Six hours later, it did. As many as 5,000 machete-wielding militiamen and East Timorese gangs opposed to East Timor’s independence overran the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Atambua, a backwater border town on West Timor’s side of the divided island. While a handful of Indonesian police and soldiers stood by, the mob broke into the offices, smashed windows, computers and desks, and made preparations to torch the building. Some of the raiders immediately killed Caceres and two of his colleagues–Samson Aregahegn of Ethiopia and Pero Simundza of Croatia–then dragged their bodies out to the street and burned them. Several foreign aid workers managed to escape over a back wall of the compound. Six of them ran through the streets of Atambua, with militiamen in pursuit, and hid in the home of a local woman for three and a half hours. “She was telling militias who banged on her door that we had tried to come in but went further down the road,” one survivor told reporters. “If not for the woman’s determination and ingenuity, we would all have been sitting ducks.”
Caceres and his colleagues were the latest victims of pro-Jakarta militias that a year ago laid waste to East Timor and are now terrorizing West Timor in open defiance of the hapless Indonesian government. The UNHCR staff had spent the past year in Atambua. Their mission: trying to repatriate more than 260,000 East Timorese refugees who had been forced into West Timor when militias and Indonesian Army units went on a pre-independence killing spree. The agency was an annoyance to militiamen, who had bitterly opposed East Timor’s move to split from Indonesia. They repeatedly harassed the U.N. workers and severely beat three of them during an incident last month. So it was no surprise to local aid workers that last Wednesday’s attack occurred. But the U.N. Secretariat in New York was caught off guard. Sadako Ogata, the high commissioner for refugees, angrily asserted that the attack was the worst ever against the agency. The United Nations evacuated more than 120 international and Indonesian staff from West Timor in the wake of the incident, and the Security Council–in the midst of its celebratory Millennium Summit–condemned the killings and urged Jakarta to disarm the militias.
An Indonesian military spokesman said the rampage was sparked by the slaying on Tuesday of a militia leader. During a march in Atambua to protest his death, a group of militiamen split off and headed toward the UNHCR offices; thousands more soon followed. The attack on the United Nations was only round one of the latest spasm of violence. Later that night, 11 people died in rioting between militiamen and local residents near the border town of Betun, where the militia leader had been slain. By Friday militiamen were blocking roads leading out of Kupang, West Timor’s capital, and searching for foreign aid workers. That day Indonesian officials, who had previously rejected international intervention in a religious war in the eastern Molucca islands as well as separatist movements in two other provinces, said they were open to allowing U.N. peacekeepers to come across the border from East Timor to help restore order. Their willingness to accept help seemed to confirm a nagging fear: Indonesia’s fragile democracy is incapable of containing a growing lawlessness. “There are many places in Indonesia, not only West Timor, where people don’t have respect for authority anymore,” said Andi Mallarangeng, a political analyst in Jakarta.
An embarrassed Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, who was in New York for the U.N. summit, claimed a sinister motive for the attack on the United Nations. He said his political enemies back home orchestrated the rampage to destabilize and discredit his government. “The purpose was to humiliate me,” he said. Wahid, as well as his top cabinet ministers, has blamed politicians and military officers close to former strongman-president Suharto for inciting unrest to weaken the government and prevent it from bringing them to court for past human-rights abuses in East Timor and other parts of the country.
The unrest in West Timor is not likely to end soon–in fact, it is a continuation of the 1999 East Timor crisis. The Indonesian military has repeatedly shown its unwillingness or inability to disarm the militias, despite repeated promises by civilian leaders, and the United Nations says it will not consider returning to West Timor until its security can be guaranteed. Meanwhile, 120,000 East Timorese refugees languish in West Timor.
