Philip Sherwell – East Timor has not known a weekend like it. The flags of the world fluttered above Dili yesterday as workmen gave a final spruce-up to the down-at-heel waterfront capital before the arrival of dignitories from nearly 100 countries, including Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, for tonight's independence celebrations.
The impoverished territory will become the first new nation of the millennium at midnight after nearly two-and-a-half years of UN administration, 24 years of brutal Indonesian occupation and more than three centuries as a Portuguese colonial backwater. Up to a third of the population of 700,000 are expected to turn out to watch the celebrations.
Even Megawati Sukarnoputri, the Indonesian president, is expected to fly in for the ceremony, although her visit was overshadowed by a row between the state-in-waiting and its former occupiers yesterday. East Timor protested to Jakarta over the entry of six Indonesian navy vessels into its waters, nominally to protect Ms Megawati's delegation.
Teresina Cardoso and Joana dos Santos are not in party mood, however. Tomorrow they will be back at work in the ramshackle market building in the border town of Maliana where they formed a widows co-operative, "The Group of 99", with nearly 50 other women whose husbands were murdered in September 1999 by rampaging pro-Indonesian militia.
They struggle to earn a living there making dresses and blouses on an ancient sewing machine and selling a few basic foodstuffs and household goods in the former militia stronghold.
To their distress and anger, recent weeks have seen the return to the streets around the market of former members of the gang that abducted and killed their menfolk after the territory voted overwhelmingly for independence. "I see these people walking free and I feel hate," says Mrs Cardoso.
Despite repeatedly searching the fields and forests around Maliana, where she lives with her two young daughters, she has found no trace of her husband, Albino.
"I just want to ask them where they left his body," the 30-year-old says, placing a hand on the shoulder of her oldest child, Saturnina, 11. "I have never been able to bury him because I never found him. Just a bone would do. Something, anything."
Ahead of independence, many former militiamen have been coming home from the refugee camps in the neighbouring Indonesian province of West Timor to which they fled after their murderous rampage. Across the border they maintained their reign of terror over more than 100,000 civilians forced out of East Timor at the same time – as I discovered when I was attacked and beaten up in one camp in early 2000 by pro-Jakarta thugs who blamed the Western world and its media for the territory's breakaway from Indonesia.
The senior militia leaders who were responsible for organising the killing sprees are unlikely to return from Indonesia. Thousands of their men are returning, however, and are likely to remain free, for now at least.
They have good reason to believe that UN prosecutors and the embryonic state's pitifully ill-funded courts will only have the resources to try senior militia leaders and those accused of the worst atrocities.
Xanana Gusmao, the former guerrilla leader and political prisoner who becomes the first president of East Timor tomorrow, is taking a high-risk gamble, making reconciliation the cornerstone of his new administration and indicating that he will issue pardons for the few militiamen who come before the courts.
"We have to break the cycle of violence for the next generation," he says. "We still feel the pain of our suffering and sacrifices and losses. But we must look for justice not revenge."
The urbane and amiable ex-rebel commander, who says he would rather be a pumpkin farmer than a president, is pinning his hopes for maintaining peace on a policy of "reconciliation with justice".
Most militiamen will be dealt with by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which his government is establishing, rather than the courts. Although the UN serious crimes unit is investigating 10 so-called "priority cases" against the former militia, it has only successfully prosecuted one so far.
Since the chaos and carnage of September 1999, when an estimated 1,500 people were killed, East Timor has made impressive strides towards statehood under UN supervision. Calm was restored by international peacekeepers and an army, police force and civil servants have been trained by foreign advisers.
There are growing fears, however, that the handover from UN control to the new government could be followed by bloody revenge attacks against militiamen by East Timorese who lost relatives two-and-a-half years ago and are frustrated by the slow pace of justice. "I don't support popular justice or lynch mobs," says Mrs Cardoso. "But if these people don't appear before the courts or the government issues an amnesty, then people will take justice into their own hands."
The last time I visited Maliana, shortly before the independence plebiscite in late-August 1999, I was repeatedly threatened by militiamen armed with home-made muskets, spears and machetes, draped in the red and white of the Indonesian flag and fuelled by amphetamines and alcohol.
Orlando Lopes, who was a member of that militia, has just returned from West Timor to the brick and mud hut where his family lives. The small and rather timid man insists that he was dragooned into the militia and witnessed no killing. He was not always so diffident, however, and admits that he was part of a mob that looted and burnt homes.
Asked how he feels about the declaration of nationhood that his militia so violently opposed, he says: "I'm happy that Xanana will become our president as he is like a big brother to us. But my life has not changed dramatically. I was a peasant then and I am a peasant now."
Mrs Cardoso only wishes that her husband could say the same.