Timor: bringing the killers to account

By Greg Ansley

With our troops


DILI - The cream wall running back from the docks at Dili, where the barge Fourcroy is unloading emergency supplies of food and medicine, is splattered with blood.

Here, at the height of the militias' rampage, pro-independence East Timorese were lined up and shot.

No one knows how many, or where their bodies were disposed of.

As United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson prepares to investigate atrocities committed after the August 30 referendum, the discovery of execution sites is a horror repeated time and again across the island.

Sometimes dozens were slaughtered at once.

Other deaths were isolated and lonely: on the day a Dutch journalist was gunned down and mutilated in Dili, a young Timorese man was shot through the heart on the other side of the capital.

A few days ago, a mother of eight returned to the shell of her home in the pro-independence suburb of Becora from the refugee camp in which she had sheltered since the referendum.

She collected the body of her husband, left untouched outside a cemetery since the terror began, and buried him quietly.

Just beyond Dili Airport, the incomplete remains of nine people remain in the burned-out shell of the truck in which they were found. The mutilated bodies of four other victims lie nearby.

Dr Kevin Baker, from Sydney, back in Dili with Timor Aid after being driven out by the bloodshed surrounding the referendum, said he knew of many young men who had huddled in their homes dying from gunshot wounds, too afraid to seek medical help.

The tiled floor of Dr Baker's own ransacked house in the Dili suburb of Surjkmas is smeared with blood.

At Lospalos, in the east of the island, the first aid convoy to reach the town found a torture cell with bloody handprints on the wall and body parts on the floor.

There will be an accounting, when families are reunited and the dead and missing can be accurately assessed, but in the meantime the scale of the carnage is largely rumour and speculation.

"The death toll is impossible to assess at this point," United Nations spokesman David Wimhurst said. "That will only be revealed as the investigations continue throughout the territory."

Five forensic experts will arrive in Dili this week to join a Dutch investigator already on site as part of the UN's human rights investigation.

In the meantime, the Interfet peacemaking force will not confirm any deaths unless there is conclusive evidence.

There is no evidence, for example, to substantiate repeated reports of boats loaded with pro-independence supporters putting out to sea and returning empty, nor of claims that a group of nine priests and nuns were killed recently in the east of the island.

Last Friday, on their first day of patrolling Dili, newly arrived New Zealand soldiers were told the location of several graves by a group of suspected militiamen detained after they were pointed out by locals.

"Quite frankly, the evidence is there that some appalling incidents took place," said the New Zealanders' commanding officer, Colonel Martyn Dunne.

"Interfet has a considerable number of graves that it hasn't had time to investigate, but whether they are fact or fiction has yet to be determined."

Dr Baker said many of the dead were also dumped randomly or buried quietly without documentation by their families.

"You'll never find 500 bodies in one grave, like in Kosovo."

The evidence of mass murder, however, is compelling. Documentation exists, for example, of the deaths of up to 50 people in the town of Alas last November, and Timor Aid has been given a paramilitary list of the names of about 35 other victims whose bodies are believed to have been dumped at sea.

Sister Joan Westblade, an Australian nun working with a Timorese literacy programme, also has the names of 42 people killed in the Catholic church at Liquica, west of Dili.

Eighteen of the victims were under 10.

The toll may have been higher: local people told the nun that nine truckloads of bodies had been dumped down a ravine between the town of Maubara, farther west of Liquica, and the Loes River.

Those who survived suffered horrific wounds from machetes wielded by militiamen crazed by a drug the locals call "mad dog."

"They were carved up like animals," Sister Joan said.

The investigation of atrocities in East Timor will be difficult, and further complicated by the nature of the carnage, local burial customs and the issue of who will be held responsible for crimes committed before the August 30 referendum - the Indonesians or the militias acting on their behalf.