TIMOR TODAY 8/11/99

TIMOR TODAY 8/11/99

For full text see… http://www.easttimor.com/

PHOTOS

1.East Timorese refugees return from West Timor after crossing the border near Memo, a small town near the East-West border, Friday. Gunmen in West Timor attacked a convoy carrying other East Timorese who were trying to return home and fired shots outside a U.N. refugee agency office, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Friday. ( Jimin Lai/Reuters)

2. Acehnese youths raise their hands while standing on the top of a car during a rally in Sigli, north province of Aceh, Thursday, Nov. 4, 1999. While pro-independence feelings are strongest in Aceh, home to 4.3 million people on the northern tip of Sumatra island, other disaffected provinces in the sprawling archipelago also could follow the example set by the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

STORIES

1. Three Special Rapporteurs Begin Atrocity Investigations (8/11/99) Three special rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Commission have arrived in East Timor to investigate and document alleged atrocities committed by Indonesian security forces and army-backed militias, a UN official said Friday.

2. Rampage directed from high (8/11/99) Warrant Officer Andrew Hobbs, like most of the peacekeepers in East Timor, has seen his share of devastation. The Indonesian-speaking, Royal Australian Navy sailor has travelled widely around the territory but in one small village near Suai, near the border with West Timor, he was shaken when he saw the lengths to which the pro-Jakarta militia and their backers in the Indonesian military had gone in their efforts to destroy everything of value.

3. Facing Militia Arrogance (8/11/99) Vargas’s story tells us quite a lot about what is happening across the rest of West Timor. The first is that the greatest single impediment to getting big numbers of East Timorese across the border now is continuing militia intimidation.Of the 250,000 refugees still in West Timor, the UNHCR and the Indonesian Government estimate that 60 to 80 per cent want to return. After six weeks on the ground, the UNHCR has so far managed to repatriate only 20,000 of the likely total of 150,000-200,000 who would like to return.

4. Cholera new fear for Dili (8/11/99) An outbreak of cholera could be the next disaster to afflict the people of East Timor, with the rainy season about to begin and tens of thousands more refugees expected in the territory now the Indonesian army has left.

5. Mystery of Timor’s missing may never be solved: Interfet (8/11/99) INTERFET yesterday admitted for the first time that many of the 80,000 East Timorese reported as missing may be dead and that bodies had been dumped at sea in a highly disciplined operation probably involving Indonesian soldiers from West Timor.

6. Dili’s traitor risks return to his own (8/11/99) Paolo P. Araujo is a 43-year-old East Timorese who was, until recently, a TNI (army) chief-sergeant intelligence officer selling his own people up the river to his Indonesian bosses. On September 8, he took his service pistol and hand-radio and surrendered to Falintil.

7. Portugal’s legacy a stumbling block for East Timorese (8/11/99) More than four centuries of Portuguese colonial rule in East Timor have left a legacy of language and culture that threatens to open a dangerous fissure in the emerging nation’s political landscape.

8. Other Indonesian Provinces Want Out (8/11/99) Associated Press BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) - Gruesome posters show alleged victims of torture by security forces and signs proclaim "Referendum is Best" at the unofficial headquarters of the pro-independence movement in the restive Aceh province.

9. FIRST IN, LAST OUT - Wisps of an Empire That Time Forgot (8/11/99) The New York Times The Portuguese were durable. They came, they conquered and they stayed. And stayed. The last of their Asian colonies will finally be relinquished in mid-December, when Macao, off the coast of China, drops quietly into the pocket of Beijing. East Timor, over which Lisbon asserted residual rights more than two decades after the territory was seized by Indonesia in 1975, is being adopted by the United Nations as it moves, at last, toward independence. First in. Last out.

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