No evidence has yet been unearthed of large-scale mass killings in East Timor during the pro-Jakarta militia rampage here, a UN official said yesterday. "We have not found evidence of massacres so far," said Mr Michel Barton, spokesman for the UN Office of the Co-ordinator for Humanitarian Assistance "In most cases when we hear horrendous stories of huge massacres, we may find two or three bodies buried," Mr Barton said.
He said there had obviously been murders, but was not able to put a figure on how many bodies had been found since international peacekeepers came in on September 20th to quell the violence in the wake of the August 30th vote for independence.
"There have been murders, there have been terrible things that happened here. But we don't believe that people in their thousands have been killed and their bodies buried or thrown into the sea. If this had been the case we would have found evidence by now. Presumably all the missing people are in West Timor or still hiding in East Timor's mountains."
A senior UN official said last week that hundreds of thousands of East Timorese remained unaccounted for, considering the official 1998 population figure of some 850,000.
Some 260,000 fled or were pushed into neighbouring West Timor, and another 100,000 or so were in Dili at the time he spoke. Tens of thousands of Indonesian residents and civil servants left before the August 30th vote.
But to date only some 50 bodies, some of them dismembered, have been discovered by international peacekeepers and journalists in the parts of the country that have been secured.
A UN Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) spokesman, Mr Nicholas Birnback, said on Tuesday that 12 people including nuns and clergy were killed in three attacks by the same roving militia group in the East Timorese city of Los Palos on a single day in September. Officials had earlier said that eight and possibly nine people were killed in a single incident in the Los Palos area on September 25th.
Mr Barton suggested that reports often exaggerated the extent of the killings, citing a report by one foreign journalist that 40 bodies had been stuffed in a well in a Dili suburb, when in fact only one was found.
"Stories tend to be exaggerated, which is apparently a traditional phenomenon in this country." He said investigations would continue when UN civilian police re-established a sizeable presence in the territory.
The UNAMET spokesman, Mr David Wimhurst, said 47 civilian police were now back in East Timor. Two were in Liquisa, 24 at Baucau and the rest in Dili. Ten more are expected to arrive today. Mr Wimhurst added the UN now also had 51 military liaison officers in East Timor.
Meanwhile, Mr Ian Martin, the official representative of UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan, arrived back in Dili after a series of meetings in New York.
Yesterday he met UNAMET officials and the Interfet commander, Maj Gen Peter Cosgrove, before heading to Darwin today for discussions with the independence leader, Mr Xanana Gusmao.