JAKARTA: A pro-Jakarta militia leader visited East Timor on

JAKARTA: A pro-Jakarta militia leader visited East Timor on Saturday for what officials described as positive discussions about his return from exile with some 35,000 of his followers and other refugees.

Joao da Silva Tavares, who led an umbrella group for the pro- Jakarta militias (PPI), met with East Timorese legislators and officials.

Militias and their families fled to Indonesian West Timor after most East Timorese voted to separate from Indonesia in a UN-brokered ballot in August 1999.

Fretilin faction leader in the East Timorese parliament, Jacob Fernandes, said Saturday's meeting, the third in a month, had made progress on the issue of the returnees.

"There was a step forward," Fernandes said after the meeting, which was held in the border town of Batugade, East Timor.

Fernandes said Tavares had insisted at the first two meetings that the returnees live initially in transit camps in one district of East Timor.

He said such transit camps would enable the families of refugees already in East Timor to take their relatives home and assure that the security conditions at their home villages could allow such a peaceful return.

"But now he has agreed that the (transit camps) will be in each of the 13 districts of East Timor," Fernandes said.

Meanwhile East Timorese Attorney General Longuinhos Monteiro, who attended the meeting, warned those who were responsible for the violence in 1999 and throughout Indonesia's 24-year rule of East Timor would eventually face justice.

Tavares has so far avoided punishment and is not among the 18 people currently on trial for gross human rights violations in East Timor in 1999. --AFP