East Timor's foreign minister Jose Ramos Horta, in New Zealand this week on a private visit, once had 10 brothers and sisters. Now he has six. Four died in the violent and suppressive regime which ruled East Timor for 25 years. Ian Stuart of NZPA reports.

Jose Ramos Horta's sister lay for 25 years in a remote grave at a mountain hideout near Suai on the southern coast of East Timor. Like some 250,000 of her country men and women, she was the victim of an invading force which ruled East Timor with an often brutal iron hand.

Late last year Dr Horta, who is in New Zealand as a guest of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand, went with what was left of his family to the remote village and exhumed his sister to bring her back to the capital of Dili to be buried in a proper ceremony with their father and another brother.

She was killed in December, 1977, two years after the 1975 invasion by Indonesia and its bloody campaign to put down the resulting independence movement. The killing continued until 1999 when East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence.

The country had then to rely on a United Nations force, including New Zealand soldiers, to keep the peace as pro-Indonesia guerillas rampaged through the island, killing at will and destroying the shacks which housed the many thousands of East Timorese. Dr Ramos Horta said the 250,000 East Timorese who died after the invasion by Indonesia represented close to a third of the small country's population.

"It was the highest number, percentage of any population, of any conflict, any time in human history even compared with the holocaust of World War 11 and higher than the killing of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge."

Some families were entirely wiped out. Others had only one survivor from 20 family members.

The cost to the country was huge, but the personal suffering of Dr Ramos Horta and his family was almost unbearable, he said.

By 1975, his mother had all but put the emotional scars of World War II behind her. She lost all her family except one sister during the war when East Timor was invaded by the Japanese and the East Timorese people quietly helped Australian soldiers fight the occupiers.

Dr Ramos Horta said it was too much for his mother when she saw his three brothers and sister killed in 1977. His mother, now 76, was so devastated by the loss of her children she could not stay in East Timor.

She moved to Australia where she remains active in the East Timorese community. "She doesn't want to come back. She said she had suffered enough."

Exhuming his sister's body was one of the hardest things he has done, but Dr Ramos Horta said it was also something he had to do. "We knew where she had been buried. The local people buried her. When they saw her killed they knew it was my sister. They wrapped her properly, dressed her and ever since they have kept a guard on her grave."

Last year, as the New Zealand peacekeeping soldiers prepared to leave East Timor after three years, Dr Ramos Horta said at least he was able to bury his sister in a dignified and fitting service, unlike two of his three brothers who became victims of the invasion.

His elder brother died of neglect in a hospital in 1992 but the other two simply vanished. "We still don't know where they are. We don't know where they were killed, how they were killed. We know they were killed in 1977." The family wanted to find them and bring then back to the family plot in Dili.

For Dr Ramos Horta the struggle for independence was as much for his sister and his brothers as for his country.

"I owed it to them, but also to everybody else because my family's suffering is no different from so many thousands of families in East Timor. I always believed one day Timor would be free. It is free now."

He said in the pursuit of justice and independence, he disciplined himself to stay focused and not to lose hope.

"If you lose hope you lose everything. You surrender." Dr Ramos Horta said East Timor was very very touched by the support New Zealand had provided to East Timor since 1999.

"Your great little country has contributed generously to East Timor defence security but also to its economic recovery."