East Timor Crisis: Tension rises as hundreds flee UN base

INDONESIAN SOLDIERS and militia men armed with hand grenades menaced the United Nations headquarters in East Timor yesterday, as hundreds of UN staff escaped through the burning streets of Dili to the airport, where planes evacuated them to Australia.

Minutes after the mass departure of most of the UN's staff and local employees, a group of anti-independence militia men threatened to throw grenades into the compound when they were refused the keys to UN Land Rovers parked outside. Witnesses said that they took the vehicles anyway after Indonesian soldiers helped them to break their windows.

Last night, Indonesian soldiers fired shots at East Timorese refugees who were fleeing into the mountains behind the compound as new reports emerged of massacres of independence supporters. In Darwin, the spokesman for the UN Assistance Mission in East Timor (Unamet), David Wimhurst, quoted unconfirmed reports that East Timorese men forcibly deported to Indonesian West Timor had been hauled off army trucks and summarily executed by militia men.

All day, Hercules transporter planes of the Royal Australian Air Force shuttled between Darwin and Dili, bringing out 478 people who had been trapped in the UN compound for a week, including 344 East Timorese local employees whose safety had been an acute concern. Last night they were camping out in a "tent village" close to Darwin's airport where they will remain for quarantine checks, before being granted limited Australian visas.

The evacuation had originally been planned for Thursday, but was postponed when the Indonesians refused to give passage to the local staff, unknown numbers of whom have been killed by the militias since the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a referendum held at the end of last month.

There were further negotiations after UN staff presented a petition to the head of Unamet, Ian Martin, insisting that the Timorese workers should not be abandoned. But only UN local employees and their families were allowed on the plane, leaving hundreds of other refugees who remain trapped in the UN compound.

A UN doctor who was evacuated yesterday said that the refugees were succumbing to diseases, including diarrhoea and skin infections. One foreign occupant of the UN compound said: "The atmosphere here is incredibly terrible, and no one is sleeping at all. You walk past the refugees, and people come up and touch you, they are so grateful to see a foreign face still here."

As darkness fell, as many as 200 of the refugees took their chances on the hill overlooking the compound, and were shot at by Indonesian soldiers from a nearby guard post. "As we were coming out, I thought, all I'm facing is a hairy ride to the airport," said Philip Caine, a British UN policeman from Hertfordshire, who arrived in Darwin yesterday afternoon. "They're facing death."

UN staff, many of them in tears and looking stunned after four days or more unable to leave their compound, described scenes of almost complete destruction on the road from the compound to the airport. All of the central shopping area and large numbers of houses appeared to have been destroyed. The streets were empty apart from hundreds of soldiers and militia men openly fraternising.

In New Zealand, where foreign ministers from all over the world are gathering to discuss the situation, Jose Ramos Hortas, East Timor's pro-independence foreign minister in exile, appealed for "mercy ships" to bring humanitarian aid. "There are tens of thousands of women and children in the mountains who can be saved," he said. "If they don't die of slaughter, they will die of starvation.

"The situation in East Timor amounts to genocide, punishable under the genocide convention. There has to be a war crimes tribunal in East Timor to indict Indonesia military leaders who have been responsible for genocide," he said.