Excerpt: Senior Western diplomats said East Timor's violence is now a one-sided proxy war, covertly orchestrated by Indonesian army officers and pitting their surrogate militias against an unarmed civilian population.

A senior envoy with a decade's experience here said: "There is not one iota of doubt, as every Western ambassador knows, that what is going on today is an Indonesian military operation. The militias answer to the military, the military can turn the violence on and off--why else was Monday's election peaceful?--and the military could end the problems if it wanted to in five minutes."

It has long been known that the military--which has about 18,000 troops in East Timor but has not brought a gang of crudely armed, untrained and undisciplined gunmen to heel--recruits and pays militias who have terrorized unarmed civilians. Its reasons involve honor, money and security.

The Los Angeles Times Sunday, September 5, 1999

Anti-Independence Gangs Ignore Vote, Terrorize East Timor

Indonesian security forces stand by as militias roam through the province.

The United Nations is helpless, and thousands of villagers flee.

By DAVID LAMB, Times Staff Writer

JAKARTA, Indonesia--Roaming gangs of gunmen held control of much of East Timor today in defiance of the province's overwhelming vote for independence and the international community's demand for an end to the nightmarish violence there.

The gunmen, representing anti-independence forces, were stepping up a campaign of terror that has no logical political objective in light of last week's vote. But they met scant active resistance from 8,200 Indonesian police charged with providing security in the province.

Senior Western diplomats said East Timor's violence is now a one-sided proxy war, covertly orchestrated by Indonesian army officers and pitting their surrogate militias against an unarmed civilian population.

One ambassador described the situation on the ground as "alarming and deteriorating by the hour."

During the day Saturday, militias attacked a house occupied by 50 Portuguese election observers; shot in the stomach an unarmed American police officer working for the U.N.; burned houses outside Dili, the provincial capital; and took control of a least six towns. Their power unchecked, the militias have become the de facto government of lawless East Timor.

U.N. officials were forced to evacuate to Dili 100 staffers from three towns that fell to the militias--Same, Ainaro and Maliana. Timorese by the thousands were fleeing villages for the mountains, and many hundreds of refugees were seeking safety in churches and the U.N. compound in Dili. The chaos in effect closed down the U.N. as a reconciliation and peace mission.

Elsewhere in Dili, shops were closed, streets deserted. Militiamen controlled the airport, ran roadblocks and stoned the downtown Makota Hotel, where many foreign journalists stay and the U.N. had been holding daily media briefings. Smoke from burning houses on the capital's outskirts hovered over the city's harbor.

The violence overshadowed the elation of East Timorese over the results of last Monday's U.N.-supervised election. Those results, announced Friday at U.N. headquarters in New York by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, showed that nearly 79% of voters had decided to end a forced, 23-year association with Indonesia and had opted for independence.

Annan and governments from Britain to Singapore, including Japan, Indonesia's largest aid donor, hailed the move toward democracy and warned President B. J. Habibie that Indonesia will face serious consequences if it fails to control security in East Timor.

Habibie met Saturday in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, with Jamsheed Marker, Annan's personal envoy, U.S. Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy and other diplomats and repeated his mantra that Indonesia has the situation under control and is committed to providing security for East Timor.

But a senior envoy with a decade's experience here said: "There is not one iota of doubt, as every Western ambassador knows, that what is going on today is an Indonesian military operation. The militias answer to the military, the military can turn the violence on and off--why else was Monday's election peaceful?--and the military could end the problems if it wanted to in five minutes."

It has long been known that the military--which has about 18,000 troops in East Timor but has not brought a gang of crudely armed, untrained and undisciplined gunmen to heel--recruits and pays militias who have terrorized unarmed civilians. Its reasons involve honor, money and security.

Many generals resent the idea of surrendering a province that their soldiers shed blood to conquer. Others don't want to yield the riches they have earned by plundering East Timor's teak and sandalwood forests. And many fear that the province's secession would encourage separatists waging campaigns for freedom in other regions of the troubled and unstable republic.

Military analysts said Indonesian commanders might have one of two scenarios in mind: The first would be to punish the East Timorese for their independence vote; the second, more sinister, would be to arm the militias before themselves withdrawing, in the hope that resultant massacres would dissuade the national parliament from approving independence when it meets in October or November.

The men financing the anti-independence movement also are believed to be Habibie's enemies, a U.N. source said. They are old-guard nationalists with links to the military, and their influence, diplomats said, indicates that Habibie, no matter how well-meaning his words, might have no control over events in East Timor. There are also concerns that the military in East Timor is answerable neither to the chain of command nor to defense chief Gen. Wiranto and is instead run by covert intelligence specialists.

Calls for an international peacekeeping force have grown louder as the violence escalates. One such call came Saturday from Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao, an independence leader who is widely thought to be the likeliest first president of a sovereign East Timor. He has been a government prisoner since 1992, but the government announced later in the day that it planned to release him Wednesday and allow him to go to Dili.

The Habibie administration has so far resisted the idea of foreign troops on Indonesian territory, but it indicated recently that it would consider such a proposal.

Military attaches said it would take too long to assemble a U.N. force to be of much short-term help in East Timor. But Australia has indicated that it might be willing to be the backbone of an international force composed of volunteer nations.

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