The wide avenue through Dili's eastern suburb of Bacora looks deceptively middle-class, with bougainvillaea and frangipani hanging over the walls of roadside buildings in blazing colours. Hidden in the tropical foliage behind them are the modest, tin-roofed homes of thousands of inhabitants, who live down leafy alleyways teeming with life.
In one such lane yesterday morning, leading to a sub-district known as Kamea, we met a long line of frightened people carrying babies and with carrier bags on their heads. There were children struck dumb by their parents' terror.
Behind them the pro-Indonesia militia had begun shooting the place up and had burned the home of an independence sympathiser. "Aitarak are coming to attack us," cried a tearful woman running by with a suitcase carrying a few belongings. "They have already burned one house." Though the Aitarak militia, led by Mr Eurico Gutterres, has been systematically attacking Bacora all week, burning houses and driving thousands of pro-independence people into refugee centres, there was not a single member of the Indonesian police force present.
Even more extraordinary was the scene at the police station on the nearby avenue where several journalists took refuge after militia members, armed with knives and home-made guns under their T-shirts, had pushed them around. The under-sized thugs followed the reporters and continued to harass them with impunity as the police stood around.
Such open collusion makes a mockery of the peace agreement which the local UN chief, Mr Ian Martin, presented at the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) with a theatrical flourish on the eve of Monday's referendum on autonomy or independence.
On that occasion, Dili's militia leader, Mr Gutterres, publicly embraced Mr Falor Rete Laek, a commander of the FALANTIL resistance movement, and solemnly promised that his followers would not carry arms in the streets and could be arrested if they did so.
The local police chief, Col Timbul Silaen, said: "We will take strong action to arrest any who bring out arms."
Army commander Col Noer Murs, with an equally straight face, called God's blessing on the agreement.
Yet the bloody events since polling day made self-evident what Bishop Belo told the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, on Sunday evening in Dili. "These people are not sincere."
Immediately after the referendum, the militia came out on the streets, openly brandishing machetes and guns. On Wednesday, outside UNAMET headquarters in Dili, they fired weapons with impunity for an hour. No arrests were made when police arrived.
In the past four days, four of the 4,000 locally-hired UN polling staff have been murdered and six are missing. No arrests have been made.
The militia, sometimes with automatic weapons, have erected makeshift checkpoints of stones and oil barrels on main roads. One morning they took control of the departure lounge at Dili's airport and prevented six East Timorese leaving. All week a bunch of scowling men has been stopping traffic on the last stretch of road before the airport and questioning passengers. In all these cases the police stood by.
UNAMET officials are furious that Jakarta has refused to assume its security role under the international agreement with the UN and the former colonial power, Portugal, under which the popular consultation was held. It gave UNAMET a badly flawed mandate, though UNAMET spokesman Mr David Wimhurst said yesterday, "if we had not agreed, there would not be a popular consultation".
Many observers here believe that UNAMET is reluctant to say just how bad the situation is and, indeed, Mr Wimhurst did not disclose yesterday that five UNAMET staff were missing in Mariana until asked a direct question.
The future of the process designed to end the violence in the former Portuguese colony, which was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 and annexed by Indonesia the following year, an action not recognised by the UN, is now overshadowed by the threat of civil war. This is what elements of the Indonesian military may want.
UN officials are in no doubt that the Indonesian army (TNI) has set up, organised, armed, paid and controlled the militias, and that it is responsible for putting UNAMET in a position where it is unable to maintain its own security, let alone that of its local staff.
This is a matter of deep shame for frustrated members of UNAMET's unarmed civilian police. It has also convinced UN officials that the political leaders in Jakarta are unable to totally take control of East Timor from army intelligence, Korpassus, which has run it as a military fiefdom since 1975.
The militia activity has not only undermined the UN operation, it has forced many of the world's press to leave in a hurry as the situation turned ugly, including all Indonesian reporters on Thursday and 70 international journalists in a plane chartered by the BBC yesterday.
"This is the wrong time to be leaving," Mr Wimhurst scolded them yesterday morning. "Your presence in the process has been absolutely crucial. No one can guarantee your security, particularly the United Nations, but I would urge you to see this through."
The militia rampage has more importantly put enormous pressure on FALANTIL commanders in the mountains to take up their guns to defend the people, but their leader, Mr Xanana Gusmao, has ordered that no military retaliation be taken against the militias, knowing that this would play into the hands of their puppet-masters.
The most popular conspiracy theory is that with FALANTIL in the fight, the Indonesian army would come in as peacekeepers, and finish the process of securing control of a future independent East Timor for its militia allies after TNI had withdrawn.
The danger of war is now real. "FALANTIL is much more disciplined but they are really pissed off and they are running out of food supplies because of road blocks," said a senior UN official.
On the eve of their greatest triumph, the most prominent independence supporters in the umbrella CNRT organisation, as well as student leaders, have gone into hiding. Some UNAMET officials suggest hopefully that all this activity is the militias' "last hurrah" and that they will quickly become demoralised by a pro-independence vote. They point to the disintegration of the militia leadership in the town of Suai.
Yet this is an unlikely scenario. A spokesman for the political wing of the militias, Mr Basilio Dias Araujo, a fluent English speaker educated at Manchester Metropolitan University, made it clear yesterday that pro-Indonesia forces were preparing to discredit the outcome of the vote.
Mr Araujo brought complaints about the conduct of the poll to the three poll commissioners appointed by UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan: Mr Pat Bradley, from Northern Ireland, Mr Johann Kriegler, from South Africa, and Ms Bong-Scuk Sohn, from South Korea. He was not satisfied, but no one expected that he would be. "We have been excluded from the process," he claimed at a press conference to which he produced villagers with complaints about local UNAMET staff directing people how to vote.
Typical was that of a toothless old man with skeletal cheeks called Mr Renaldo Mirana, from the district of Casa. He told us: "A woman called Georgina took my ballot paper and marked it for me." Whatever the merit of such complaints, they seem designed more to give the losing side some justification for whatever action it plans next. And for the people of East Timor, like the "internally displaced persons (IDPs)" in UNAMET-speak who fled from their homes in Bacora and other regions ravaged by the militias his week, it is likely to get much worse before it gets better.