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Wahid says international aid needed to help refugees |
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September 9, 2000
NEW YORK, SEPT 8 (AP) - As Indonesian troops headed to West Timor following a ferocious attack on three U.N. workers, President Abdurrahman Wahid said the international community must help remove militia gangs from the beleaguered province. Wahid said he spoke Thursday with the U.N. administrator now running East Timor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, about relocating thousands of "criminal elements" from West Timor to other parts of his sprawling nation. "But this will come at a great cost," said Wahid, a guest speaker at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "We ask the international community to give us money to resettle them." A mob of 3,000 militiamen and supporters stormed the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in the West Timor town of Atambua Wednesday, beating and stabbing three foreign workers to death, then burning their bodies. The mob also killed an Indonesian man who had been working for the United Nations along with two people in a nearby village. The brutality of the slayings has placed new pressure on Wahid to crack down on the militias - which human rights groups say are backed by hard-line elements of Indonesia's army - and to close refugee camps that are used as bases by militias for cross-border raids into U.N.-administered East Timor. "The international community demand we do this or that, but they don't give us the necessary tools to do so," said Wahid, who was in New York to attend the U.N. Millennium Summit. "Maybe now our international friends will be ready to bare the cost of resettling the pro-integration forces to other places, to allow them to live outside of Timor." By Thursday almost all U.N. aid workers were evacuated from the West Timor, where they had been providing relief to the refugees who had fled from East Timor to escape violence in the run-up to the independence referendum a year ago. Some 90,000 refugees remain in the squalid camps and the U.N refugee agency said it would not continue it's work in West Timor unless it received adequate safety assurances from the Indonesian military command. Two battalions - or 1,200 men - have been deployed to the border of West Timor "to impose order in that area prevent the occurrence of further bloodshed," Wahid said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Thursday. Several hundred Indonesian mobile brigade police have already arrived in West Timor and Wahid said at least 10 people linked to the violence have been arrested. "I received a telephone call today saying we are full control of the area," he said. Wahid has often blamed 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. "Some will do anything to sabotage peace," he said, "including influencing people to hold demonstrations and convincing criminals to do killings."
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