We should have known from the show of force put on by armed militias for a funeral of one of their leaders yesterday that it was going to be a bad day for Dili, though few anticipated that it would end with gunfire and death right at the gates of the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET).
The funeral was of Placido Menendez, the father of two boys and six girls, who was stabbed to death by a mob of pro-independence supporters on Saturday. Placido was a prominent member of the Aitarak militia, who was reportedly killed by a brother of a man he had shot during the Santa Cruz massacre in Dili in 1991. Some 75 motorcycles and two dozen open-back trucks carrying Aitarak members in black T-shirts and red-and-white bandanas accompanied the cortege to a roadside grave site outside Dili. They made little attempt to hide the fact that the trucks contained guns. Along the route sinister men stood guard at junctions with revolvers and machetes.
About 750 militiamen, joined by 33 members of Besi Mera Putih, another militia group from the town of Liquica, formed long lines at he graveside and saluted their dead comrade on command. Several held a huge red and white Indonesian flag over the grave as a priest sprinkled holy water on the coffin. Brooding over the affair was the set face of Eurico Gutterres, the youthful, long-haired commander of Aitarak, who was said to be taking the death of his brother-in-arms very badly. How badly we soon found out.
In a drive with colleagues to the seaside town of Hera south of Dili we found a scene of spooky terror. People around a little shop told us furtively that four students had been pulled out of a Toyota Kijang the previous day on their way from Dili by members of Aitarak led by a local commander called Mateus. They were held for several hours and then killed.
A local man who had the misfortune to witness their killing had his right arm broken and his head smashed, they said. Students in East Timor are automatically assumed to be pro-independence.
We had to negotiate a roadblock manned by Mateus's men a little further on. They were dressed in fatigues and carried automatic weapons, in defiance of an agreement signed in the town of Bacau on Saturday between the militia and the resistance movement Falantil not to carry weapons outside small, designated areas.
Further along was a more ragged bunch of militiamen, one wearing a T-shirt with the words in English "Kill them all".
High above the village two miles on we encountered about 100 young men, all supporters of Falantil, who were congregated on a hill with a commanding view of Hera. They carried arrows, knives and swords. None had uniforms and most wore ragged T-shirts, including one with the slogan "Hudson River Renegades".
Their leader, a middle-aged man named Marcus Manek, was the only one who had a gun, and it was a crude homemade weapon of the type with no trigger and which was fired by lighting a match to the barrel. He said they had fought skirmishes with the militia from dawn until 2 p.m. With their inadequate weapons they had to rely more on courage than on firepower to combat their assailants.
Their willingness to fight after months of intimidation puts enormous pressure on Falantil, whose men in the hills have maintained a policy of turning the other cheek, certain that the militia activity is designed to pull East Timor down into civil war and prevent it gaining its independence.
The police have taken no action to prevent the militia road-blocks. An incident affecting UN polling staff in the town of Emera would seem to confirm that the police are sympathetic to the militia but that the army is their real master. Emera was the scene of the worst incident on polling day.
Three local UN poll workers were killed after polling closed on Monday evening, and on Tuesday when a convoy of 17 UN vehicles tried to make the hour-long journey from Emera to Dili with ballot boxes it was besieged for eight hours by local militia members.
At one point when a UN helicopter tried to land in a field and collect the ballot boxes, militiamen ran across shooting at the aircraft. Police intervened but faced the helicopter rather than the militiamen. There were about 30 militia in all, said Australian Jeremy Hobbs of Oxfam who was a witness, and they said they would only lift their road-blocks if the army told them to do so, though eventually they let the convoy pass.
The road from the scene of yesterday's fight at Hera led down from the hills into the pro-independence Dili suburb of Becora. It was here, not far from UNAMET headquarters, that Placido Menendez was killed, and the militiamen had been taking their revenge during the afternoon when they returned from the funeral, burning houses and terrorising the population. It was from here the trouble spread to UNAMET. All around Dili last night families from Becora and other districts were seeking shelter in convents and churches, not knowing what Eurico Gutterres and his ruthless henchmen will do next. Down at the docks there was a mad rush of people trying to get on a ferry leaving for West Timor. And at UN headquarters officials began to think seriously of evacuation plans.
All this has lent an air of great foreboding to East Timor as it awaits the result of the count in the next few days, which could determine the fate of the former Portuguese colony that has known only colonisation and occupation for the last 500 years.