Mari Alkatiri

Mari bin Amude Alkatiri ( ; born 26 November 1949) is a Timorese politician. He was Prime Minister of East Timor from May 2002 until his resignation on 26 June 2006 following weeks of political unrest in the country, and again from September 2017 until May 2018. He is the Secretary-General of the Fretilin party as well as President of the Special Administrative Region of Oecusse. Alkatiri is an Hadhrami Arab by ethnicity and comes from the Al-Kathiri tribe, a branch of which ruled the sultanate of Kathiri in the Hadhramaut, which is now part of Yemen. He is one of very few Muslim politicians in a country that is 99.5% Christian. The main issues facing his second term as prime minister were environmental conservation, cultural conservation, accession of East Timor to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, free public education and public health services, and building the country's economy, notably the lagging services and manufacturing sectors. Life Alkatiri's ancestors were Hadhrami merchants who lived in Portuguese Timor, he was born in Dili, and had 10 other siblings. He left East Timor in 1970 for post-secondary studies in Portuguese Angola, returning to East Timor as one of the founders of Fretilin, becoming its Minister for Political Affairs. Following Fretilin's declaration of independence for the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste on 28 November 1975, Alkatiri was sent overseas as part of a high-level diplomatic mission. After Indonesia invaded the nascent nation on 7 December 1975, Alkatiri and his colleagues were unable to return, and he established the headquarters of the Fretilin External Delegation in Maputo, Mozambique.