Seventy people arrested in East Timor brawls
DILI (JP): Seventy people have been arrested following five days of street brawls involving Roman Catholic church activists and prointegration youths in Viqueque, the military said yesterday.
Col. Mahidin Simbolon, chief of the East Timor military command, told The Jakarta Post last night that the youths would be questioned about their involvement in the incidents that occurred between Feb. 7 and Feb. 11.
Government and military officials in Viqueque said the situation had returned to normal yesterday. Church sources said many people were still missing.
Catholic priests in the Viqueque parish who witnessed the brawls said the unrest started when a group of prointegration youths in Gada Paksi waylaid 10 church activists en route to a meeting in Viqueque town.
They said the prointegration youths started to attack the church activists without reason and hurled abuse at the accompanying priests after their demands for identity cards were turned down.
The fighting continued for another four days until the military intervened.
Representative
In another development, Reuters reported from the United Nations headquarters in New York that Pakistan's former U.N. envoy, Jamsheed Marker, was appointed Secretary-General Kofi Annan's personal representative for East Timor Wednesday.
Marker, aged 74, retired in March 1995 after more than four years as his country's U.N. ambassador.
The United Nations has yet to recognize the 1976 integration of East Timor, a year after the departure of the colonial power Portugal. Talks aimed at finding an internationally acceptable solution were initiated by the then-Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, in 1983 and continued by his successor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
In announcing Marker's appointment, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said it was part of Annan's effort to give impetus to finding a "just, comprehensive and internationally acceptable solution to the question of East Timor."
While the new secretary-general intended to be personally engaged in these efforts, he had asked Marker to represent him in all aspects of his good offices function, including talks under U.N. auspices between Indonesia and Portugal. He would also be involved in consultations that the secretary-general holds with a cross-section of East Timorese figures.
The eighth round of the long-running talks between the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Portugal took place in Geneva last June under Boutros-Ghali. A ninth round scheduled for December was postponed.
Annan held separate exploratory meetings this month with Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas and Portuguese Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Vitorino on the fringes of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. (33/pan)