Lincoln Wright – Secret defence documents on East Timor show the Howard Government was well-informed about how the Indonesian armed forces were fomenting militia violence in the run-up to the independence ballot.

Prepared by the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), the documents undermine the view that it was rogue elements in the Indonesian army, TNI, that caused the violence that led to Australian military intervention.

Further evidence of TNI's conspiratorial role in the militia violence was presented by Wayne Sievers, an officer with the Australian Federal Police, to a private meeting of Parlia ment's Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on Monday night.

Mr Sievers, a police intelligence officer who served with UNAMET, the United Nations mission in East Timor, had gathered the material from a variety of sources, including East Timorese serving with TNI and Indonesia's security services.

He said the documents he had obtained showed there was a conspiracy at the highest levels of TNI, Indonesian police and government officials.

On the eve of the ballot in August, DIO advised that East Timor will experience violence and intimidation for much of the rest of the year". TNI will continue to foster violence against its perceived enemies." The DIO memorandum advised that the militia violence was orchestrated along strict guidelines" from TNI, that it had a clear purpose and that if the vote was for independence, TNI would have less control over its militant surrogates".

But Prime Minister John Howard said last night that intense diplomatic pressure had been the only serious option and that critics of his policy were misguided.

What did they expect us to have done other than what we did?" he asked. We made 120 separate representations to the Indonesian authorities from the beginning of the year until about the time of the ballot."

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton claimed Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer had obfuscated the facts about the role of TNI by denying, right up to the third week of September, that anyone but rogue" or some" elements in the TNI unconnected to the leadership, were initiating the violence.

In response, Mr Downer said the leaked DIO documents were not as significant as Mr Brereton claimed. These documents don't throw any new light on what has happened in East Timor or what the Government has said over the course of the last he said. At the time of the Liquica massacre in April, another leaked DIO document reveals that it was unclear" what was TNI's role in the massacre, but that TNI [or ABRI as it was then called] was culpable".

In April, DIO's view of TNI commander-in-chief General Wiranto was that he had ordered his troops to remain neutral, but had warned that without pressure local officers would still back the pro-Indonesia militias. A DIO document prepared in October showed TNI was worried that General Wiranto would be implicated in the UN human-rights investigation, and that its own investigation would scapegoat officers at lower levels.

Mr Sievers said the documents he provided to the parliamentary committee detailed secret meetings, plans for violence, funding arrangements, arming, and the provision of TNI intelligence officers to monitor and control militias. On the morning the result of the vote was announced, we knew what was going to happen, when it was going to happen, and how it would would happen. It was like waiting for the sky to fall in on he told The Canberra Times last night.

Mr Brereton has called for the Government to provide intelligence to the UN commission investigating human-rights abuses in East Timor, in the same way that NATO had provided secret information about war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Mr Downer said he and Mr Howard would do the right thing about providing intelligence to the UN, but in a way that would not threaten networks. We are looking, in particular, at the precedent that has been set by the Americans and the British in relation to investigations that have gone on into human-rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans."