RIGHTS-EAST TIMOR: UN Condemns Latest Violence

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 1999 (IPS) - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the attack Wednesday by pro-Indonesia militia units outside UN headquarters in Dili, East Timor’s capital, and urged Indonesia to crack down on the paramilitaries.

Annan responded to the Dili assault, which reportedly left two people dead, by calling on the Indonesian police “to arrest those responsible for the violence and to take immediate steps to ensure it does not happen again.”

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard confirmed that some 300 East Timorese, afraid of the militia violence that followed Monday’s relatively peaceful self-determination vote, had taken shelter in the UN headquarters.

After an hour-long incident in which the militias threw rocks at the UN compound and burned several nearby houses, Eckhard said, Indonesian police had established order around the headquarters. He added there was no indication, aside from the rock-throwing, that the United Nations had been a specific target of the attacks.

Nevertheless, the violence which followed Monday’s vote – in which an estimated 98.6 percent of the roughly 450,000 registered voters cast their ballots – has been aimed both at supporters of East Timor’s independence and at some UN workers.

On Monday, one Timorese UN staffer, Joao Lopes Gomes, was killed in the district of Ermera. Two other Timorese staffers went missing in the district and, although Australian officials reported that they had been killed, the United Nations has not confirmed their deaths.

More significantly, pro-Indonesia militias responded to the ballot by attacking the credibility of the UN Assistance Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), which organised the vote.

The militias, who favoured East Timor’s autonomy under Indonesian rule, claimed that UNAMET was biased in favour of the pro-independence movement, which was expected to garner the majority of votes cast.

One pro-Indonesia leader, Basilio Araujo, declared that UNAMET had encouraged East Timorese to break with Indonesia, which occupied the island in 1975.

“If the interpretation of a fair and just ballot shall mean that the pro-independence side should win, then the outcome will really be just garbage,” Araujo said.

Such statements and the post-vote burst of violence worried UN observers who were concerned that militias and Indonesian military leaders, who reportedly armed and funded them, would not accept the result of the voting if the autonomy option lost out.

Yet Indonesia’s UN mission, in a statement, labelled the voting “generally free and fair” and cited Foreign Minister Ali Alatas as saying the Jakarta government would respect the outcome. “The East Timorese were free to vote without any intimidation,” Alatas said.

UN officials were pleased that, despite the violence which had resulted in the harrassment and killing of independence supporters both before and after polling day, almost all registered voters were able to cast their ballots on Monday.

“We saw consistently all over the regions where displaced people were present that people left their homes, towns and villages to seek refuge in the mountains because they were afraid, but they came back to vote,” said Carina Perelli, chief of UNAMET’s electoral assistance division, in Dili.

“They came back, and then they left again,” she said of the thousands of Timorese who have been displaced by the recent fighting. “Of course it is a humanitarian problem, but it was not a problem for their determination to vote.”

With all ballot boxes now in Dili, UN officials have begun the process of “reconciling” the voting by ensuring that the number of ballots and number of voters match. Once that procedure was completed, probably on Thursday, UNAMET will begin to count the votes, a process expected to end early next week.

At the same time, additional police officers and military liaison officers were arriving in East Timor to bolster UNAMET’s presence.

Last week, the UN Security Council agreed that UNAMET should include 300 military liaison officers and 460 police, although all officers are to be unarmed and coordinate their work with the Indonesian authorities.

Eckhard stressed that, even despite the violence, “Indonesia is fully responsible for security” in accordance with a May 5 peace agreement signed between Indonesia and Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial power.

The Security Council is expected to approve UN peacekeepers for East Timor, but only after Indonesia’s Popular Consultative Assembly endorses the election results. That may not happen until November – with only Indonesian police in position to counter the rising violence until then.