Threats to massacre teens prompted ambassador to flee

Ambassador Ruth Nuttall (right) greets New Zealand troops in East Timor yesterday. Picture / Leith Carroll

Threatening telephone calls to the mobile phones of refugees sheltering in the New Zealand embassy in Dili were what prompted Ambassador Ruth Nuttall to flee.

Ms Nuttall yesterday described the dramatic events that forced her, her partner and her deputy to flee to the Australian embassy for safety on Saturday.

New Zealander Patrick Adams, who works at an Australian aid agency in East Timor, had tried to find refuge for two teenage survivors of the massacre of a mother and five of her children.

The two had managed to live by scrambling over the rear fence as the murderers bludgeoned their mother, brothers and sisters to death inside.

Adams had tried to find a place for them at church compounds and at other Timorese homes but because of the pressure of refugees and fears of revenge attacks no one would take them in. Ambassador Nuttall said that because the teenagers' lives were at risk and because they were traumatised she had agreed that they could stay at the embassy for a day to keep them safe until another refuge could be found.

"They turned up here with half their neighbours as well," she said. The new arrivals joined the families of three locally employed staff already sheltering there.

Early on Saturday one of the people in the group told staff they had received threatening phone calls from private numbers making specific threats. "They said they knew where the children were, that they were at the New Zealand embassy and that they were coming to get them."

Later, a local member of the staff received another call of a similar nature. The ambassador called in military attache Colonel John McLeod and police liaison officer Superintendent Athol Soper.

Their only real line of defence at the mission should an attack occur was the perimeter fence - the embassy building itself could not withstand a serious assault.

Colonel McLeod, who had only just returned from a harrowing drive through violent riots elsewhere in the city, said if the embassy was attacked there was no way out and given the threats and the violence he had witnessed, he thought the ambassador, her partner Wayne Farmer and acting deputy chief of mission Susannah Gordon should leave.

Ambassador Nuttall said she took the decision to leave unwillingly and had not been frightened for herself.

But she was leaving the teenagers and their friends, who were at very real risk, behind.

They were gathered behind the building out of site of the main road, told of the situation and left in the care of the small military and police attachment at the embassy.

"I just felt distressed for the people who were still there," she said. She, Gordon and Farmer were driven off in a convoy to the nearby Australian embassy at about 11am but were forced to halt outside the gates by hundreds of terrified Timorese who were seeking protection there. Surrounded by her escort and pulled by the hand of a very large Australian security officer, the ambassador and her party made their way through the press of bodies to safety. At about 4pm when the situation had cooled they returned to the mission.

The teenagers, their aunt, two cousins and the others who had arrived with them were on Saturday night evacuated by the Royal Australian Air Force to Darwin.

* Ms Nuttall was appointed New Zealand's first ambassador to East Timor in November last year, and took up the posting in December.

She joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1980 and has extensive experience in the Asia-Pacific region, including as deputy director of the South East Asia Division.

Her previous overseas assignments include Jakarta, The Hague, Canberra and, before her posting to Dili, deputy head of mission in Beijing.