Joanna Jolly, Kupang – East Timorese militia leaders in West Timor say they will meet all conditions set down by the United Nations, including facing justice, in order to return home.

Eight militia leaders said yesterday in the West Timorese capital, Kupang, that as long as the UN gave them a legally binding security guarantee that they would not be harmed in East or West Timor, they would return, bringing with them most of about 100,000 East Timorese refugees still in West Timor.

"We will accept justice, but there must be fair justice," a militia vice-commander, Nemecio Lopez de Carvalho, said. "We will return as soon as we have a security guarantee from the international community." In Dili, a UN spokeswoman, Ms Barbara Reis, said anyone was welcome to return to East Timor as long as those who did so were prepared to accept the conditions laid down by the UN transitional administration in the territory.

"Everybody is welcome as long as they realise they will face justice if they are implicated in serious crimes; if they renounce violence, if they stop questioning the result of last year's popular consultation and if they realise it is pointless to talk about the allocation of a separate district for refugees." The militia members say they will accept all these conditions, as they believe the Indonesian military and police will assassinate them if they remain in West Timor because of what they know.

In a letter to the UN Security Council this week, the militias said they were ready to release information implicating the Indonesian Government in last year's violence if the UN sent a team into West Timor to conduct disarmament and guarantee their security. The letter carried the names of 55 prominent militia members, including their overall chief, Joao Tavares.

They also demanded that the notorious militia chief Eurico Guterres be tried in the international court in The Hague, rather than in Jakarta, where he is in prison facing an illegal weapons charge.

The letter signals a split between militia leaders and UNTAS, the political body that represents East Timorese pro-integration support groups in West Timor. Kupang newspapers report that UNTAS is critical of the militias' demands, and says they should leave West Timor because they will cause instability if they remain. "Those who feel they are not Indonesian citizens must get out of Indonesia soon," the UNTAS secretary-general, Mr Filomeno Hornay, told the NTT Express.

Local newspapers have also reported that Tavares complained that the militia leaders did not consult him before writing to the UN. The militia leaders yesterday stood by their allegation, made on Wednesday, that the former Indonesian president Dr B.J. Habibie ordered the destruction of East Timor at a secret meeting in Dili on August 20 last year.

"The meeting was very secret and professional. We can prove it through our testimonies," Lopez de Carvalho said. "Habibie came by plane with generals Wiranto, Damiri and Zacky Anwar and we had a meeting with them that lasted more than two hours." General Wiranto was then the armed forces chief, General Damiri the regional commander and General Anwar the intelligence chief.