Lindsay Murdoch, Jakarta – Death threats and intimidation this week forced United Nations officials to abandon efforts to reunite children living in impoverished Indonesian orphanages with their parents in East Timor.

A prominent Timorese pro-Jakarta activist, Mr Octavio Soares, told the Herald that if any member of an international organisation "dare mess with the kids, I will not hesitate to kill them".

"I swear, I will protect and take good care of them and protect them with my last [drop of] blood," he said.

Humanitarian workers suspect that Timorese living in Java are blocking UN attempts to repatriate the children because they want to indoctrinate them and raise them as activists to seek East Timor's reintegration with Indonesia.

Letters from 14 of the children's parents in East Timor asking them to return home were confiscated from them several weeks ago by friends of Mr Soares.

The traumatised children have become pawns in a highly politicised tug-of-war. They are confused and sceptical about UN assurances that their parents have returned to East Timor from refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor, where they last saw them.

Many of the children have been told that the UN wants to take them away from orphanages only because it gets money for transporting them.

Sister Josefinia, a nun helping to care for 73 of the children at St Thomas, an orphanage near the East Java city of Semarang, said one of the children cried herself to sleep when she was told she would be leaving.

Julmiro Sarmento Pinto, 12, said that the first time he heard the UN wanted to take him home, "I got confused".

"How is it possible that my parents, who insisted that I must study in Java in the first place, now want me to go back to them without having finished my school?" he asked.

Two UN officials trying to negotiate the return of a first group of 14 children from St Thomas were this week the targets of verbal intimidation and threats, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mr Bernard Kerblat, said.

Mr Kerblat was quoted in Dili as saying that the "case was almost completed and the [UNHCR] team had been due to begin the last interviews with the children before they leave to join their parents, who had asked for their return".

Asked about the threats, Mr Soares said the UNHCR must have misinterpreted his comments. But he said that he and his friends had argued with UNHCR officials over the children's future.

The children are among as many as 1,000 boys and girls who were separated from their parents at the height of the violence in East Timor in 1999, and who were later moved from camps in West Timor.

Mr Soares and his friends persuaded parents of the 124 children taken to five Indonesian orphanages that they would receive a better education in Java.

But UNHCR officials said the parents agreed to their children being taken away because of the chaos and fear at that time. They said the separations were against the spirit of United Nations conventions protecting children. The children were left with nuns at the orphanages who were given no prior notice of their arrival.

Mr Kerblat said the threats and intimidation of UN officials had come from members of the Hati Foundation, an organisation that has close links to Indonesian government departments.

Mr Soares, a nephew of the former Jakarta-appointed governor of East Timor, Mr Abilio Soares, is secretary-general of the foundation, which continues to refer to East Timor within the framework of "Indonesian unity".

Sister Angelina, the senior nun at St Thomas, said Hati representatives got upset and raised their voices in front of the children this week when they learnt that UNHCR officials had met the children without them being present.

Mr Soares said it was up to the children to decide whether they wanted to return to their parents.

But he said the UNHCR had threatened him while the media and others had accused him of exploiting the children for political purposes. "But to hell with them ... to hell with the media," Mr Soares said.

He was concerned that the children, if returned, would face a tougher, more dangerous life in East Timor, he said. "I don't want them to be neglected or manipulated by certain people, or even worse end up on the street becoming beggars or child prostitutes."

Mr Soares said that when the children came to Java, he had agreements with their parents that they would stay and finish their studies.

[On March 17 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Kirsty Gusmao, wife of Xanana Gusmao, plans to raise the case of an East Timorese teenage girl abducted by a notorious militia leader before the UN's International Commission of Human Rights in Geneva. Juliana dos Santos, of Suai, was 15 when she was abducted as a "war prize" by Igidio Mnanek, the deputy commander of the Laksaur militia. She was taken across the border into West Timor to live a life of virtual sexual slavery - James Balowski.]