Jakarta – An overwhelming majority of East Timorese refugees languishing in West Timor camps want to stay in Indonesia, early results of a registration drive showed Friday.
The preliminary results of the two-day exercise issued by the registration committee in Kupang, the main town in West Timor on Friday morning showed that 97.65 percent, or 88,102 of the 90,225 people counted so far, wanted to remain in Indonesia.
Another 1,399 refugees, or 1.55 percent, wanted to return to East Timor, while 724 made no choice, said Tupan Masan of the committee's media center.
Usman Abu Bakar, coordinator of the media center, said discrepancies in the numbers of refugees chosing to return, which on Thursday night stood at 4,259, was because of miscounting in Belu district, where most of the refugees are camped. "Belu sent a revised version last [Thursday] night and apologized to us. We're not tempering with the data," Abu Bakar told AFP.
Masan said that out of 14 districts in the province, only the districts of Kupang and Timor Tengah Utara had completed the vote counting. "We hope we will complete the counting today," he told AFP. Masan put the number of the refugees in West Timor at 152,790.
All East Timorese aged over 18 in the camps are required to register and state whether they and their dependents want to be repatriated to East Timor or resettled in Indonesia. The registration was extended for an extra day Thursday as turnout far exceeded expectations.
Officials have said an agreement between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Indonesian government in a meeting in Bali on May 15, has pushed up the number of people registering. One of the criteria for eligibility, residence in East Timor for 12 consecutive years, was reduced to just five years.
The state Antara news agency quoted several of the refugees as saying they might opt to return later when conditions improve in East Timor, where the militia burned whole towns to the ground after the 1999 vote. Others said they were in militias or related to militia members and feared vengeance attacks, Antara said.
The planned one-day consultation opened on Wednesday amid tight security, but had to be extended by another day because of the number of people still waiting to register. Officials cited the short preparation period and refugees' ignorance as the main obstacles in the exercise.
Foreign critics, including in the United States, have warned that as long as former pro-Indonesian militias remain in control of the squalid West Timor camps an accurate assessment of where the refugees want to go would be difficult. They said the militias were still intimidating refugees and spreading disinformation about conditions in East Timor, leaving the refugees vulnerable to reprisals if they registered to go home.
The refugees are the last of more than 250,000 people forced across the border by the militias during an orgy of violence and destruction in the wake of East Timor's independence vote on August 30, 1999.
The United Nations, whose personnel fled the territory when three UN aid workers were murdered by the militia last year, and other foreign agencies are eager to repatriate the refugees ahead of a June 20 deadline to register for elections in East Timor.