Some human rights monitors and activists who worked to facilitate a fair referendum in East Timor are now asking themselves, "why didn't we listen?" Warnings of the bloodshed that has engulfed the island in the wake of the pro-independence victory were everywhere. PNS commentator Caty Greene is an anthropologist who has lived in Indonesia for many years. She worked with the Carter Center as an observer of East Timor's election.

SINGAPORE -- Waiting at the airport for a flight out of Jakarta, I pick up the Jakarta Post to find out that a priest I had worked with in East Timor has just been killed. His name was Father Hillario and he had arranged Bishop Carlos Filipe Belo's visit to the East Timorese town of Suai to hold a reconciliation mass just before the ballot. He along with a hundred refugees living at a makeshift camp in a Suai church yard were hacked to death by anti-independence militia thugs on Sept. 7.

It was only a week earlier that I first saw that church, looming large and half built, the skeleton of a building that already housed some 4000 refugees who had fled their villages several months earlier, afraid of anti-independence militias. Decorated with makeshift huts and tents, this house of God was filled with people who had lost everything -- their families, their homes, their freedom. These are people who put the only hope they had left in the UN and the international community.

Nearby in a much smaller church I had attended the reconciliation mass and meeting the day before the vote, where pro-autonomy and pro-independence enemies hugged and shed tears and asked for forgiveness. Afterwards I had talked with Father Hillario and another priest, Father Francisco, at the priests' residence. Unconfirmed reports say Father Francisco managed to escape after the attack. Father Hillario is now dead.

According to a Straits Times report of the attack, a priest on his knees was "begging and screaming for people's lives, saying 'Please, have mercy."' That was either Father Hillario or Father Francisco. It is not clear because no more reports have gotten out and the United Nations staff have been evacuated.

There is no reason to believe the militia stopped at 100 refugees and one priest. There were 4000 people living in that refugee compound, people who showed more bravery by going to the polls on August 30 than most of us can ever imagine. People who, because of the failure of the Indonesian government and the international community to reign in a rampaging militia and its military backers, have been hacked to death with machetes or shot with automatic weapons supplied by the international community.

And what do we in the international community do? I see men in the airports, dressed in elegant suits, carrying laptops, flying first class to Jakarta to ask the Indonesian Government yet again why they can't stop the genocide in East Timor. I ask myself, how on earth can we let this happen? 

Only a little more than a week ago, people on both the autonomy and independence sides were telling us Westerners -- human rights workers, election monitors, aid officials, journalists -- that this was going to happen. We could feel the tension mounting. David Ximenex of the National Council for East Timorese Resistance put it plainly the day before the vote. "The consultation (referendum) is a dark day for East Timor."

Why didn't we listen?