By
The Associated Press
KUPANG, Indonesia - Frightened U.N. relief workers were evacuated from West Timor yesterday, fleeing rampaging militias, and the caskets of three slain workers were airlifted out, draped in blue U.N. flags and covered with tropical flowers.
After failing to stop a militia-led mob that destroyed a U.N. office in the West Timor town of Atambua on Wednesday, Indonesia's military deployed troop and police reinforcements and made 15 arrests.
With the suspension of international aid operations, some 90,000 refugees were faced with potentially disastrous shortages of food and medicines in their squalid camps on the western side of the border that divides Timor island into the Indonesian west and the U.N.-administered East Timor.
At the United Nations, President Clinton urged Indonesia to "bring those responsible to justice, to disarm and disband the militias and to take all necessary steps to insure the safety of those continuing to work on humanitarian goals there."
Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, humiliated before scores of world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit, promised he would work with the U.N. administration in East Timor on removing the hostile militias from the border region. "But to remove such a number of people needs time," he said.
He insisted his forces had tried to prevent Wednesday's attack, which left three aid workers, including an American, and three civilians dead. Witnesses say soldiers stood by without stopping the mob.
"We protected them, but it's a problem of a cultural nature," Wahid told journalists, saying tribal differences fueled the militia problem.
Foreign governments demanded Wahid make good on past promises and take strong action against the militias, which human rights groups say are backed by hard-line elements of Indonesia's army.
Wahid has often blamed such rogue military elements of triggering bloodshed and mayhem in Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia to derail attempts by his 11-month-old government to build a new democracy after decades of authoritarianism.
Indonesia's official Antara news agency quoted Wahid earlier as saying Wednesday's attack was engineered by his domestic political foes.
"This was done at a time when I am in New York, at the United Nations, in order to embarrass me," he was reported as saying. He did not repeat the accusations when speaking at the United Nations.
On Wednesday, about 3,000 militiamen and supporters stormed the Atambua office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and beat and stabbed three workers to death, then burned their bodies.
Other workers fled and hid in the homes of sympathetic townspeople or under Indonesian police protection.
Alias Bin Ahmal, a Malaysian who managed the U.N. office, was sheltered along with five colleagues by a woman and her husband. The woman told militiamen who banged on their door that the U.N. workers had gone on ahead.
"If it was not for the woman's determination and ingenuity we would have been sitting ducks," Ahmal said.
The militias blamed for the slayings are the same gangs that terrorized and devastated East Timor a year ago after its people voted to break free of Indonesian rule in a U.N.-supervised referendum.
That violence sent some 250,000 East Timorese refugees fleeing to West Timor. About 160,000 of them have since returned.
Some 196 U.N. and other aid workers were flown and trucked from West Timor yesterday to the nearby island of Bali or to East Timor, U.N. officials said. The coffins of the three slain U.N. workers arrived by plane yesterday in the East Timorese capital, Dili. "This is going to hit the refugees very hard," said Chris Lom, from the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration after he left the West Timorese capital, Kupang.
He said food supplies were already low, and that without medicines and doctors, outbreaks of disease were probable. In many camps, children already have scabies. Most were malnourished and malaria and respiratory illnesses were rife, he said.
Indonesia promised to start supplying food, but international aid workers said Indonesian aid was often meager and unreliable.
East Timor's U.N. administrator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, warned that the refugees "will be at the mercy" of militiamen, who have imposed control in the camps and reportedly prevent many refugees from returning home.
In overcrowded Tuapukan camp on the outskirts of Kupang, some refugees said they prayed for the day when the government would force the gangs out.
"We yearn for our home in East Timor. But we have to watch out for the militias," said a 40-year-old mother of eight, Justina Fernandez.
