Doug Struck, Kupang – A human rights organisation has documented atrocities in East Timor that implicate the Indonesian military and militias in at least seven mass killings and dozens of individual slayings.

"Killing, plundering, burning, terror, intimidation and kidnapping have been carried out by the Indonesian armed forces, along with the pro-Jakarta militia" since East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence on 30 August, concludes the report by the Foundation for Law, Human Rights and Justice, based in Dili, the East Timor capital.

Many refugees were interviewed secretly because of fears of retribution from militiamen in the refugee camps. Most of the atrocities cited by the group have not been verified because after shooting erupted in Dili, journalists were confined to the United Nations compound, and then evacuated.

According to the report, witnesses identified Indonesian military members, in addition to the militias, as participants in the atrocities. Indonesia has denied that any mass killings happened, and has sent more troops to East Timor to impose martial law and end the turmoil.

The report includes some incidents that have been verified by the media and other sources and others not previously known. Among them:

Several hours before results of East Timor's independence referendum were announced on 4 September, 45 people were killed in Maliana, western East Timor. They included 21 drivers and local employees of the UN observers' operation.

Ten people in Bidau Macaur Atas, a neighborhood in Dili, were hacked to death on 4 September by militia and Indonesian armed forces. Some were buried by relatives, but "others were put into bags and thrown away on the side of the road. Others were thrown into the ocean". On the same day, militia members killed 50 people in Bedois, eastern Dili.

The next day, eight people who went to the Dili harbor to try to leave East Timor by ferry were identified as pro-independence, and shot dead by Aitarak militia members.

The group said it also documented the attack on a Dili Roman Catholic centre, which killed at least 25 people, including a baby; the killing of 15 local employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Dili on 5 September; and an attack by the army and militia on a Catholic church compound in the Dili neighborhood of Balide, where unknown numbers were slain.

The human rights group, which is working in East and western Timor, provided reliable reports in Dili before chaos engulfed the city last week. Its offices were ransacked and many of its files destroyed.

Much of the violence in East Timor has been carried out by pro-Indonesian militias, but there have been frequent reports of shooting and looting by the military. The Indonesian armed forces chief, General Wiranto, acknowledged yesterday that the militias and military were "comrades in arms". He said his forces have not succeeded in ending the violence, because for his soldiers, "I can understand it is very hard to shoot their own people".