Jakarta – When East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia last year, feared militia leader Eurico Guterres made his displeasure known by sending his armed followers to the airport to block any East Timorese from leaving.

His followers, members of the Dili-based Aitarak (Thorn) militia, met no resistance from the Indonesian military, nor did it attempt to stop Guterres when he turned up at Dili airport's departure lounge, bound for Jakarta himself.

At the airport, Guterres, 28, a colorful but feared figure, who favors military fatigues and cap, dark glasses and long hair tied back in a pony tail, regaled journalists with a mixture of anger against the Indonesian military, the United Nations and the world in general.

The top pro-Indonesians in East Timor, he fumed to an AFP reporter, were leaving, abandoning their responsibilities to loyal people like him. Asked why he too was leaving so suddenly – only one day after the UN released the overwhelmingly pro-independence result of the vote – Guterres said simply that was a different matter. He was just going to see his wife in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, he said.

Guterres's followers meanwhile were blocking – with the simple menacing prod of a rifle – any other East Timorese from escaping. The Indonesian military watched.

The same day, the Dili-based Aitarak and fellow militia groups – the Besi Merah Putih (Red and White Iron), the Mahidi (Live or Die for Indonesia) and others – started a campaign of arson, that was to turn within hours into a territory-wide reign of terror. Again the Indonesian miltiary watched as Dili burned, saying that the people who voted against independence were angry and that Timorese were by nature a violent people.

The military had long augmented their troops with the militia – a motley collection of paid spies, thugs, defectors from the independence movement, and press-ganged youths. Each of the 13 districts of East Timor, when it was still Indonesian territory, had its own militia group.

As an irregular force, Indonesian authorities were able and did paint the militia as fervent Indonesian loyalists and gave them a political status as such. Despite frequent denials, the Indonesian army also provided them with weapons and paramilitary training.

Independence supporters, speaking in the months ahead of the vote, said their own spies in Dili banks had detected huge amounts of counterfeit money being paid out to the estimated 10,000 militia. Not that spies were needed.

Along the roadsides journalists could see the new recruits being drilled, and in shops they bought up huge supplies of the local stimulant "Kratingdaeng" and black beer – the combination of which was reputed to put them in a crazed killing mood. The militia often roared, armed to the teeth, through the city in new jeeps, in a show of power.

They publicly distributed signed leaflets, marking pro-independence followers for death – then followed up their threats with attacks as the Indonesian military, widely believed to be their paymasters, again stood by. One year later and Guterres is still publicly strutting his stuff.

Now stranded in West Timor, the king of nothing but squalid refugee camps, whose inmates are said to be held virtually to ransom by the militia, Guterres continues to appear regularly on Indonesian national television. He continues to rail angrily against his fate, and suggests that if anyone should be blamed for the post-Timor violence, it should be former Indonesian president B.J. Habibie, who allowed the vote to go ahead.

He turns up at public functions, welcomed UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata at the Atambua refugee camps when she first visited them, flies back and forth between Jakarta, Bali and Kupang, and shows up regularly at National Day functions alongside Indonesian officials. And he continues to urge that East Timor – already half an island – be divided again to give the militia a home – and in the most fertile western parts too.

But the question raised by the brutal killings of three UN aid workers Thursday was whether militia leaders like Guterres might have decided that they had been "too soft" in East Timor by not killing foreigners. Hounded on all sides, apparently abandonned by their paymasters, their bases in West Timor shrinking as the refugees return, the militia seem cornered and determined not to move.