Subject: Report from Atambua: Militias to mount
attacks from refugee havens
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 08:15:15 -0400 The Independent [London] Sunday, September 26,
1999
Militias to mount attacks from refugee havens
Thousands of people fled to West Timor to escape the killing in the East.
Unfortunately, the killers ran that way too. Humphrey Hawksley reports from Atambua
JUST ABOUT every shack on the road between Atambua and the border with East Timor is
flying red and white Indonesian flags, snapping in the strong wind like ensigns at a yacht
club. Each flag represents a refugee family taken in by the people of West Timor, where
tens of thousands have fled. Some are pro-independence, some anti - all wanted to get away
from the fighting.
But the refugees have not escaped the men who brought terror to East Timor. Our
bodyguards tensed as we rounded a corner and came face to face with the militias who had
laid waste to East Timor like an army from another age. They were coming across the border
into West Timor with their families, and their belongings, wardrobes, motorbikes,
dismantled huts. Nothing was too basic or too extravagant to take away - there was even a
van with a satellite dish, so they could keep tabs on the nightmare they had created.
Lines of trucks waited at a barrier, some sprayed with the logos of militias such as
the notorious Aitarak (Thorn). Women and children were crammed on board, clinging to the
sides. The militia themselves were masked by balaclavas, or had bright scarves wrapped
around their faces. "Don't talk to them," said one of the policemen escorting
us. "They are angry. They might attack you."
The police made a show of confiscating a handful of clumsy, home-made guns. But minutes
later, with the civilians deposited securely in a refugee camp, a truck headed back
towards East Timor. The militia rode in the back with modern rifles and machine pistols,
and a crate of beer.
Like the IRA with Northern Ireland or the Khmer Rouge with Cambodia, the Timorese
militia are setting up bases on sympathetic territory outside their field of battle, well
away from the mandate of the multinational peacekeeping force in the other half of the
island.
The master-stroke has been moving their people with them. In the Atambua district
alone, more than 100,000 have been brought over, doubling the population and, in effect,
giving the militia control of the whole area.
"I just do what I'm told," said a market trader from the town of Maliana,
where some of West Timor's worst recent atrocities are thought to have taken place as
militiamen weeded out people thought to sympathise with the East Timorese independence
movement. "I left because everyone was leaving. I don't care where I live as long as
there's no fighting."
"Controlling the militia isn't easy," said Natsir Achmed, the local police
chief. "In East Timor, they wore T-shirts identifying themselves. But over here
they're mixed up with other armed forces and the refugees, and the situation is more
complicated."
Once in Atambua, it becomes blindingly obvious that this is another element of the
complex political and military process in East Timor which the United Nations has
overlooked. From West Timor, the militia can run a highly effective guerrilla war against
the multi-national force. They have supplies, weapons, sympathy and a population of
supporters which they have moved into exile with them. The already tiny country will be,
in effect, partitioned, with the peacekeepers unable to secure the western areas of East
Timor.
Those suspected of war crimes in East Timor can live in Atambua without fear of arrest
by Indonesian security forces and can travel freely from here. "We are victims of a
war which began in 1975," said Herminio Davista da Costa, the chief of staff of the
PPI, the umbrella organisation for all militia groups. "If we are bad, it is because
the pro-independence fighters did bad things to us. Crimes have been committed by both
sides."
"I don't know why people are talking about war crimes," said Adam Damiri, an
Indonesian major-general whose military region included East Timor. "We were facing
armed groups who threatened the lives of innocent people. We're asking the militia to lay
down their weapons and if the UN lets us discuss things instead of accusing us of war
crimes we could find a perfect solution."
Could Western governments and the UN have anticipated the slaughter that resulted when
they backed an independence referendum in East Timor? On the remote island of Alor earlier
last week, away from the tension in West Timor, I met a young member of the Aitarak
militia. Enrique Lopez, 27, proudly wearing his black militia T-shirt, made a living
organising card games and cock fights before taking up a machete against the UN. "A
lot of us wanted to join the UN and help with the referendum," he said. "But the
UN only took on people who supported independence. That's not fair, is it?"
Instead, the poorly educated, unsophisticated Mr Lopez joined the militia, and was told
to hunt down pro-independence activists. It was all the same to him: he simply wanted to
do something more with his life than work for a gambling syndicate. One wonders why the UN
did not factor men like Mr Lopez into its East Timor plan. Instead, he was given the
conditions in which he could commit the very atrocities the UN said it feared.
Earlier this year a senior British official confidently told me that East Timor would
get its independence as scheduled. But the island could be faced with yet more decades of
guerrilla war, with Atambua as the base, Mr Lopez still making his living as a fighter and
the official moving on to tinker with a problem in another distant land.
Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC World Affairs correspondent.
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