Hundreds of multinational peacekeepers yesterday dug in for their first night in the East Timor capital of Dili, as the militias which laid waste to the city signalled they had not given up the fight against independence.
More than 1,000 heavily-armed troops, most from Australia and New Zealand, with Gurkha fighters from Nepal, took up positions at key points in the city, its port and airport, with night-goggles and rifles at the ready.
In a briefing at the end of the day, the spokesman for the Indonesian East Timor Martial Law Command, Lieut Col Willem Rampangilei, said a total of 1,190 soldiers from at least six countries had arrived by dusk.
But the militia, apparently all but banished from the capital it ransacked, said in messages through Indonesian media that it had regrouped just inside the border to defend the unity of Indonesia.
"We will not attack the UN peacekeeping troops," the deputy chairman of the newly-named National Unity Front (FPB), Mr Joao da Silva Tavares, told the SCTV private Indonesian television from the town of Balibo.
However, Mr Tavares said the group sought to defend "our territory", and the official FPB declaration swore to "defend the wholeness of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia and free East Timor from the chains of neo-colonialism and the grips of new colonialists."
In Jakarta, the Indonesian military spokesman, Maj Gen Sudrajat, estimated the pro-Jakarta militia had around 50,000 followers, but gave no estimate of its firepower.
For the new arrivals sweating in combat gear, Dili was a city with, in the words of one United Nations officer, "no food, no water, no nothing".
Maj Gen Peter Cosgrove, the Australian commander of the International Force for East Timor (Interfet), said his troops met no resistance.
"This can be seen as an arrival rather than some sort of aggressive military deployment." But he added the city was "still, from my point of view, a pretty risky environment". In the only reported encounter as they patrolled the streets on foot and in armoured personnel carriers, soldiers from New Zealand stopped a man riding a motorbike and confiscated his home-made rifle without any fuss.
Indonesia's martial law commander, Maj Gen Kiki Syahnakri, sent by Jakarta after some troops openly collaborated with the militia in its two-week rampage of murder and destruction, has said he will hand over control by the end of the week.
Yesterday's air deployment was expected to be followed at dawn today by the arrival of warships in Dili to unload bulky equipment, including more armoured vehicles.
A small contingent of US marines travelled with Maj Gen Cosgrove's approval to explore the possibility of moving some of the troops to Baucau, 115 km east of Dili, to ease congestion at Dili's airport.
Indonesia's military chief yesterday dismissed reports that thousands may have died in East Timor and said the death toll was under 100. "The number of victims that we have recorded since the announcement of the result of the referendum is roughly in the 90s," Gen Wiranto told parliament.