May 20, 2002

BIRTH OF A NATION
Canadian recalls dark moments In his role as UN adviser, Ottawa native was shot at, besieged by murderous militia

ERIC ELLIS, Dili

DILI -- For Colin Stewart, the start of East Timor's new life as an independent nation is a bittersweet moment.
For the 41-year-old Ottawa native, it marks the culmination of a "life-altering" period helping the troubled country to statehood.
For the past three years, he has been the United Nations' most senior political adviser in East Timor. In that time he was shot at, besieged by militia, met the love of his life, and adopted a baby monkey that seems to think he is its father.
Mr. Stewart, a former Vancouver resident, went to East Timor as part of the UN mission to conduct the 1999 referendum in what was then Indonesia's 27th province.

A month after the Aug. 30 vote, enraged Jakarta-backed militias roamed Dili, refusing to accept the pro-independence results. The growing violence forced the removal of hundreds of Mr. Stewart's UN colleagues to Australia.

He stayed on -- the only civilian among a dozen UN workers holed up for 10 days in the UN compound, where 2,000 East Timorese refugees had sought sanctuary from the murderous mob outside.

"The darkest moment was to do with the refugees," he said in an interview yesterday. "They had come to us for protection and we couldn't protect them adequately because the UN wanted to pull us out, which would've meant leaving them there for the militia.

"We were certain they would've been massacred, just sitting ducks. We had to tell the refugees that no one was going to help them but none of us could get the words out," he recalled.

Finally, after tough negotiations in New York and pleas from an increasingly desperate Mr. Stewart and his colleagues in Dili, came a last-minute reprieve. Australia granted temporary refuge to the 2,000 refugees and then led a multinational force, including more than 600 Canadian peacekeepers, to restore order to East Timor.

When Mr. Stewart returned to his house -- for his first shower and change of clothes in nearly two weeks -- he found it had been raided and vandalized, as were about 90 per cent of the buildings in Dili.

This week, he leaves Dili for a new and possibly even more difficult mission, as the UN envoy for East Timor in Jakarta, the capital of East Timor's former ruler, Indonesia.

"That'll be a tough gig," he said, "but it'll be easier if I can bring my monkey with me.

"My girlfriend, a Canadian who I met here, and I have spent hours . . . crying our eyes out over this monkey."