| Subject: Militia
Conducted Concerted Campaign to Split Families The Australian 8 November 99
Militia set out to split families
From SIAN POWELL in Dili
THE pro-Jakarta militia in East Timor conducted a concerted
two-stage campaign to split up families, warning men they would be killed if they did not
flee, then forcibly transporting the remaining women and children to West Timor.
Sidney Jones, the Asia director of Human Rights Watch, who
has interviewed hundreds of returned refugees in East Timor, said it was a comprehensive
pattern of dislocation, which continued in the camps in West Timor.
"Women were told their husbands had been killed and
there was no point in going back, their villages had been destroyed, that Interfet
soldiers would rape them," she said.
The villagers were usually transported to the district
military command before being forced over the border and Ms Jones has documented three
cases of rape in these commands in Suai, in the south of the territory.
"There is no question TNI (the Indonesian army) was
involved, and active-duty officers were actually in the militia, particularly in the
western regions," she said.
These soldiers were also East Timorese and many other East
Timorese, of the Tentara Tiga Bulan literally the three-month army, a reservist force
were also involved.
Apart from the already documented massacres, such as the
killings in the church in Suai, where an estimated 200 people were shot dead, and the
deaths by stabbing of 47 people in the police station in the border town of Maliana, Ms
Jones said her understanding was that most killings were more targeted.
"My guess is that (the deaths) will add up to several
hundreds," she said. "The determination was to push everybody out across the
border."
There were two reasons for this, she said.
First, the militia and the TNI wanted to convince the world
that the UNAMET ballot was rigged and that East Timorese were so averse to independence
they had fled in their thousands.
Secondly, they wanted to clear the territory of
independence activists and sympathisers to aid the return of the militia.
From her interviews, Ms Jones learned that members of
Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces, arrived in Dili in the week before the ballot and
fanned out across East Timor.
Of equal concern, Ms Jones said, was evidence that militia
members were often very young.
She had been told of one boy of 10 who was a militia member
and others of 14, 15 and 16. Contrary to common perception, they were nearly always East
Timorese and known to their victims, sometimes even related to them.
Ms Jones said there was still a great deal of investigative
work to be done before the whole truth about the devastation of East Timor emerged.
"There is still a lot we don't know," she said,
"there's still a lot that has to be followed up."
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