The memories of East Timor are but a few weeks old but now they haunt. There were the many women who would smile and hold up their babies so those toddlers could see you. The women thought that, if not from UNAMET (United Nations Mission in East Timor), you were either a journalist or a sympathetic foreigner. In Dili, the capital, there appeared a surface calm. Even the security forces had placed a large, red and white banner across one city street which read"Welcome if you love East Timorese, love both the pro-integration and the pro-independence."

There were the long lines of people at the voting registration centers. They clutched in their hands the documentation that would enable participation in the August 30th ballot. And there were the requests by some Timorese for us to travel to the more remote regions. The notion was that foreign presences would add confidence those furthest from international scrutiny. Those people were more vulnerable to the whims of the militias and the Indonesian security forces. Most of all there was the thought that the long trauma might be nearing an end. As one Australian journalist put it,"Something very, very bad happened here. Now there is a chance to make it right."

Sure there were dark signs of trouble, though not on a scale that would account for what is happening now. Larger militia-infested towns like Maubara and Liquica seemed eerie. They were in fact not as populated as they should have been. Many residents had fled to nearby hills. For those that remained, they planted flagpoles displaying Indonesian flags prominently in front of their houses. This was to ensure that those homes remained intact. In the south, several locals suggested that the town of Viqueque was not a very good place to spend time and indeed it had an air of palpable menace. I recall a group of Indonesian soldiers observing two of us with a steady and glaring hatred.

More seriously, UN registration centers were being periodically attacked. At one near Ainaro, an Australian UN police official had warned that,"this is not the time for you to be traveling around East Timor" and that"Polri and Brimob (the Indonesian police and their mobile brigades) have said they can protect me but I can' t protect you." He was probably right on the first count but wrong on the second, being himself injured two days later in a militia attack. The police were nearby but their response, in this and in similar situations, was"slow and inadequate" according to UNAMET spokespersons. For Timorese UN workers in those attacks there was an added worry. Militia groups sometimes tried to separate local assistants from the international workers, allowing the latter to leave. This was resisted since there was little doubt what would result.

Nonetheless, the election went ahead in relative quiet with 98.6% of registered voters going to the polls. This was a total bound to shame those of us from countries where that right is respected and turnouts barely manage 50%. The 78.5% vote for independence was not what the militias, nor those in the Indonesian military and intelligence apparatus who direct and arm those auxiliaries, wanted. Perhaps they had become too used to a political system in which the ruling party felt free to announce in advance its target (and subsequently achieved) winning percentage, though perhaps subtler minds among the thuggish elements did expect to lose.

Whatever the case, the decision was taken that the East Timorese had to be punished in the worst possible way for their insolence. Some cover had been provided by politicians across the Indonesian spectrum who termed the East Timorese"ungrateful" and"incapable of running their own country," words that could have come straight from the mouths of Indonesia' s previous Dutch overlords. Dili has now been largely destroyed and throughout the country, hundreds, maybe more, have been brutally massacred in places previously considered sanctuaries, such as church compounds. This work has been largely conducted by the militias but the acquiescence, and sometime participation, of the Indonesian security forces, in them has been well attested.

The international presence, as led by UNAMET, has been humiliated and intimidated to the point of total collapse. When all foreigners leave there will be no one to"see" what happens next. The haunting that I, and perhaps others, may feel now has to do with whether we may have been part of a process that had given false hopes and whether we could and should have done more to help a people who had already, in 1975, been abandoned to a grisly fate.

The reaction of the larger international community has been mixed with some countries and organizations appealing for, even demanding, what is most needed now, the immediate intervention of a fully-armed international peacekeeping force with full powers for security. The continued presence of the Indonesian military allows it to pursue its own agenda, one similar to that of allowing a fox to secure the hens. Others worry about the dangers of possible sovereignty violations (although the UN has never recognized East Timor as a part of Indonesia). They speak of Indonesia as an"old friend" in terms suggesting a bosom companion who has just been arrested for drunkenness and not a volatile, highly-complex society with unstable politics and, in some regions, an out-of-control security apparatus murdering those it still claims as its own citizens.

Perhaps in the coming days and weeks a combination of threats, finessing, cajoling, inducements, or even direct action may have an effect and put the long-suffering East Timorese people back on the road to recovery and freedom. Whether this will be of posthumous consolation to those men, women and children who have already been massacred is another matter. What we mustn' t do is abandon those who still survive. (RH)