MARLOW Bottom aid worker PAUL GREENING has been in East Timor for over a year. Last June he reported in the Free Press on the initial scenes that greeted him when he arrived in the war-ravaged country. Nine months on he gives a harrowing account of the suffering that continues to beseige the East Timorese.

HER past is too traumatic to think of and her future too uncertain. To almost every question, Lorenasa Martins, 24, replies that her only thoughts now are of her beaming five-month-old baby, Rai, the child of the man who raped her.

"I think I'm just like any mother," she said as she nursed her child.

"The only thing that's important to me now is my baby."

As East Timor recovers from the violence and destruction that followed its vote for independence from Indonesia in 1999, more and more stories are emerging of women like Miss Martins as dozens, even hundreds of rapes, often involving torture and humiliation come to light.

Investigators say it has become clear that the crimes of the Indonesian military and the local militias it commanded as opponents of independence include not only massacres, widespread destruction and mass deportations but also rape and sexual slavery on a wide and possibly systematic scale.

The Forum Komunikasi Untuk Perempuan Loro Sae, known as Fokupers, is East Timor's leading women's aid association. They claim many of these acts were planned, organised and sustained.

Their detailed report also states that militia members and soldiers connived "to abduct women or share them like chattel, or in some cases forcibly taking women across the border into West Timor where the women were raped daily and made to perform household chores".

It is only recently that rape has been recognized as a war crime and as a crime against humanity. This month, in the first such conviction, an international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, sentenced three Bosnian Serbs to long prison terms for such sexual violence.

As a newly created tribunal begins its work here in East Timor, its first dozen cases will include one charge of rape. More may follow.

As of late last year, the aid group had documented 165 cases of "gender-based violations" in 1999, including 46 cases of rape. The chief investigator of sex crimes for the United Nations David Senior said the full total is probably in the hundreds with violations still continuing in camps in West Timor where approximately 100,000 people remain under the control of the militias.

"We are coming up with new cases all the time," said Mr Senior. "I don't think we've scratched the surface on the incidents of rape. With more confidence, I think these cases will continue to be reported at a staggering rate."

But numbers alone do not tell the story.

He said: "How do you put a number on five women being raped by 12 guys? How do you put a number on a woman being raped daily for six months? How do you put a number on one girl being raped by three guys for five nights? For me, numbers don't describe the impact that rape has had on the women of East Timor."

As with Miss Martins, who has been told by one local leader to leave her remote hillside town, the victims have often become outcasts.

Some have been shunned by their husbands and their communities as "dirty," said Olandina Alves, a Timorese social worker who has counselled many victims.

In some cases, family members have threatened to kill the babies born of rapes, Mr Senior said.

In one town, Roman Catholic church workers refused to allow baptisms for the babies or confessions for their mothers.

The shame of victimhood is so strong that some victims, hearing of investigations and possible court proceedings, fear it is they who will be brought to trial for their "relationships" with members of the militias, according to Fokupers.

Based on survivor accounts she said it appeared that militia units and Indonesian soldiers had sometimes carried out the rapes in an organised fashion.

Miss Alves said: "Many times, the young girls were raped by high-ranking officers. Those who were married or were not young any more were raped by lower ranking people."

It was a member of the militia named Maximu who took Miss Martins to be his sexual property in December 1999, in a West Timor refugee camp near the town of Atambua. When he abducted her, he was wearing a black T-shirt bearing the name of his militia group, Red Blood.

"He never said anything to me," Miss Martins said. "He just said he would kill me if I did not have sex with him."

When she tried to flee she said he locked the door and threatened her with a pistol. Already pregnant, she made her escape back to East Timor a year ago. She never learned his last name.

If the man named Maximu ever returns from West Timor and if he is ever brought to court, Miss Martins said she would be willing to face him and testify against him.

And what would she say to him if she saw him?

Miss Martins smiled and cracked her knuckles nervously: "I wouldn't say anything, I have nothing to say to him. I just want him to suffer the way I did."