Patrick Mcdowell, Jakarta – Drunk on stolen beer, pro-Indonesian militiamen looted the UN compound in East Timor on Friday, smashing equipment and terrifying East Timorese still inside after most of the UN staff were evacuated.
As Indonesian troops fired guns to intimidate the 80 remaining UN workers, several journalists and hundreds of refugees, militia extremists chanted for them to be burned out. Gunfire sent two elderly women scrambling over the wall into the compound, shredding their arms on barbed wire. Estimates of the death toll in East Timor has ranged from 600 to 7,000.
In New York, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said martial law has failed to restore order in East Timor and urged Indonesia to accept foreign military help.
"The time has clearly come for Indonesia to seek help from the international community to fulfill its responsibility to bring order and security to the people of East Timor," he told a news conference.
Even though Australia, New Zealand, France and many other countries have offered troops to a peacekeeping force, Annan said all governments "have made it clear that it's too dangerous for them to go in without the consent of Indonesia." In Jakarta, the defense minister, Gen. Wiranto, said: "We do not reject the UN peacekeeping force, but it is not the appropriate time."
Protesters in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, protested the international pressure on their country by urinating and smearing chicken dung on US and Australian flags before burning them.
President Clinton called the attacks on the compound "simply unacceptable," and said it was clear the Indonesian military was "aiding and abetting the militia violence." Clinton was in Hawaii on his way to a Pacific Rim summit in New Zealand.
Clinton's statement came a day after he suspended the Pentagon's few formal contacts with the Indonesian military and threatened to suspend economic assistance to the country.
Comparisons to Kosovo and Cambodia have increasingly been made as television footage shows men, women and children, their hands raised, being herded at gunpoint from burning homes. Indonesia calls the claims of forcible deportation "nonsense," but UN officials report that an estimated quarter of the 850,000 East Timorese have fled their homes.
At least four UN staffers were killed by militiamen in the past week. About 350 staffers were evacuated Friday from the compound in Dili and flown to Darwin, Australia.
Those who stayed behind were awaiting a visit Saturday by a team of ambassadors from the UN Security Council. "Morale is actually pretty high," a UN information officer said in a telephone interview. "We're all happy we were able to stay." But the conditions around the compound could not be described as cheerful.
Militiamen drunk on looted beer entered the parking lot outside the walls and demanded several UN vehicles, UN officials said. The militiamen were refused, so they smashed up the vehicles and looted whatever they could.
A UN official said some of the refugees left the compound and fled into the surrounding hills. As they were climbing uphill, shots were fired at them. The government has acknowledged the existence of rogue army elements and claims the problems can be solved through martial law imposed earlier this week.
However, the thoroughness of the savagery and depopulation in the past week suggests complicity at a very high level. Refugees who have been forcibly shipped to neighboring West Timor remain under the control of the Indonesian military and the militias. Foreign journalists and aid workers have been threatened and attacked if they try to enter.
Meanwhile, Bishop Carlos Belo, the spiritual leader of East Timor, arrived in Lisbon on his way to Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II. He called for a war crimes tribunal. "We can verify that there is a genocide, a cleansing," said Belo, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. The crisis has threatened the stability of this country of 216 million people scattered across 13,000 islands, simmering in turmoil since longtime dictator Suharto was toppled in street protests last year.