Timor Kiwis change guard

By GREG ANSLEY

The New Zealand guard is about to change at the shattered East Timorese border town of Suai.

More than 600 soldiers of the Linton-based 1 Battalion Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment will fly home next week after a gruelling six months in the most dangerous region of the former Indonesian province.

And they will be leaving in the midst of a monsoon that has made life still more perilous for the New Zealanders.

The wet season combined with ill-maintained roads means the ever-present risk of accidents such as the one that killed Staff Sergeant William White on Anzac Day, when his truck rolled down a 30m bluff.

The troops' main task is constant foot patrols in mountainous country so rugged that platoons can be isolated for three or four days at a time in places where only helicopter drops can reach them.

The primitive roads used to require an entire battalion of Indonesian Army engineers to keep them open during the wet season.

They are a dangerous lifeline that has so far killed two New Zealanders.

"Construction is basic, maintenance levels are not good, and the roads were not designed for the level of traffic we need to put over them," says the 1 Battalion commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Kevin Burnett.

"We need to be very careful and minimise our traffic as much as possible, but we need to get out, to move, patrol and support, and that puts us at risk."

The west part of the country, where the New Zealanders and a recently rotated battalion of Australian infantrymen guard the border, is the area of greatest threat and probably the most critical sector for the troops of what earlier this year became the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (Untaet).

In March, the New Zealanders in the Suai area came under a series of attacks.

Colonel Burnett believes it was probably a misguided attempt to test the strength of the Untaet forces - that their militia enemies had not realised they were exactly the same force of peacekeepers previously known as Interfet.

Dressed in a mix of Indonesian Army uniforms and civilian clothes, and typically armed with automatic or semi-automatic weapons, the militiamen came across from Indonesian West Timor mainly in groups of four or five.

They fired a few shots (including several at Australian helicopters) and fled back across the border.

Replacing the present New Zealand force will be the regiment's 2 Battalion from Burnham, near Christchurch, heading into a similar six-month deployment.

The new contingent will face the sensitive task of phasing in a civilian police force in an emergent nation still lacking most fundamentals of a civil structure.

Embittered militiamen lurking in West Timor continue to cast a long shadow across the border.

But new and potentially deeper problems are beginning to appear as the reality of life in one of the world's poorest lands hits home to a population still traumatised by the Indonesians' brutal, scorched-earth retreat.

Eighty per cent of East Timor's 700,000 people are unemployed, and the country still lacks the most basic services.

The southwest corner, where the New Zealanders have been serving, has always been dangerous.

It was previously a militia stronghold that witnessed some of the earliest and worst of the massacres that followed last year's independence referendum.

It was the final sector to be cleared by the initial Interfet force, including New Zealanders and Australians.

The early operations, by troopers of the New Zealand and Australian Special Air Service, saw gunbattles that seriously wounded two Australians and killed several militiamen in an otherwise eerily depopulated region.

The land was ravaged. Suai and the surrounding villages were razed, with few buildings left standing and nothing to come home to except the blue United Nations tarpaulins that remain the only shelter villagers have from the unrelenting monsoon.

No refugees came back from West Timor until the Kiwis arrived, landing from ships guarded by HMNZS Canterbury in the first amphibious operation of its kind undertaken by New Zealanders or Australians since the Second World War.

Bernado Carpose was among the early refugees to return from West Timor.

Marked for death by the Laksaur and Mahidi militias because of his employment by the United Nations, Mr Carpose hid for 10 days before slipping across the border and dodging assassination squads until New Zealand patrols convinced him that the charred remains of his village of Kamanasa were safe.

Jose Miniz, also a Kamanasa villager, fled with his father and other men to the mountain hideout of Dilu Hilin, while his mother and younger sister crossed to West Timor.

The family were reunited after the New Zealanders arrived.

As reports filtered back to the tens of thousands of refugees stuck in West Timor by militia threats and propaganda alleging Interfet rape, beatings and shootings, the trickle across the small concrete bridge at Salale became a flood that almost overwhelmed soldiers and aid workers.

The New Zealanders provided trucks and soldiers and dropped from their normal three fresh meals a day at base to one so they had more time to help.

"They were marvellous," says UN humanitarian assistance coordinator Maggs MacGuinness. "We couldn't have done it without them."

The flood of returning refugees has now slowed to a trickle, but no one knows how many more Timorese want to - or can- return to the east.

Although at least 250,000 are believed to have fled to the west during the militia rampage, only about 160,000 of them have returned - including more than 200 former Indonesian soldiers under protection of Falantil, the still-armed guerrilla army that fought Indonesian occupation for 25 years.

With propaganda and terror operations still believed to be deterring many from going home, Jakarta has extended its humanitarian and repatriation schemes beyond the original March 31 cutoff.

For those who have made the trek across the Salale bridge, there is a sense of security, if not yet normality, and an affinity between peacekeepers and Timorese.

As Army four-wheel-drive vehicles pass children call "Kia ora" and line up for high fives. On the ruins of Suai market, a jubilant Timorese painted: "I love you military New Zealand."

Soldiers regularly beat locals at touch rugby. The locals just as regularly beat the Kiwis at volleyball and soccer.

"Right now we believe we have a very secure environment and we're quite confident with the situation," says Colonel Burnett.

"We have a good relationship with the local people and village leaders."

There are encouraging signs that this security, maintained for the moment by New Zealand infantry and armour, will become more entrenched as the Burnham soldiers settle in and hand more responsibilities to the United Nations civilian police force.

Colonel Phil Gibbons, New Zealand's newly arrived senior national officer and chief of operations at the peacekeepers' Dili headquarters, says that in the east and centre of the country, patrolled by Korean, Thai, Philippine and Portuguese troops, the threat is low and security good.

There are signs that Indonesia is finally beginning to clamp down, with the arrest and jailing of a number of senior militia leaders.

There is also a new border agreement and increasing cooperation between the New Zealanders and the Indonesian paratroopers guarding their side of the border.

Tomorrow Colonel Burnett will join Australian sector commander Brigadier Duncan Lewis for a regular fortnightly meeting with Indonesian counterpart Lieutenant-Colonel Djohar.

Their sessions have helped to clamp down on border raids, and Colonel Burnett is impressed with the Indonesian paratroopers' professionalism.

"I don't expect any significant trouble in the near future," he says.

Nor, despite reports of large-scale recruiting and defiance of the UN "no arms" mandate, does he believe the Falantil represent any threat to the peacekeepers' operations.

The Falantil have appeared again in the New Zealand sector, but have shown no violence and intend appointing liaison officers to the Kiwi force.

This is a move welcomed by Colonel Burnett and the UN, which has recognised the former guerrilla army as the likely core of the new nation's security forces.

"Falantil is a very impressive organisation that is determined to show its professionalism and discipline," he says.

Trouble is more likely to come from anger and despair in a country that has less than nothing.

Violence and civil disorder of that kind flared in a bloody clash in Dili markets earlier this year.

Colonel Burnett says that while no similar trouble has erupted in the southwest, a nervous eye is being cast north.

"We're certainly watching Dili with keen interest - we think it's a glimpse of the future for us."

For Colonel Burnett and 1 Battalion Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, however, the immediate future is much brighter - they will all be home by next month.