At Dili Airport a courteous officer stepped forward. "Good morning," he said as he collected our passports after our arrival from Kupang in West Timor. This was a tacit acknowledgment that East Timor has a frontier with the western part of the island in spite of Indonesia's assertion that East Timor is its 27th province.

The co-ordinator of the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign, Tom Hyland, was reincarnated as Tomas Ohaolain. This mouthful became "Mr Tomas". But it apparently didn't correspond with any blacklist. I was Daithi O Sionnaigh or "Mr Daiti". We used Irish to conceal our identities. Hiding our relief when the passports were handed back about 20 minutes later, we found ourselves on the palm-lined road to the capital of what could be a Pacific paradise.

Facing out to sea behind the harbour is the imposing old Portuguese colonial governor's house. Troops in white T-shirts were drilling to the sergeant major's barks. At the harbour in Dili, where a huge naval ferry was offloading military vehicles and troops, little children were playing in the sea. Behind them was a symbol of East Timor's darkest day, the rusting hulk of one of the landing craft used in the invasion of December 7th, 1975.

It has been left there apparently as a reminder to the Timorese of what has been to the international community a mere footnote of Cold War history. Dili's harbour front is like a mini version of Havana's Malecon. Indeed the playful spirit of the Timorese reminded me of the Cubans. In common they share a proud determination to endure adversity.

But who can you trust? Taximen were able to tell us where we had been yesterday and where we intended to go tomorrow. But it became possible to distinguish friends from paid spies, essentially by the delight of their greetings. The Timorese see few strangers, apart from the 30,000 Indonesian troops in their midst.

How paranoid should we be? was a constant question. In public places we announced intentions that were the exact opposite of what we did. Tom had bought a stupid straw hat and appeared the perfect dumb tourist who knew nothing about politics or the history of the place. On our first meeting with the resistance we asked how careful we should be. "You must believe in yourselves," was the only reply.

We listened to resistance spokesmen give hair-raising accounts of military brutality: dismembering of bodies to prevent identification, use of drugs to permanently retard students and fighters, and "dialogue" that means "finding out how we think". Asked if they were frightened these activists would shrug and say things like: "We have a saying that when you get afraid you get brave."

We took a bus into East Timor's spectacular mountainous landscape along a narrow cliff road, the edge of which was invisible as we swung around bends high above sea breaking on black rocks. I wasn't surprised when Tom abandoned the bus halfway to Timor's second city of Baucau.

As he waited the four hours for me to return on the next bus, he tried to join in a table-tennis game policemen were playing in the open. But instead they took him in for 11/2 hours of repetitive questioning. "Where are you from? What is your name? Why are you here? Do you like Indonesia?" A friend later said: "You are lucky it wasn't the military."

According to the resistance, more than 6,000 Fretilin guerrillas elude up to 30,000 Indonesian troops and "special forces". They are as close to the capital as the tree-fringed mountains that surround it on one side, I was told.

On the question of Fretilin's proposal for eventual self-determination in which voters could feel free from reprisal, Mr Francisco Lopes de Carvalho, general secretary of a new alliance between pro- and anti-integrationists, said: "If there is a referendum even the ants will come out to vote."

In spite of the military's infiltration of the society, 90 per cent would vote for independence, said resistance sources.

The recent creation of Mr Lopez de Carvalho's organisation, the East Timor People's Reconciliation and Unification Movement (MRUPTL), is seen as the most significant development in Timor for a long time. Just before Christmas, Governor Abilio Soares, who had already ordered the arrest of its land-owning class leaders, accused the MRUPTL of being "anti-Indonesian".

Mr Lopez de Carvalho is one of the few brave enough to go public in his pursuit of a solution to Timor's plight. He and others we met were watched arriving and leaving our meeting places.

His organisation brings together former enemies who now favour a referendum on the full independence Fretilin fights for; confederation with Portugal; or integration with Indonesia. This last option was the policy of his party, Apodeti, traditionally seen as an Indonesian pawn.

Timor was once famous for its sandalwood, which the Portuguese traded. Now there is none because the Indonesians have destroyed this resource, taking but not replacing old trees, dissidents said. They even removed the roots. "We are very sad about that because sandalwood was not just a product but a national symbol." But in an attempt to deprive the guerrillas of cover the military has also burnt large areas of mountain woodland. The resistance described how, through a conglomerate company, Batara Indra, the army has monopolised the distribution of Timor's needs, from tea to tissues, and exports its coffee and marble to Indonesia. Timor's oil reserves in the Timor Sea have already been shared between Indonesia and Australia under the Timor Gap Treaty. A 1993 study likened the reserves to those of Kuwait.

Economic vested interests of the military, and increasingly the presidential family, are seen by the resistance as a big barrier to settlement, no matter how ready politicians might be to bow to the international pressure that is visited on President Suharto whenever he travels abroad.

The army, the resistance says, sees East Timor as a "laboratory for transmigrasi", the process of bringing in Muslim strangers from other Indonesian islands to eventually outnumber the predominantly Catholic Timorese in their own land. Already there are 300,000, it says, with thousands more arriving every week. But it is a stipulation of the resistance's peace plan that the transmigrasi be excluded from a referendum.

In Baucau I had experience of these merchant people. A well-dressed woman leant over and tapped my watch admiringly. She did not acknowledge my existence in any way. She was merely talking to a friend about an object she apparently would like to acquire.

In contrast to the reception from the open Timorese, on the bus I was stared at as if I was a taxman by these people from perhaps Java, Sulawesi, or Celebes islands. I was told the transmigrasi hold 95 per cent of the jobs and businesses in Timor, and it is apparent when shopping in Dili.

The military also sees Timor as a training ground more than 1,000 miles from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, where soldiers can train to kill by actually doing it. With impunity, the resistance said. "They hate peace."

Not that the Fretilin rebels have been angels either. In a lecture in St Anthony's, Oxford, just before our visit, the East Timorese Nobel Peace laureate, Dr Jose Ramos Horta, said: "Our crimes - and not `mistakes' - cannot be washed away. There were terrible crimes by Timorese leaders in 1975." At that time, a civil war was fought out between the independence Fretilin government and another, more gradualist conservative independence party, the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT). Now the UDT is involved in the new MRUPTL.

I asked Mr Lopez de Carvalho about the future. Using the example of Northern Ireland I wanted to know if he was not worried about time, intermarriage and the eventual permanence of the planters doing their work.

Because he envisages a solution by the year 2001, he seemed not to have considered this threat. "I am married to a Javanese but that does not mean I change my politics because of my wife."

In Jakarta activists in Indonesia's underground pro-democracy movement are only developing solidarity with the Timorese. "Widi" (21) is the leader of a group of young Islamic students in the capital whose peaceful protests have already attracted the violent attentions of the police and the censure of Muslim elders.

He told me: "I think East Timor is our little brother. We care about them. We want them to be independent but we don't want them to be apart." When the resistance heard this, they said: "That is good news. That is the spirit of solidarity we want. The Indonesians want it to be a religious conflict." But they recalled that Bishop Carlos Ximines Belo, Timor's other Nobel laureate, "has said there has always been great tolerance here between Muslim and Catholic".

Meanwhile, as Indonesia suffers an apparent economic meltdown and rumours about the health of its 76-year-old president, the commander of ABRI, the army, said that his forces would not hesitate to "cut to pieces" all anti-government groups. Speaking after a meeting with President Suharto, Gen Feisal Tanjung said ABRI would be ready to face every threat to security.