TALKS on East Timor between the Portuguese Foreign Minister, Mr Jaime Gama, and his Indonesian opposite number, Mr Ali Alatas, ended in London last night in stalemate.
The talks, which were held under the personal aegis of the UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, achieved nothing more than that the three men decided to meet again at mid year in Geneva. East Timor has been occupied by Indonesia, which refers to it as a province, since 1975, in defiance of the United Nations.
Indonesia again refused yesterday to relax its grip in any way on territory where 200,000 people are estimated to have died since the invasion.
"The foreign ministers got to know each other a little. That's the best you can say," commented one conference source. Each foreign minister took the opportunity, in successive press conferences, to make his own points.
Mr Alatas claimed that the UN Security Council resolutions of 1975 and 1976, ordering Jakarta to remove its troops from East Timor, had been "superseded" less forthright resolutions from the General Assembly. Mr Gama denied this.
The Portuguese Foreign Minister called for the monitoring of the use by Indonesia in East Timor of arms sold by European Union states and the US to the Indonesians on the understanding that they would not be used in East Timor.
The EU, according to Mr Gama, will take on increasing importance in the efforts to bring self determination to the East Timorese. Indonesia, he forecast, would soon be talking not to Portugal alone but to the whole membership of the EU.
Mr Alatas said "East Timor is not paradise but it isn't the hell that it is being described as."
Mr Yasushi Akashi, the UN Under Secretary General, refused to reply to a question at the news conference as to why the United Nations had not used the same military force to eject the Indonesians from occupied East Timor as it had to expel the Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait.
Rebels in Indonesia's Irian Jaya were divided over whether to hold or release hostages, including six Europeans, whom they seized more than a week ago, Antara news agency said yesterday. A military spokesman said in Jayapura that an Indonesian woman, Mrs Jacobus Wandiba, and her six month old child had been freed.