In the early morning hours last Sunday, Nairn was walking the streets of Dili taking notes. Most reporters had evacuated East Timor days earlier, fleeing the reign of terror by government-backed militias opposed to East Timor's independence vote. He saw hacked bodies piled in the streets, a city reduced to ruins. Suddenly he was surrounded by an armed militia gang, which took him into custody. They took him to Dili's military barracks, where, he told me, the militias mingled freely and jovially with the soldiers supposed to police them.
Citizens slip across national boundaries all the time.
When they are caught, they are deported. When Nairn was picked up in Dili last week, most of his friends thought that would happen. He was treated relatively well, allowed to retain his cellular phone. But the detention dragged on. He was transferred under military guard to a holding center in West Timor, home base of those same furious militias who torched Dili and hacked the East Timorese with machetes.