APSN Banner

Gurkhas rescue 4,000 from militia

Source
South China Morning Post - October 1, 1999

Agencies in Dili, Los Palos and Jakarta – British Gurkha soldiers yesterday arrested two members of a group of East Timorese militiamen who were holding more than 4,000 people in the eastern port of Com, military sources said.

The militiamen appeared to be preparing to move the 4,000 people out of the territory, the sources said.

The Gurkhas, part of the Australian-led International Force for East Timor (Interfet), arrived in the eastern town of Los Palos earlier in the day. They were acting on information received on the ground, the sources said.

Thousands are thought to have been killed by pro-Jakarta forces since East Timor overwhelmingly voted for independence in a UN-organised August 30 referendum.

Hundreds of thousands have left the territory, many of them forcibly removed by militiamen backed by elements of the Indonesian military.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan yesterday asked the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, to set up a commission of inquiry into East Timor and to report to him by December 31.

Mr Annan said the international inquiry would include "adequate representation of Asian experts" and work in co-operation with the Indonesian national commission on human rights. Jakarta has so far rejected such a probe.

Armed forces chief General Wiranto yesterday admitted military transport was used to move most of the 250,000 refugees now in West Timor, but only because there was no other transport available.

"This does not mean that we encouraged [their move] or engineered it," General Wiranto said after accompanying President Bacharuddin Habibie in talks with visiting US Defence Secretary William Cohen.

General Wiranto said Mr Cohen had expressed hopes that when security had returned to East Timor, Indonesia would assist in returning the refugees who wanted to go home. The general said: "When the time is right, the military will be ready to help return them."

Mr Cohen said the military had aided and abetted violence in East Timor and urged it to disarm anti-independence militias and investigate and punish those guilty of "improper behaviour".

He said General Wiranto had promised to investigate the military's role and act to disarm militias. "I made it clear that the US will not consider restoring normal military to military contacts until the TNI [Indonesian armed forces] reforms its ways," he said.

In New York, Foreign Minister Ali Alatas rejected US charges that the Indonesian military was failing to protect East Timorese refugees in West Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia, but invited Washington to send a fact-finding team to the region.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright agreed to the proposal. But she failed to persuade Jakarta to co-operate with a UN investigation into rights abuses in East Timor.

The peacekeepers have had to release a man believed to be a militia commander because Interfet's mandate will not allow it to hold him for more than 72 hours.

Interfet forces said yesterday it had recovered nine bodies in the eastern part of the territory at the weekend.

The recovery of the bodies from Lautem, 175km east of Dili, followed the discovery on Wednesday of nine other mutilated corpses in a truck near Dili airport.

Country