Darwin - An East Timorese support group said here yesterday it had received reports that tens of thousands of people had died in a deliberate genocidal campaign by Indonesia.
The East Timor International Support Centre also believes 300,000 to 400,000 people face death from starvation and thirst and another 250,000 people, a third of the population, have been deported in vast convoys of trucks and ships.
Dr Andrew McNaughton, of Darwin, said the group has got information from people with access to the only satellite telephones left in East Timor painting the crisis as being even worse than the United Nations believes. He says the information his group has been receiving - from friends and relatives - is entirely credible although there is a lack of hard evidence about the numbers involved.
"There's no doubt the Indonesian army is engaged in an attempted genocide, a final solution against the people of East Timor," he said. "We don't use these words lightly. The way in which this has been put together shows that it has been planned for weeks and months as a major operation.
"The information we have indicates more than 200,000 people, perhaps by now 250,000 people, have been forcibly removed to West Timor and elsewhere.
"We know of vast convoys of trucks that have gone across the border to Atambua, we know of deportations in naval ships, we know that people have been flown out in planes."
Young people are alleged to have been taken out of concentration camps in Atambua and probably killed while others on ships had been beaten to death and thrown over the side. "We have reports that ships have left Dili and come back empty within hours and there's a suspicion that the people on board have been killed."
He said the media focus has been on the besieged UN compound in Dili and on the Dare refugee enclave where 31,000 people face starvation, but the situation throughout East Timor is equally bad or worse.