Sian Powell – A delegation of senior Australian diplomats last week toured an Indonesian region considered by the UN to be more dangerous than Baghdad.

Australian deputy ambassador in Indonesia Peter Rowe and several other diplomats made an official visit to West Timor, an impoverished half-island in eastern Indonesia.

West Timor is rated phase 5 by the UN, the highest danger-level alert, warranting immediate evacuation. Phase 5 bars UN officials from working without extraordinary security clearance, stifling aid to a dirt-poor district now home to thousands of East Timorese refugees.

The Australian delegation met local officials, toured the area and visited the squalid refugee camps on the border with East Timor.

"It [the trip] was designed to get a better understanding of the security situation there," Mr Rowe told The Australian.

The Australians, who took no extraordinary security measures, were repeatedly told of West Timor's struggle.

"A constant thing we got from people in West Timor was their concern about the phase 5 rating," Mr Rowe said. "It's a very poor place and they have had the burden of all those refugees." Many aid workers dismiss the UN's security assessment, describing it as overblown and saying its impact on West Timor is disastrous.

It is understood Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri raised West Timor's dilemma with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan when she visited New York last year.

A quarter of a million East Timorese were forced over the border to West Timor after East Timor's bloody independence referendum in 1999. Most later returned to their homeland of their own accord but a stubborn core has remained in West Timor, some of them former militia members or supporters.

West Timor has been rated phase 5 since three UN officials were murdered by militia thugs in the town of Atambua in September 2000. While it is true the district is still home to many of the militia hoodlums who wrought such havoc after East Timor's 1999 independence referendum, experts say there has been no organised violence for some time.

Tensions have eased considerably since infamous militia leader Joao Tavares left the border region last September, for a more comfortable life in the Javan city of Yogyakarta.

The head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Jakarta, Robert Ashe, has been to West Timor many times in the past 12 months.

UNHCR has been trying to resettle the thousands of East Timorese refugees living near the border, with some success despite the restrictions of phase 5. "We can go in on short missions, but we have to get prior approval from a UN security officer in New York," Mr Ashe said.

"Then I send our own security officer to West Timor, and he discusses the situation with security officers there." While in West Timor, Mr Ashe is accompanied by a police escort everywhere he goes.

The UN's field security officer in Indonesia, Bill Simpson, said the phase alerts were an internal system, and "not for the public".

Mr Simpson said areas were designated phase 5 "if some incident has happened and people were in danger".

He added that he had no information that a review of the West Timor rating was planned. "If there's any intention, they will be discussing it in New York," he said.

Gregorius Maubili, deputy regent of Belu, next to the East Timor border, said the UN should rethink its assessment of West Timor as a matter of priority.

"Maybe to withdraw it is not an easy matter, but at least the status should be adjusted to reflect the current situation," Dr Maubili said.

"With the phase 5 alert, the lives of the people are disrupted because international aid is not able to come here – this applies especially to handling the East Timorese refugees," he said. "We have been punished by this rating." Dr Maubili said the burden of the East Timorese refugees had been borne for four years in a district with limited means. "We have tried to contact the UN in order to get an evaluation of conditions at this time," he added.

Embassies often take the UN's rating into account for their travel advisories, markedly depressing tourism.

The military district commander in Belu, Lieutenant-Colonel Ganip Warsito said the embassies were wrong and the impoverished district was entirely safe.

"Even though there is phase 5 in Belu, the people's lives run normally. There is no problem," he said. Conceding that some individual militia members still lived in refugee camps in the area, he said the militias as organisations were defunct.