Last Indonesian Troops Pull Out of East Timor

With troops clustered forlornly at the rail, a gray Indonesian troop-transport ship set sail early today from the darkened, nearly deserted harbor of East Timor’s capital, ending a 24-year military occupation that left tens of thousands of people dead.

The Indonesians’ departure from the former Portuguese colony marked the end of a long and fruitless struggle by the world’s most populous Muslim nation to subdue a small, stubbornly separatist Roman Catholic province on its eastern fringe.

The battered, rusting ship, watched over by only a few international peacekeepers, was crammed with Indonesian troops and equipment, so full that its loading ramp sank beneath the water and the last of the soldiers had to slosh aboard through water up to their knees.

It was an ignominious comedown for a military force that once numbered more than 40,000 and whose word once was law in a province now on the road to independence.

For the past week, as their garrison dwindled to the last few hundred, Indonesian troops looked glumly from behind their sandbag fortifications, protected by peacekeepers and jeered by locals, unable to leave their compounds even to say a final farewell to their military dead.

Early today, many East Timorese learned of the Indonesians’ predawn departure when they streamed to an open-air Mass near the waterfront. A religious procession later in the day was to wind past the dock where the ship had been moored.

“Now we are free,” said Joana Soares, 28, dressed in her clean but ragged Sunday best and clutching her curly-haired baby daughter.

The saga of Indonesia and East Timor reads in some ways like a familiar script: a lightly equipped rebel band--one that lives close to the ground, knows the terrain and commands the unflinching loyalty of a rural populace even as they bear the brunt of horrific reprisals--prevails in the end over a vastly larger and better equipped army.

The tumultuous events in East Timor fit other patterns as well, and ones that are becoming ominously familiar: an outbreak of internecine hatred, a rampage by paramilitary forces apparently abetted by a regular army, a massive displacement of civilians. Suddenly another obscure conflict became a crisis requiring urgent international military intervention.

Here, as elsewhere, the stated mission was to rescue civilians caught up in the violence, but the unspoken premise was potentially explosive: The international community was coming to the aid of a separatist movement in a sovereign nation.

In this case, Indonesia voluntarily relinquished its claim to the territory, agreeing to accept the results of its 2-month-old independence referendum. That prompted quiet but heartfelt sighs of relief in the foreign ministries of countries taking part in the peacekeeping mission.

In part because of such sensitivities, all the parties involved--the peacekeepers, the U.N. transition team that is a government in all but name, even the rebel army that is now in the process of transforming itself into a political movement--have been at pains to praise the Indonesians for a relatively painless final pullout.

That was plainly underscored by the send-off given top Indonesian military men Saturday, as the last few troops were preparing to leave East Timor by ship and plane.

Not only the acting head of the U.N. team, Ian Martin, and the Australian-led peacekeepers’ commander, Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, came to the airport for the farewell to Indonesian officials--so did the longtime leader of the rebel army that had spent years locked in bloody battle with them.

The guerrilla chief, Jose Alexandre “Xanana” Gusmao, 53, told reporters that the Indonesian occupation had been “a mistake between two countries.”

“Now we have to look to the future,” he said. Clad in fatigues, he chatted in the dingy airport lounge for more than half an hour with the Indonesian military men, lighting a cigarette and puffing it as he spoke.