"The UN Security Council needs to threaten Indonesian army commanders in East Timor with a war crimes tribunal in the same way as Slobodan Milosevic" to save next August's referendum from disaster, because of intimidation by army-backed militias.
This is the stark conclusion of Mr Tom Hyland, of the Ireland East Timor Solidarity Campaign, as the United Nations-managed referendum on August 8th on East Timor's future appears increasingly to have little chance of being free or fair. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs was told this week by Mr Hyland: "So long as security is within the authority of the Indonesians a free and fair ballot is not possible."
Mr Hyland called on the committee to write to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, asking that up to 10,000 peacekeepers be sent to the former Portuguese colony, as requested by Bishop Carlos Belo.
Reports since January 27th, when President B.J. Habibie said he was prepared to "let go" of East Timor, suggest the exact opposite, said Mr Hyland. Indonesia was speaking with a "forked tongue". And Mr Hyland rejected a presentation of the violence in East Timor as "a civil war". The violence was "a deliberate campaign of terror instigated by the Indonesians to ensure that the East Timorese do not vote for independence".
The reports have included accounts of hundreds of killings by anti-independence militias during recent months, of crocodiles eating victims' bodies thus preventing identification or burial; of an estimated 57,000 internally displaced rural people in concentration camp conditions, of student and youth leaders in hiding, of animist-type blood drinking ceremonies in which villagers were forced to dedicate themselves to Indonesian rule, and of the Indonesian army training the militias - this account by UN observers has been denied.
Some of these reports have gone unconfirmed though the pattern is clear enough. But yesterday resistance activists were trying to establish the provenance of a document circulating in Dili which said the militias were making a death list of independence supporters and groups. "The aim is to exterminate them all," it said.
Either the document is genuine or it is a purposely leaked attempt to further intimidate voters, said an aid worker and resistance sources.
It said: "Mass killings will be conducted from village to village as the ballot results are announced, in the event that the pro-independence forces win." It detailed plans by the Indonesian military to support pro-integration militias, whose numbers it said would be swelled from the current level of several hundred to 50,000, "including volunteers and villagers forced to join them". It added that soldiers were preparing to join the militias.
The report said that when Dili's university reopens in August the militias "will enrol 2,000 of their members as students. They will be armed with pistols and grenades and will receive scholarships from Jakarta."
Mr Hyland could not confirm the source of the document but said that 35 killings during his visit in April with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, had been foreshadowed in a similar paper.
East Timor's Nobel Peace prizewinner, Mr Jose Ramos Horta, has also accused the Indonesian military of supporting the militias. However, the special representative of the resistance still retains faith in President Habibie. "Habibie is doing his very best, within enormous constraints and difficulties. I respect him," Mr Horta told the Jakarta Post.