Jakarta – The Indonesian military is investigating reports that pro-Jakarta militiamen are stockpiling weapons along the border between East and West Timor, an officer said Saturday.
"We don't know how many are stashed. We suspect that the weapons were from past unrest," said Indonesian Army Col. Moeswarno Moesanip, who is in charge of security in the region.
Moesanip said the group may have caches of firearms, hand grenades, and ammunition buried along the mountainous border that divides the island, but added no weapons would have been hidden in Indonesia-ruled West Timor. He did not elaborate.
The Jakarta Post, quoting Moesanip in a report Saturday, said former East Timor-based militiamen may use the arms in raids into their one-time homeland from West Timor. Moesanip told The Associated Press Saturday he was misquoted. "We don't know what they are planning. They are lying low," Moesanip said.
A former militia chief, Eurico Guterres, now based in West Timor's provincial capital Kupang, denied the rebels were caching weapons or planning assaults in East Timor. "We have no plans for armed incursions," Guterres said. "We gave all our weapons to the military."
The Indonesian army recruited thousands of militiamen in the final days of its 24-year occupation of East Timor in 1999, in an effort to intimidate the population into voting against independence in a UN-organized referendum.
But four-fifths of the voters opted for independence _ and after the poll, Indonesia's army and its auxiliaries laid waste to the province, killing at least 1,500 civilians, destroying most of its housing and infrastructure and forcing nearly half of its 600,000 people into exile.
The reign of terror was cut short by the arrival of international peacekeepers, who promptly kicked Indonesian forces out of the territory they'd invaded in 1975.
Thousands of militiamen fled with the troops. Many have returned home in the past four years, but several thousand have stayed in Indonesia's West Timor province _ the other half of the island where East Timor is located, several hundred kilometers (miles) north of Australia.
Although some militia have made sporadic attempts to infiltrate East Timor, the border area has been mostly quiet since 2000.
Several thousand UN soldiers remain in East Timor. Most are scheduled to pull out in the next several months, when the newly established East Timorese army will take over security duties.