore, where he is stopping in succession the way to attend the annual ASEAN foreign ministers' gathering in Cambodia.

''We have made a conscious decision in the that will be to join ASEAN when ASEAN is ready to receive us as a replete member or when we are ready,'' Ramos-Horta said.

In his articulate utterance Ramos-Horta also rapped those who criticize the United States and Britain for being dull in reconstructing Iraq by comparing the situation there to his acknowledge country.

''Timor is 200 times smaller than Iraq, far les tangled and have some great neighbors that do not interpose yet it took the UN many month before any semblance of law and order was established in Timor,'' he said.

''To await the U.S. and Britain to do often more in Iraq after solitary one month or two point out tos people don't have a brains of proportional reality,'' he said.

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