Dili – Thousands of East Timorese, clutching flowers and photos, followed independence leader Xanana Gusmao in a procession through Dili's still-rubbled streets yesterday, in the largest ever commemoration of a massacre in the city's Santa Cruz cemetery nine years ago.

On November 12, 1991, Indonesian soldiers opened fire on protesters in the cemetery, killing what activists say more than 200 people, while the Indonesian military put the official figure at 50 to 60.

Video footage of the cemetery attack was broadcast around the world and drew international attention to the brutal oppression that the East Timorese were living under during Indonesia's 24- year rule over their half-island territory.

Nobel peace laureate Jose Ramos Horta, now the territory's foreign minister, said at least 500 people had been killed, based on information from the church, Dili's Bishop Belo and pro-independence fighters. "It did not stop at the cemetery, it did not stop that particular day," he said before the procession.

An estimated 250,000 East Timorese lost their lives opposing Indonesia's rule, according to human rights activists, and on August 30 last year their struggle was won when 78.5 per cent of the population voted to break away from Indonesia.

The price for last year's independence vote was at least 600 lives and the razing of the territory when Jakarta-backed militia unleashed a wave of arson, looting, destruction and killing after the vote.

Fourteen months later Dili is still a shell of a city, with gutted buildings, piles of rubble, rusting corrugated iron and burnt out homes lining its streets.

But with the city's new freedom, more than 2,000 people were able to congregate at the whitewashed Motael church on Dili's waterfront for a 90-minute mass to mark the ninth anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre.

Crowds spilled out from the churchyard onto the waterfront park, where teenage boys knelt in prayer on the grass, girls clutched sprays of bougainvillea and hibiscus, and relatives carried wreath-encircled photos of the missing and the dead. Mr Gusmao held a cross of red bougainvillea leaves as he led the procession out of the churchyard.