A five-member UN Security Council delegation and the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, will fly to Dili this morning, hoping to see the situation there for themselves after a week of killing, burning and looting by Indonesian-backed militias.
The futility of their one-day mission was underlined, however, by the cynical behaviour of the Indonesian military in Dili even as the UN delegates were being reassured in Jakarta that the security situation on the ground was improving.
Militias, with the complicity and sometimes active help of soldiers, forced the evacuation yesterday of most of the remaining international staff from the compound of the UN Mission to East Timor (UNAMET). Some 500 international and local UNAMET staff were escorted through a city of burned buildings still controlled by armed militia gangs to the airport in a military convoy, leaving only a skeleton staff to maintain a presence. After they had gone, regular Indonesian soldiers joined in a militia attack on the UNAMET compound.
Members of the anti-independence Aitarak militia, one of them armed with a grenade, walked through an Indonesian army line next to the compound and looted a UNAMET vehicle, the mission's spokesman, Mr Brian Kelly, said.
"They walked right past the TNI," he said in a telephone interview. "The next thing, one of our guys observed the Indonesian army [TNI] help the militia smash the windows of a vehicle and remove some things from it. What this is a further ratcheting up of intimidatory tactics and a further example of the porosity of the security fence we have been offered by the military." He said he was sure it was all part of a game plan and there was no way to predict how long the remaining staff could stay. Heavy shooting later broke out when refugees inside the compound made a break for safety as dusk fell. One of the remaining journalists in Dili told CNN that TNI fired at the refugees as they scrambled up the mountain behind the compound.
Mrs Robinson's visit to Dili today was arranged as evidence mounted that a human rights catastrophe had occurred in East Timor under the noses of a helpless UN mission. Thousands have been slaughtered, including priests and nuns, and some 200,000 driven from their homes simply because they expressed a preference for independence.
Mrs Robinson said in Geneva before leaving she wished "to obtain a first-hand assessment of the situation on the ground" and then visit Darwin, Australia, and Jakarta. The five-member UN mission wanted to show the people of East Timor that they had not been forgotten, an official said, though the UN ambassadors will find almost no people in Dili other than armed pro-Jakarta militias and security forces.
A British delegate, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said their aim was "to lay a very strong emphasis on humanitarian access for the people of East Timor . . . and to bring across to the commanders on the ground the essential point that the improvements that have now just begun over the last two days must be sustained."
The UN team spent two and a half hours in Jakarta yesterday talking to the head of the Indonesian armed forces and the Defence Minister, Gen Wiranto, who afterwards said: "We do not reject a United Nations peacekeeping force, but it is not really the appropriate time."
The Indonesian leaders show no sign as yet of cracking under the relentless international pressure building up, from President Bill Clinton to Pope John Paul II, for an outside force in the former Portuguese colony, which voted by 78.5 per cent for independence in the August 30th UN referendum.
An East Timorese leader and Nobel Peace laureate, Mr Jose Ramos-Horta, said in New Zealand yesterday that countries which waited for an invitation from Jakarta to send in an international force "will be accomplices to genocide". His fellow Nobel laureate, Bishop Carlos Belo, appealed in Portugal - where he received a hero's welcome yesterday - for such a force to save the people from slaughter and return refugees who had fled the territory.
Meanwhile the plight of internally displaced persons and refugees grows steadily worse. Tens of thousands have been taken forcibly in military transports and troop-carrying aircraft to West Timor, where journalists and aid agencies were prevented from visiting them in camps near the capital, Kupang.
One report on Australian television last night said that many were being deceived into boarding planes by men dressed in UNAMET uniforms or caps, and there was an unconfirmed report of a massacre of two truckloads of refugees on a West Timor beach.
In Jakarta President B.J. Habibie tried to reassert his authority, which has been severely weakened by the East Timor crisis. He spoke in public for the first time in three days, during which Gen Wiranto denied, unconvincingly, that a silent coup had taken place.
In an apparent plea to the army to stop its brutal onslaught on the East Timorese, the President said: "Do not get caught up in patriotism and nationalism which are based only on the needs of a certain group and which are not coming from justice and humanity. Do not let narrow political needs disrupt national unity."
Without enlarging he added: "I need to reiterate that all the decisions concerning East Timor have been thoroughly calculated and planned." In January President Habibie infuriated the military by starting the process which led to the UN referendum in East Timor.
An editorial in the Indonesian Observer daily in Jakarta yesterday said: "There are increasing indications that the military has emerged from the current East Timor crisis as the single most dominant and cohesive power bloc." Dozens of women protested against the violence in East Timor outside the Defence Ministry in Jakarta yesterday.
"We are shocked and ashamed about what is being done to our country," one said. Ten trucks of heavily armed police prevented another demonstration by students from the Catholic University reaching parliament to protest against increased militarism in Indonesia.