Criminals set free in city without laws

By Greg Ansley

With our troops

DILI - There is little to distinguish the low, white building in central Dili from its neighbours, other than that it escaped the worst of the sacking of the East Timorese capital.

Inside the former administrative centre, the location of which remains secret, small groups of men and women file in, afraid for their lives.

One of the most difficult problems facing East Timor, a society lacking even fundamental legal structures, is that within days these people walk free, even though they are known militia members, or have been detained for carrying arms.

At the weekend, during the first visit by journalists to the building, militia members relaxed in one set of rooms, fed on Australian Army rations and were visited each day by the International Red Cross.

In another room were three members of the opposing Falintil revolutionary army, detained by Interfet members for carrying weapons outside their cantonment areas in breach of the United Nations mandate for East Timor.

None will remain in detention, because there is no legal framework outside the UN mandate. Even that will remain uncertain until a new policy on legal issues, requested by the Interfet commander, Major-General Peter Cosgrove, is finalised.

Captain Adrena Gill, a New Zealand Army lawyer working with the Interfet legal team, said the new policy would probably be released this week. The urgency for a workable justice system in a city that lives in a state of benign anarchy has become more pressing with the decision to send UN human rights experts to Dili. They are to determine if a war crimes tribunal should be established to investigate atrocities committed on the island.

Under the existing ad hoc system, Interfet soldiers arrest people suspected of being militia members, or who are carrying weapons or committing crimes, and turn them over to military police.

Suspects are photographed, registered in a log, interrogated, and held until their inevitable release.

Although Interfet spokesmen have defined the maximum period of detention as 72 hours, legal officers say the rules will not be set until the acceptance of the new policy.

Captain Murray Heron, the Australian in charge of the detention centre, said there had been no hardcore criminals arrested.

"No one's been caught in the act of committing atrocities or anything like that, but it will probably eventuate that we will get a few of those as time goes on."

Captain Heron is already selecting potential evidence from the vast stock of confiscated militia weapons, such as a knife marked with blood and human hair.

"It may be, in a month's or a year's time, when all the investigative work is completed, it might come down to saying 'that knife killed that person on a certain day by that person'," he said.

One of the militia leaders linked to mass killings, Caitano Da Silva, of the Dili-based Aitarak militia, has already passed through the process of detention and release.

Da Silva believed he would be jailed.

When he was told he was to go free he asked to remain in captivity beyond the normal holding period.

"He wasn't quite keen to walk out the front when we released him," Captain Heron said. "He said he'd like to stay under our care for a couple of days until we sorted out a couple of things."

In a sealed room nearby are stacks of the weapons used by Aitarak and the other militias in a campaign of terror and killings whose final toll has yet to be uncovered.

One stack contains Korean War-vintage, Chinese SKS 7.62mm assault rifles - one bearing the image of Christ and his bleeding heart on its stock.

There is a PK1 submachine-gun and a pile of steel-tipped spears, machetes and bows and arrows. There is even a collection of crude pipe guns, which use a blend of coconut husk and gunpowder to fire a lethal short-range hail of lead, nails and metal pellets.

Interfet also took from Aitarak headquarters almost 200 police batons and riot shields.