Terror in East Timor

Terror in East Timor

Fresh reporting by Keith B. Richburg of The Washington Post
confirms the darker suspicions about Indonesia's intentions in
East Timor. Indonesia has promised an early choice between
autonomy and independence to the 800,000 East Timorese. Their
island was a colony of Portugal, which was about to release it to
independence, when Indonesia grabbed it in the 1970s. Even as
Indonesian officials spoke the other day in Jakarta, however,
Indonesia's military was intensifying a program of murder and
intimidation in Timor plainly designed to subvert the promised
choice on Aug. 8.

In the Liquica district of Timor, correspondent Richburg found
evidence that local paramilitaries controlled by the Indonesian
Military last month stormed a church where hundreds of
proindependence refugees had fled, teargassed the crowd and shot
or hacked to death some 50 persons. Another scene exploded into
violence on May 9 in the Timorese capital of Dili when a crudely
armed anti-independence militia attacked a marketplace and was
met by youths who fought back with stones. Portuguese and
Australian journalists were threatened during the incident.

Indonesia's civilian government promises the East Timorese due
process, but its military arm appears ready to preempt the offer
by force. Whether the inconsistency proceeds from artifice or
from real internal conflict is uncertain.

What is clear, however, is that the August vote cannot be
conducted, let alone respected, if immediate steps are not taken
to ensure a fair and open run-up, vote and count. The newly
recounted episodes of terrorism on the part of the Indonesian
military make it impossible to rely on that body. The United
Nations talks of putting in an international police force of 300
persons, perhaps armed, perhaps not. The United States, onetime
patron of the Indonesian military, plans to train Jakarta police
commanders in the peaceful handling of antigovernment
demonstrators. These measures hardly seem enough to ensure an
honest act of self-determination by the Timorese.

-- The Washington Post