Japan should pressure Indonesia to disarm militia groups still operating in West Timor and closely monitor Jakarta's investigation into human rights violations committed in East Timor, an East Timorese nongovernmental organization worker said in a recent public meeting in Tokyo.

Members of the Indonesian army's Strategic Reserve Command and Kopassus Special Forces are still giving support to militias and secretly training them at a base in Betun, West Timor, said Mary Barreto of the Communication Forum for East Timorese Women, an NGO aiding victims of sexual violence.

She said that many Indonesian soldiers who formerly served in East Timor are still stationed close to the West Timor border and that they have detailed knowledge of East Timor's geography, which could be used to plan future cross-border guerrilla attacks.

Barreto said that while establishing an international tribunal on human rights abuses committed in East Timor by the Indonesian military and its militias is the only way to really heal the trauma suffered by the East Timorese people, Japan should at the very least carefully monitor Indonesia's domestic investigation and prosecutions.

The United Nations and the National Council of Timorese Resistance, an umbrella organization of the main East Timorese political parties, have said they will watch how the Indonesian investigation of human rights violations in East Timor progresses. But Barreto said it is doubtful that Jakarta will carry it out properly.

"East Timorese know from their own experience that Indonesia doesn't do what it says it will do, so the Japanese government should make sure Indonesia fulfills its promise," she said.

She also urged Japan to support efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to repatriate East Timorese refugees. There are still an estimated 100,000 East Timorese in camps in West Timor.

Barreto fled to West Timor in September amid the violence that followed the U.N.-sponsored ballot on independence, and spent a month hiding in Kupang, the provincial capital.

On Sept. 7, a militia member came to her home in Dili, East Timor's capital, where she was taking shelter with a group of friends, and told her that the Indonesian military had begun a large-scale operation to destroy the town and kill the main independence leaders, she recalled.

"He said that if we stayed in my house, the Indonesian soldiers would come and rape the women and kill the men," she said. "He told us that anyone caught attempting to escape to the mountains (where the East Timorese armed resistance was based) would be killed."

After returning to East Timor in October, she said, she heard through her organization of many cases of East Timorese women in West Timor refugee camps being raped and used as sex slaves by militias and the Indonesian military.

Last week, the Japanese Diet Members Forum on East Timor issued a statement calling on the Foreign Ministry to urge the Indonesian government to properly prosecute those who planned and carried out abuses in East Timor last year, to disarm militia groups and to relocate troops formerly stationed in East Timor away from the West Timor border.