World

First U.N. Peacekeeper In E. Timor Dead

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 24, 2000 / 3:07 PM EDT / CBS

A soldier from New Zealand became the first U.N. peacekeeper to be killed in East Timor. He was shot in the head Monday during a clash with armed men, said the U.N.'s top official in that area.

"That endangers everything we've been trying to achieve" in the brutalized territory, Sergio Vieira de Mello told journalists in Bangkok. "This is the first combat casualty since the peacekeeping troops arrived."

Identified as 24-year-old Pvt. Leonard Manning from the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, the soldier was part of a team tracking men who had reportedly crossed the border from Indonesian-ruled West Timor to East Timor.

In the morning the soldiers and the armed men clashed, and his body was recovered in the late afternoon.

This was the third major attack on U.N. peacekeeping troops in East Timor, de Mello said. The last attack left one Australian soldier injured after someone tossed a grenade at troops.

Last year the U.N. force tried to guarantee security in East Timor when militias backed by sections of Indonesia's military unleashed a bloody two-week rampage.

The violence, which killed at least 300 and displaced hundreds of thousands, came after an overwhelming majority of East Timorese voted in an Aug. 30 referendum for independence from a quarter-century of brutal Indonesian rule.

The U.N. had been in charge of overseeing the territory until they were ready to hold elections and declared a full-fledged nation.

But since U.N. troops arrived, pro-Jakarta militiamen have regularly crossed the East Timor-West Timor border to stage attacks. Much of East Timor remains a terrorized wasteland, and tens of thousands of people are refugees.

De Mello said East Timor could have been rebuilt much more in the past year but for "this constant threat on the part of a small number of thugs and extremists."

He was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, where he was part of a panel discussion with East Timorese leaders Jose Ramos-Horta and Jose "Xanana" Gusmao.

They are in Thailand to attend a meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Ramos-Horta said East Timor may try to join the association when the territory emerges from U.N. tutelage in two or three years.

Gusmao, the former leader of independence fighters, said the attacks showed that not everyone accepts Indonesia's new democratic government, which has tried to make amends for the harsh rule of former dictator Suharto. East Timor had made progress since last year, but "all of this can be imperiled if problems like this morning still happen," he said.

"That is why we hope the problem of refugees, the problem of militias, can be taken seriously by the international community, since all this aid, all this financial help, will mean nothing," Gusmao said.

The United Nations has 8,500 troops stationed in the former Portuguese colony.