Govt needs Willem's help for refugee repatriation

Yemris Fointuna, The Jakarta Post, Kupang

Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Yusuf Kalla has officially requested the Indonesian Military (TNI) leadership to allow Maj. Gen. Willem T. da Costa, chief of Udayana Military Command to participate in the government's endeavor to repatriate East Timorese refugees.

Kalla made the request in an official letter he delivered to Indonesian Military Commander Admiral Widodo A.S. on Nov. 6, 2001.

He explained in the letter that he had lodged the request after witnessing the repatriation of 138 East Timorese families at Willem's good initiative.

According to The Jakarta Post's monitoring, conflicts among East Timorese refugees have been reduced significantly following Willem's appointment as the military command's chief (to replace his predecessor Lt. Gen. Kiki Syahnakri, now deputy chief of the Army) in January 2000.

Willem has so far held several talks between conflicting refugees in their barracks in which he has encouraged refugees to return to their homeland. Of 143 East Timorese refugees registered last June, 8,000, including 1,200 former members of the pro-Jakarta East Timor militias, have gone back to their home villages in East Timor.

Meanwhile, some 50 tribal chiefs of the Ermera district in East Timor, who are also refugees and 125 coordinators of refugee barracks held a preliminary meeting in Atambua on Friday to prepare a reconciliatory meeting scheduled for Nov. 17, 2001 in a free zone between the settlements of Batu Gade in East Timor and Mota Ain in East Nusa Tenggara.

Claudio de Jesus Lay, a tribal chief from Ermera who is also a refugee in Belu, said the meeting of the two sides was important to make preliminary preparations for the planned reconciliation among refugees and for the government-sponsored repatriation program.

"We are all meeting here to reach agreement on the planned reconciliation and repatriation of refugees," Antara news agency quoted him as saying.

The agreement on reconciliation was reached in the meeting between figures of East Timor's Ermera district and refugees in Belu on Oct. 24.

A majority of 16,000 Ermera refugees in the province are former members of the former prointegration force (PPI), which was widely known to be repressive and hardline before the 1999 poll in East Timor.

Claudio said the reconciliatory meeting would be a golden opportunity to encourage Ermera refugees to go home.

"Most of us will likely return home should Ermera's figures be ready to accept us as their brothers," he said.

He said he understood the demands made by people from Ermera for the trial of ex-fighters who were involved in mass killings in the district following the East Timor ballot.

"But, most participants of the meeting want the people of Ermera and refugees to put all the bloody incidents behind them to enable reconciliation to take place in East Timor," he said.