While Indonesia begins to investigate some military officers accused in last year's violence in East Timor, the people who live in that devastated territory are unable to arrest or jail even local thieves and robbers.
Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations arrived on a visit here today and congratulated Indonesia for moving ahead with possible indictments of senior officers, including the former military chief, General Wiranto.
But in East Timor itself, which Mr. Annan is to visit on Thursday, there are no local police officers, no local laws or justice system and only the first rudimentary courts and trainee judges. The one tiny jail left standing in the capital, Dili, can hold just 45 of the most serious criminals, mostly killers and rapists. Other offenders in the increasingly unruly territory, one official said, "are just being told not to do it again."
Nearly six months after rampages by local militias -- armed and backed by the Indonesian military -- East Timor remains at what foreign aid officials there call "ground zero."
Widespread destruction and the killings of hundreds of people -- about 250 bodies have been exhumed so far -- followed a vote on Aug. 30 by the former Portuguese colony to break away from Indonesia after 24 years of military occupation.
The violence seemed to be intended in part to make rehabilitation of a free East Timor as difficult and expensive as possible to the local people who rejected Indonesian rule.
"We are now in a period of emergency in which we lack everything -- houses, food, health care," said Jose Alexandre Gusmao, the territory's de facto leader, last week. "We have to rebuild every school and equip it; we have to rebuild every hospital and equip it." Only a handful of teachers and doctors remain in the territory.
For the huge majority of the population who lost their homes, almost no building materials are available. If they were, few could afford to buy them. And if they did, no property or tax records have survived to prove their claims to their homes.
"This is a unique event for the U.N. and for the international community because all other U.N. activities have involved dealing with existing institutions, however difficult they may have been," said one experienced United Nations official. "This is a place with no institutions."
Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the spokesman for the United Nations mission that is administering East Timor until it is ready to try to stand on its own, said it might be years before that day comes.
"Full independence for East Timor would depend on how much has been accomplished, which means things like having a central payments office, a central fiscal authority, a new civil service, a minimum level of rehabilitation and reconstruction," he said. "You need to have an electricity grid that is in place, a water system, a health system, an education system so that a new country will not start from below zero."
Despite pledges by donor countries and international lenders of $522 million in reconstruction aid, the relief effort is only beginning, partly because of the bureaucratic procedures of both the World Bank and the United Nations, officials said.
The slowness of foreign aid -- and the jobs it would generate -- is contributing to restlessness and discontent that is causing crime and gang wars. Faced with growing challenges to law and order in the absence of any local police force, the United Nations has so far deployed just 460 international police officers out of a planned force of 1,610.
Officials in East Timor also worry about what they call a "culture of dependency" in which residents become listless and passive. Seeing the busy, well-equipped aid workers going about their work, and still overwhelmed by the outpouring of international concern, many people expect everything to be done for them.
"I've seen reports where material arrived in a village and people stand around and ask the U.N. to build their house," said a United Nations official in Jakarta. "In other cases I've seen reports of people refusing to plant rice after they have been given the seeds because they are afraid that if they plant it they won't receive free food from the World Food Program."
Even more discontent is reported to come from the fact that the economy of East Timor remains virtually defunct. An estimated 80 percent of East Timorese are unemployed.
When 7,000 applicants gathered in a stadium a month ago to apply for 2,000 jobs offered by the United Nations administration, peacekeeping troops had to be called in to quell a riot. "They are angry that their applications were rejected because of their lack of skills," a United Nations official was quoted as saying. Most of the jobs required some knowledge of English.
When the East Timorese political leader Jose Ramos-Horta, who has been living abroad, told the crowd that he was "ashamed" to see the violence, a man shouted, "We stayed here and fought for 24 years, but those who traveled around the world and learned English are now getting all the jobs."
Poor and desperate, East Timor has at least been freed of most of the terror that consumed it last year. But in the neighboring Indonesian territory of West Timor, intimidation by remnants of the militias continues in camps that house 110,000 or more people from East Timor.
During their rampage, the militias, in a bizarre program of depopulation organized mainly by the Indonesian military, drove an estimated 750,000 of East Timor's 880,000 people from their homes, according to United Nations figures. Well over 200,000 of these were forced across the border into the west.
Some 136,000 of those people have now returned to East Timor. Those who remain are a mix of militia families and supporters, genuine refugees who are still afraid to return and terrorized hostages who continue to be abused by the militias.
Last week, Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees in Geneva, said there had been a new surge of violence against those people. Some who wish to return home are being intimidated, he said, and some are being kidnapped from buses as they head toward the border. In addition, he said, some aid workers have been barred from entering the camps and have been intimidated in their work in the border area.
"Thousands of East Timorese are effectively being held hostage by the very same militias that drove them from their homes in the first place," said Joe Saunders, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch.
The violence and destruction of recent months has brutalized people on both sides, and aid workers say that in the absence of a legal system, vigilante justice has spread in East Timor. There are reports that suspected members of the militias and other people returning from West Timor are being interrogated and beaten by local groups.
"The demands for justice are so high that it is not at all clear that the judicial system here, which is brand new, is going to be able to cope with it," said Sidney Jones, director of the human rights unit of the United Nations administration in East Timor. "Can you imagine the backlog these poor people face?"
For these homeless, hungry, traumatized people, the moves to investigate Indonesian generals are a distant abstraction, Ms. Jones said. At the same time, the inadequacy of East Timor's justice system is frustrating a visceral hunger for some form of justice among its people.
When a foreign official tried to explain the process of international justice at a recent community meeting, Ms. Jones said, "someone in the crowd stood up and said, 'Yes, but it wasn't an Indonesian general who burned my house.' "
GRAPHIC: Photo: East Timor is hampered by a severe shortage of materials needed to repair buildings destroyed during the turmoil last year. Children in Dili, the territory's capital, attend school in a gutted classroom. (Darren Whiteside/Reuters)
Map of East Timor shows location of Jakarta: East Timor has been described as "a place with no institutions."