Andi Jatmiko, Liquica – Dozens of anti-independence militiamen who fled East Timor are secretly returning with plans to launch a guerrilla campaign against the international peacekeepers charged with keeping them out.

The Associated Press accompanied a militia leader and his armed followers through the mountainous interior of the half-island territory this week. The Australian-led multinational force has clashed with, and killed, several militiamen in the past week.

"We are East Timorese. Why are [the peacekeepers] trying to keep me out of East Timor?" militia leader Eurico Guterres asked Tuesday. "This is the place where I was born. I will fight to be in my own land, my own place." The peacekeepers were deployed on September 20 after the Indonesian army and its militia allies unleashed a wave of killings following an overwhelming vote for independence by East Timor's 850,000 people in a UN-sponsored referendum.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas urged Indonesia's parliament on Wednesday to approve East Timor's independence, saying the country could face economic sanctions if the legislators delay their decision.

The United Nations has urged the militias to disarm and to help rebuild an independent East Timor. However, guerrilla leaders like Guterres have ignored the appeal.

This week, he traveled from a militia stronghold on the border of Indonesian-controlled West Timor to a village in Liquica, about 30 miles west of Dili, East Timor's capital, where the peacekeeping force is based.

There, he inspected a group of about 150 militiamen, who he said had slipped into East Timor last week. Most had M16s, AK/47s and other automatic weapons; others carried homemade arms. All wore uniforms of Indonesia's military, which is accused of covertly supporting them.

"We are going to send more militias in soon. Maybe then we will fight," Guterres said as his men gathered in a secluded bamboo grove. He and his Aitarak militia are accused by independence activists of several bloody attacks, which the United Nations plans to investigate.

Hundreds of militiamen retreated into West Timor ahead of the arriving peacekeepers, and Guterres said they are now returning.

"I want to tell the world that the militias are not still just on the border, like the media says," he said. "We are back in East Timor and behind [the peacekeepers'] lines." Despite the militia presence, a company of Australian mechanized infantry rolled into Liquica on Wednesday in their M113 armored personnel carriers.

"We're going to stay here permanently," said Capt. Jeremy Gillman-Wells, the Australian commander of the newly established garrison.

He said he planned to go into the hills overlooking the coastal town and appeal to an estimated 30,000 displaced people to return to Liquica and surrounding villages.

Doctors Without Borders, an international relief agency, was planning to set up a clinic in the destroyed town, once used by the Portuguese as the seat of their colonial government. Other humanitarian organizations were planning to mount a large rice distribution drive in the town on the weekend.

"The people up in the hills won't come down until they see that security has been re-established," Gillman-Wells said.

Another militia leader, Cancio Lopes de Carvalho, was spotted 60 miles southwest of Dili. Carvalho said he leads 400 fighters in camps near Suai, not far from the border, and others would be arriving soon despite a buildup of peacekeepers in the area.

On Wednesday, 344 Australian troops landed on beaches near Suai to reinforce a garrison of 139 New Zealand soldiers. Across the border in West Timor, about 100 militiamen conducted drills armed with sticks.

"We will give them automatic weapons later but not today. We are training them how to live and fight in the jungle," said their instructor, who identified himself as Abilardio.

On Wednesday, Australian Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, the peacekeepers' commander, applauded the progress his troops have made so far. "A vast part of this country is relatively secure and vastly more secure than it was before we arrived," he said.