Joanna Jolly, Dili – The government on Friday urged Indonesia to abandon any hope of retrieving assets from its former territory of East Timor, saying Jakarta's brutality and economic exploitation during its occupation nullified any claims to what it left behind.

"East Timor's position is very clear," said East Timorese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Domingos Savio. "If Indonesians want to claim their assets, they can claim them from their own government."

"The Indonesians used our property, cut down our sandalwood, and used our coffee plantations for years," Savio said. "Who is going to pay for all the Timorese killed? All the orphans? All those who were kidnapped?"

East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a United Nations-sponsored referendum in 1999. After the vote, anti-independence militias and some members of the Indonesia military killed up to 1,000 people and destroyed much of the territory.

Human rights groups claim 200,000 people were killed or died from disease and famine during the pro-independence guerrilla war in the years before the vote.

Indonesia spent millions of dollars on developing East Timor's infrastructure after it invaded the territory in 1976. Despite this, most of the territory's people 800,000 remained poor during the occupation.

Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said the assets would be brought up with East Timor's government.

"This is an issue that needs to be discussed," he said. "How are we to speak for the many thousands of [Indonesian] individuals who lost their belongings and their property and tell them this is the past?" Natalegawa said the government was currently calculating the value of assets belonging to the government, state enterprises, private businesses and individuals left in East Timor when Indonesia withdrew.

President Megawati Sukarnoputri traveled to Dili to attend East Timor's celebration of official independence on May 20th, when the United Nations, which had administered the territory since 1999, handed over control to a local government. Several Indonesian nationalist legislators opposed Megawati's trip.

Earlier this week, Jakarta asked East Timorese President Xanana Gusmao to cancel a planned trip to Jakarta, saying the Indonesian government was not prepared.