HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: World news

May 26, 2006, 5:23AM

## Foreign Troops Struggling in East Timor

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

DILI, East Timor — Foreign troops struggled Friday to stave off civil war in East Timor after soldiers gunned down unarmed police in the capital and a mob torched houses. At least 20 people were killed in four days of violence.

ADVERTISEMENT

Members of the 800-member army attacked the national police headquarters Thursday, accusing police of backing a large band of dismissed soldiers who have waged street battles with the military in Dili.

Within the hour, U.N. police and military advisers had negotiated a cease-fire calling for police to surrender their weapons and leave the building.

But as the unarmed police were escorted out, "army soldiers opened fire on them, killing nine and wounding 27 others, including two U.N. police advisers," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York.

The unrest in East Timor is the most serious threat to the desperately poor country since it won independence from Indonesia in 1999. The attack on policemen illustrates the dangers facing peacekeepers from Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Malaysia, the first of whom arrived on Thursday.

The United Nations, which spent millions of dollars training East Timor's army and setting up the country, urged East Timor to take "all necessary steps" to end the violence, which has been driven by longstanding tensions between the country's eastern and western regions.

On Friday machine-guns, mortar and small arms could be heard from the hills overlooking dili. Machete-wielding youths stopped a bus on the city's outskirts and asking passengers where they were from, before eventually letting them go.

Residents described how a mob came smashed windows and poured gasoline on houses in one neighborhood. One of the homes burned was said to belong to Home Security Minister Rogerio Lobato, though he was not inside at the time.

An Associated Press Television News cameraman saw six charred bodies _ some of them women and children _ scattered across the living room, bedroom and bathroom of the house on Friday.

"I ran away when I saw them coming," Victor Do Dantos, a 20-year-old neighbor, said of the mob, declining to speculate who they were.

Earlier in the week five people were killed in gunbattles, most of them government forces.

Streets in Dili were largely deserted, with thousands of terrified residents fleeing to the waterfront, or seeking shelter in schools, community centers and the main United Nations compound.

The violence follows the government's decision in March to fire 600 soldiers _ 40 percent of the military _ after they staged a monthlong strike, complaining of poor pay and discrimination.

The dismissed soldiers are largely from the country's west, while their military's leadership originates from the east.

The renegade soldiers said they were routinely passed up for promotions and often given the worst assignments.

After engaging in deadly riots last month, the rebel troops fled the capital, setting up positions in the surrounding hills and threatening guerrilla warfare if they were not reinstated.

Widening the conflict, some police officers have allied themselves with the disgruntled soldiers, Jean-Marie Guehenno, the chief of the U.N. peacekeeping department, said in New York.

Disillusioned youths have also apparently picked up arms, and ordinary citizens are also taking sides, frustrated by poverty and unemployment in the Connecticut-sized nation six years after Indonesian rule ended.

"Unmet expectations. You see this in a lot of postcolonial countries," said Damien Kingsbury, an Australian academic and expert on Indonesia and its former province.

"Lots of people believe once their colonial masters are gone everything will get better. Well, often that isn't the case."

Hundreds of heavily armed Australian forces arrived Thursday and Friday, and set to work securing the airport. Australia said it would send up to 1,300 troops, along with ships, helicopters and armored personnel carriers.

The country led a multinational peacekeeping force in East Timor in 1999 that ended a bloody rampage by Indonesian troops and their militia proxies following its independence ballot.rces, while Malaysia pledged 500.

___

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer and Nick Wadhams at the United Nations contributed to this story.

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: World news
This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/3899155.html