Tom Fawthrop and Marianne Kearney, Kupang – More than 230,000 East Timorese refugees in West Timor camps are being pressed to declare whether they want to return home or stay in Indonesia.
Jakarta's Ministry of Transmigration has been preparing a resettlement plan to absorb more than 250,000 East Timorese, with promises of two hectares of land and a house.
International aid agencies in Kupang, West Timor's capital, are concerned that with intimidation, disappearances and political killings routine in the camps, now is not the time to ask the refugees to make such crucial choices.
An officer with the newly established Kupang office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said: "We want [the refugees] to be well informed, to know what to expect if they return home, to know what kind of guarantees for their safe return and transportation can be provided. That is clearly not the case at the moment."
Mr Kenneth McClean, the director of Catholic Relief Services in Kupang, was concerned that "with armed militias still in camps, refugees would be afraid of opting to return home, fearing that they would expose themselves as independence supporters".
The Indonesian Ministry of Social Affairs has distributed about 50,000 registration cards, one for each household in the camps. The results for Kupang districts were already being tabulated on Wednesday.
The head of each refugee family is required to nominate its preference: to return to East Timor; to stay in West Timor or neighbouring regions; or to move elsewhere in Indonesia.
On Saturday refugees held in a sports stadium in Kupang were among the first to be registered in a process administered by Indonesian soldiers, who gave red cards to those who wished to return, and blue cards to those who chose to stay, according to an Indonesian non-government organisation.
Mr John Campbell, a lecturer from the Protestant University of Kupang, saw this as a "deeply flawed process which could be used by pro-integration groups, if the numbers of refugees opting to stay exceed those who want to return. Whatever this survey represents, this is in no way a referendum on the referendum."
One priest in Atambua said: "The only way to make sure you really know who wants to return is to have UNHCR do private interviews with all the refugees."
Many aid agencies wonder why the authorities are in such a rush. They have begun a crash building program to create new settlements, co-ordinated between four ministries and with land already allocated.
The Indonesian authorities have authorised the first UN flight taking refugees from Kupang back to East Timor, and about 180 people are expected to travel today.
Church sources believe the military has supplied the militia with a hit list of about 300 independence supporters, many of whom are expected to be on that first flight today.