| Subject: Militia Threats
May Force Out UN Staff Sydney
Morning Herald Thursday, November 11, 1999
Militia threats may force out UN staff
By PAUL DALEY, Herald Correspondent in Dili
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is
considering withdrawing staff from parts of the Indonesian-controlled West Timor border
amid rapidly increasing threats of violence from militia intent on stopping East Timorese
refugees going home.
A UNHCR spokeswoman, Ms Ariane Quentier, yesterday said UN
staff had been subject to 18 serious security incidents in the past 10 days, including
being pelted with stones and threatened by machete- and spear-wielding militia.
She said the increased militia activity at the border town
of Atambua had deterred thousands of refugees from registering with the UNHCR to go home,
and potentially threatened the lives of her colleagues.
At a refugee camp near the West Timor capital, Kupang, on
Monday three militia dressed as Indonesian troops (TNI) said they had orders to stop
people leaving the camps.
''I believe at least 70 per cent of those people would want
to go back to East Timor and we were thinking of moving over 3,000 of them,'' Ms Quentier
said. ''By the end of Monday, after those people being at the entrance, we only had two
people [refugees] who left the camp and went over to the transit centre.''
Indonesian police and the TNI did nothing to deter such
intimidation, she said, adding that the UNHCR's representative in Jakarta had written to
Indonesia's Foreign Minister ''deploring that there has been no effort to intervene and
arrest the perpetrators of these incidents''.
''We have reached a very worried state with insecurity in
Atambua, but also in Kupang,'' Ms Quentier said.
Asked if the UNHCR had withdrawn staff from the volatile
areas, she said: ''Not yet, not yet ... because we also believe that the people we are
extracting, and that's the work our teams over there are doing, are also in great danger
if they stay there.
''This is a race against time trying to get as many people
as possible out. We might have to do it [withdraw] eventually.
''To quote our colleagues in West Timor, it is
deteriorating by the day.''
The UNHCR's reports of militia activity concur with
Interfet fears that while East Timor is largely free of the militia, a number of the
groups are rearming and training in large numbers - unhindered by the Indonesian security
forces - just over the West Timor border.
But despite the escalating militia activity, at least 1,000
refugees a day continue to leave West Timor by ferry and another 200 were expected to be
met by Interfet troops at the border crossing at Batugade yesterday.
Interfet's chief of staff, Colonel Mark Kelly, yesterday
conceded that anti-independence militia might still be operating in the hills of East
Timor.
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