After failing to stop a militia-led mob that destroyed a U.N. office in the West Timor town of Atambua on Wednesday, Indonesia's military deployed troop and police reinforcements and made 15 arrests. With the suspension of international aid operations, some 90,000 refugees were faced with potentially disastrous shortages of food and medicines in their squalid camps on the western side of the border that divides Timor island into the Indonesian west and the U.N.-administered East Timor. Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, humiliated before scores of world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit, promised he would work with the U.N. administration in East Timor on removing the hostile militias from the border region. He insisted his forces had tried to prevent Wednesday's attack, which left three aid workers, including an American, and three civilians dead.
Witnesses say soldiers stood by without stopping the mob.
Foreign governments demanded Wahid make good on past promises and take strong action against the militias, which human rights groups say are backed by hard-line elements of Indonesia's army. Indonesia's official Antara news agency quoted Wahid earlier as saying Wednesday's attack was engineered by his domestic political foes. He did not repeat the accusations when speaking at the United Nations. On Wednesday, about 3,000 militiamen and supporters stormed the Atambua office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and beat and stabbed three workers to death, then burned their bodies. Other workers fled and hid in the homes of sympathetic townspeople or under Indonesian police protection.