Macau – East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Jose Ramos Horta said on Tuesday that Jakarta was sending 3,000 new troops to his occupied home land.
Ramos Horta, a former foreign minister of the now defunct Democratic Republic of East Timor, described the highly publicised withdrawal of 1,000 Indonesian soldiers from East Timor in July and August as "propaganda." He said that Jakarta was acting in "bad faith." The leader of East Timor's "external" resistance also said in a CNN interview monitored by LUSA in Macau earlier the day there had been no clashes so far between the newly deployed Indonesian occupation forces and East Timorese freedom fighters.
Ramos Horta said in the interview that the half-island off nothern Australia was on the brink of a mass uprising. East Timor has been under Indonesian military occupation since December 1975. "In the last few weeks they [Indonesia's military] have again introduced in East Timor around 3,000 troops," Ramos Horta said in the interview. Adding, "if the Indonesian government continues to act in bad faith and if the army renews hostilities on the ground I am concious that there is going to be a major uprising throughout the country [East Timor]." Ramos Horta also said, "if Indonesia renews hostilities in the country [East Timor], we will have tens of thousands, hundreds of East Timorese throughout the country, East Timor, going into the streets." East Timor some 800,000 inhabitants.
Indonesia's military in Dili, capital of East Timor, has claimed it had withdrawn three companies of soldiers and mobile police brigades, allegedly totalling 300 men, as part of a "regular troop rotation" on 5 August.
The Indonesian Armed Froces (ABRI) last week denied claims that it had replaced the combat troops that it had withdrawn from East Timor last month. In a statement released by Jakarta's official news agency, Antara, ABRI claimed it had only sent a "very small" number of military personnel involved in medical and "morale-building" tasks, to support non-combat troops in East Timor. Indonesian President Jusuf Habibie has promised a "gradual" troop withdrawal from East Timor in a meeting with the apostolic administrator of Dili, Bishop Carlos Belo, in June. Disgarced former Indonesian president Suharto ordered the invasion of East Timor in December 1975 and its unilateral annexation in July 1976. East Timor had been ruled by Portugal for about four centuries.
The East Timor International Support Centre in Darwin in a press release last week quoted an armed resitance source in the eastern region of East Timor as saying that 300 fresh troops had arrived in the area on 6 August. Renan Selak, regional secretary of the eastern region of the armed wing of the East Timorese resistance movement, FALINTIL, said in a letter dated 6 September that "several thousand" troops had arrived in East Timor before the high-profile withdrawal of 1,000 Indonesian troops. Ramos Horta also said in the CNN interview the East Timorese resistance miovement categorically rejected Habibie's offer of limited autonomy for the occupied territory. "Our problem with President Habibie's offer of autonomy is that the autonomy is conditional on the United Nations recognising the annexation of East Timor. We cannot accept that," Ramos Horta said.
The East Timorese resisrtance movement demands that the territory be given the right of self-determination through an internationally supervised referendum on independence.