UNITED NATIONS - East Timor's constituent assembly recommended Wednesday that the UN-administered territory elect its first president in early April, one month before independence, the United Nations said.

The council, meeting in the capital Dili, voted 68 to two to hold the election in the first two weeks of April by universal, direct and secret ballot, UN deputy spokesman Manoel De Almeida e Silva said here.

Another 18 council members abstained or did not take part in the vote.

The territory's chief electoral officer, Carlos Valenzuela, told the council that other arrangements for the election should be complete by January 15 to give the electoral commission time to organise the poll.

Valenzuela recommended that the candidate with the highest number of votes be elected, even if he or she polled less than 50 percent, so as to avoid a second round of voting that might clash with independence day, May 20.

That date was fixed last month by the UN Security Council on the recommendation of the constituent assembly.

East Timor's independence hero Xanana Gusmao, who is expected to become the first president of East Timor, said Wednesday that he was ready to serve.

"I'm ready to be president if political parties nominate me," Gusmao said while on a three-day visit to the Indonesian province of West Timor, where he appealed to East Timorese refugees to come home.

Gusmao told about 1,000 refugees in the town of Kupang that the fact that many of them had voted against independence from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored ballot in August 1999 should not deter them from going home.

An estimated 250,000-290,000 East Timorese either fled across the border or were forced across by anti-independence militias following the vote.