The essential travel kit for people preparing to enter East Timor in the coming days contains the following: ration packs, bottles of water; a mosquito net, a sleeping bag, a ground sheet, a miniature tent, sun block, medicine, hygiene bags and that indispensable article of modern war zones, a mobile telephone.

At least that's what the UN officials and the dozens of foreign correspondents currently kicking their heels in Darwin will be taking with them when they manage to get a ride across the Timor Sea in an Australian naval craft in the coming days.

As they go in to East Timor, the peacekeeping soldiers, mostly Australians in the initial stages, will have to bring with them every single item they need for survival and combat in a hostile environment - from armoured and support vehicles to water, food, medicine and communications systems. For they and their camp followers will be entering a land which has been reduced almost to ground zero by the pro-Jakarta militias, who with their backers in the Indonesian army (TNI), took a terrible revenge on the population for daring to vote for independence in the August 30th referendum.

Dili is a city where almost all the houses have been burned and the shops and the half dozen little hotels, trashed or looted. There are virtually no places to stay. The Makhota hotel was destroyed and the staff has disappeared. The Turismo was shot up and its Chinese manageress forced to flee abroad. One hotel apparently survived because of its militia connections.

In the best of times there was only one bakery in Dili, one shop selling clothes which could be called a department store, and about a dozen modest restaurants specialising in fish and rice. Now there is nothing. The department store has been stripped bare, the hotel workers have fled and the restaurants are no more.

There is no one to reopen the small shops which line the main avenues nor is there rice or cooking oil or flour to put on the shelves. Many of the small shopkeepers were Indonesian immigrants and it is unlikely they will ever return to reopen in any event.

Dili's warehouses have also been looted. On the seafront the Red Cross building was trashed, Bishop Carlos Belo's house was gutted and the diocesan office set on fire. For the past two weeks a steady procession of loaded trucks have been heading westward out of Dili towards the border with West Timor.

Some undoubtedly carried the legitimate possessions of fleeing people; others were piled high with looted goods from the shops and from the hundreds of tin-roofed homes of ordinary people which were razed. They have roared into West Timor with power-drunk militiamen in red and white Indonesian bandanas, sitting on top of their loot, brandishing guns.

At first, according to eyewitnesses, they took the most valuable items, such as refrigerators and televisions. Then, after the best pickings had gone, they returned to steal the furniture, piling up everything from tables to plastic buckets in the back of their vehicles. In the last few days they have been seen trucking cows out of East Timor.

The members of the international force will have to rely on their supply lines from Darwin to Dili for virtually everything they need, at least until they can bring in sufficient stores for the longer term. Which is why securing the few dockside warehouses in Dili - if they have survived - will be one of the first priorities of the International Force for East Timor (Interfet).

Even finding civilian vehicles and drivers will be a major problem. It is likely that the militias commandeered the small number of privately owned cars and land cruisers in Dili and took them away. The 40 UN vehicles parked in a senior high school beside the UN compound in Dili were smashed up or stolen. The scene is reportedly the same in towns right across East Timor. It remains to be seen what important government records have been taken or will be removed by Indonesian troops as they withdraw, and if they plan to take away some crucial parts of East Timor's under-developed infrastructure such as mobile telephone masts or electricity generators as they leave the territory for good.

For the international force all this amounts to an inconvenience. For hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in East Timor it is a matter of life and death. There are an estimated five areas in the mostly-barren mountains to which more than 20,000 refugees fled for their lives from the militia death squads. "These people have had no food for over a week," said Mr Ross Mountain, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for East Timor. Reports reaching Darwin speak of many people dying of starvation, and others staying alive by eating banyan leaves.

A major and immediate priority for the intervention force in its first few days will therefore be to facilitate humanitarian operations, as mandated by the UN Security Council resolution of September 14th on restoring peace and security. It is authorised to take all necessary measures to fulfil this mandate, which means using force if necessary to remove the militias who have prevented these people from getting access to food or water.

DESPITE their blood-curdling threats about what they will do to peace-enforcers, the militias may not stand and fight. The likelihood is that they will flee with their TNI patrons, or simply remove their T-shirts and bandanas, making it almost impossible for the peacekeepers to know who is militia and who is not. The militias were strong because they had the backing of the Indonesian army, which used it to commit deeds it did not want to be associated with. There are many cases where witnesses have seen soldiers donning militia T-shirts and joining in the violence.

The danger is that some militia members will try to test the will of the international soldiers by using hit-and-run tactics. They just might try something more serious. The military planners of the mission have not forgotten that the aim of the pro-integration forces is to partition East Timor, so that the west of the former Portuguese colony remains effectively in Indonesian hands.

Securing the frontier with West Timor will also have to be a priority for the Australian-led force. This is the area where the worst atrocities have taken place and where the militias are strongest, and it is here, not in Dili, where the multi-national force is likely to encounter real trouble. Much depends on whether the Indonesian army decides to give covert backing to the partition plans.

However the militia will not just have the peacekeepers to contend with. During the terror the people were powerless, and too terrified to resist. The departure of the Indonesian army and its replacement by friendly foreign soldiers will have an electrifying effect on a population which voted 78.5 per cent for independence.

So too will the appearance in East Timor of Xanana Gusmao, the undisputed leader of the Timorese resistance who instilled such an iron discipline in the scattered Falintil forces, even from prison, that they maintained their ceasefire throughout the last few months and are now witnessing the success of this strategy.

When the peacekeeping forces make contact with Falintil in the coming days, they will be meeting the moral victors in the struggle for East Timor. The commitment of Falintil and Xanana not to seek revenge on the militias is the best guarantee that the international mission will succeed and that the restocking and reconstruction of Dili and the rest of East Timor can begin in earnest in the shortest possible time.