Jakarta – Indonesia's defense minister has accused foreign powers of inciting rioters to murder three UN aid workers in West Timor last week, media reports said Friday, ostensibly to stop East Timor from returning to Indonesian rule.
"So they provoked this riot. They throw stones and then hide ... so that the world would once again blame Indonesia," Mahfud M.D. said, according to The Indonesian Observer.
The United Nations and many foreign governments have condemned the slayings and blamed militia groups opposed to East Timor's independence from Indonesia.
However, Mahfud claimed "a certain country" had fomented the violence. Although he refused to name it, in the past Indonesia has accused Australia of trouble-making in Timor. Australia took the lead role in peacekeeping in East Timor after it was devastated by militia gangs last year.
"We suspect and have preliminary evidence that there were international intelligence operating in Atambua in a bid to stop East Timorese [refugees] from reintegrating with Indonesia," he said, referring to the West Timor town where the aid workers were killed. It was the deadliest attack on UN workers in the history of the world body.
Mahfud was a little-known professor at an Islamic university before President Abdurrahman Wahid appointed him defense minister during a Cabinet reshuffle last month.
On Friday, a Defense Ministry statement said that the "East Timorese people are already thinking about reintegrating with Indonesia" because of the failure of the United Nations to form a government, a year after East Timorese voted to separate from Indonesia.
Mahfud said that those nations that backed last year's UN-sponsored independence referendum in East Timor, "feel embarrassed for [their] failure to develop East Timor." The August 30 1999 ballot, in which four-fifths of East Timor's voters opted for independence, ended Indonesia's brutal 24-year military occupation.
Sections of the Indonesian army and paramilitary groups reacted to the vote by going on a rampage, killing hundreds of civilians and devastating much of East Timor.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled in terror, many of them to the Indonesian western half of Timor island. The United Nations, which has taken over administration of East Timor during its transition to full independence, has managed to repatriate about half of the 250,000 people from West Timor.
But the return of the others has been blocked by the militia groups. The UN Security Council has ordered Indonesia to disarm and disband the militia gangs, which are said to be operating in the refugee camps with the covert support of hardline elements in the Indonesian army.
After meeting Indonesia's security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on the tourist island of Bali, East Timor's UN administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello said Friday he was skeptical that Indonesian security forces would disband the militias in West Timor. Yudhoyono failed to convince him that Indonesia was serious about cracking down on the gangs, he said.