Indonesia Planned Deportation of 300,000 East Timorese

"We are being informed that in the case of the evacuations it is a pre-meditated scenario where authorities said that they expected to evacuate 200,000-300,000 refugees," UN spokesman Brian Kelly told the Associated Press by telephone from Dili. "It seems to be a forced evacuation on behalf of the authorities," he added.

With international outrage rising by the hour, the Indonesian government of President B.J. Habibie declared martial law in East Timor Tuesday as evidence mounted of his military's collusion with Timor's anti-independence "militias," who are believed to have killed hundreds and destroyed since East Timorese cast 78 percent of their votes for indepencence from Indonesia in the UN-mediated Aug. 30 referendum.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, said in Geneva that army and militia forces "must stop their deliberate policy of terror and displacement" of East Timorese.

Tens of thousands of people have fled for the relative safety of the Indonesian province of West Timor and other parts of the archipelago since the militia rampage began on Aug. 31. More than 5,000 people, including journalists, were forcibly removed by the military and militia members from the grounds of Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Carlos Belo's home near Dili and then burned it to the ground.

"There is every indication that a massacre is taking place, staged by [Indonesian] military forces," Ana Gomes, Lisbon's diplomatic envoy to Jakarta, told Portugal's TSF radio on Sunday. "Over 100 dead would be a conservative estimate." Portugal, which freed East Timor, its former colony, in 1975, has been on of Indonesia's stiffest critics since Indonesian Army units came ashore at Dili in 1975 and took control of the Island. On that occasion as on this one, journalists were a special target of troops. Indonesian Army officers in uniform ordered the cold-blooded execution of seven Australian journalists on a Dili dock as they awaited evacuation.

According to the pro-independence East Timor Action Network, most remaining U.S. -based referendum observers were forced to evacuate East Timor Monday as Indonesian-backed paramilitaries and Indonesian military units conducted widespread operations throughout the capital of Dili.

"The residence of Nobel Peace Laureate Bishop Carlos Belo has been attacked and burned by paramilitaries, while thousands of refugees who had taken shelter in his compound were loaded at gunpoint onto trucks and taken to an undisclosed location," said ETAN spokesman Eric Piotrowski, who has been in touch with ETAN offices in Dili continuously over the past several days.

Meanwhile, despairing UN workers who had helped conduct an election that was nearly free of violence and widely accalimed as fair struggled Tuesday with the disintegration of civil order following the vote.

"The UN process, which gave voice to the political aspirations of the vast majority of East Timorese, is being destroyed as we speak," said Ben Terrell, one of the last remaining observers with the International Federation for East Timor Observer Project (IFET-OP), as he was forced to evacuate Dili. "We urgently call upon the international community to support the immediate introduction of UN forces to East Timor." Most remaining IFET observers (from an August 30 total of more than 120) have been evacuated.

The UN had a total of some 4,000 workers in East Timor. Many have now become the target of militias. Indonesian sources and some local news reports say the dreaded Kopassus military units that were responsible for much of the anti-democratioc violence during ther overthrow of former President Suharto in May, 1998 have entered East Timor and are joining the ranks of the rampaging gangs out of uniform.