All around the UN buildings are families sleeping on blankets, cooking rice on little fires, weeping The fear is overwhelming A Unamet official hands me binoculars. "Look at the ridge," he tells me, "and you will see them - soldiers of the TNI, watching these people, ready to shoot any who run in their direction."The refugees know they owe their lives to Unamet (whose real job, by the way, is actually over - supervising the poll of 30 August). They have no reason to do so now: Dili is in ruins.But that doesn't mean the terror is over. About 100,000 people have been forced into West Timor, mainly around the coastal city of Kupang, from where new stories of killings and persecution are now flooding in. But many more, up to 400,000, have fled into the hills of East Timor Without shelter and food, they face mass starvation.

On one torched house I saw this cruel graffiti, scrawled by the militia: "Freedom is the jungle. So stay there."The compound, therefore, is the safest place for now But conditions are dire. Others may have been those who opposed independence, who might have been allowed to stay. Others have been hunted down once on board the ferries, all bound for West Timor, stabbed and thrown overboard.So Dili is empty, or almost. Of the few thousand civilians we saw, most were huddled in displaced persons' centres, theirbelongings - or others' belongings that they have looted - stacked all around them Most are thought to be West Timorese waiting to go home. But officials at the compound tell a still more grisly story.

They have hundreds of reports, they say, of militiamen combing the crowds for pro-independence sympathisers, pulling them to one side and then making them "disappear". Here, tens of thousands have been herded on to boats, as part of the policy to empty an entire city of its population - a policy, by the way, carried out by the militia and TNI together. It is the name of the militia.What this port has witnessed in recent days we may never fully know. We wanted to see the warehouse where Unamet keeps its vital stores It is, of course, empty. Children scurry in the mess of packaging and cardboard that remains. Outside, a stolen Unamet jeep is parked, filled to the brim with looted goods, the UN insignias painted over on its doors On the bonnet, "Aitarak" is daubed, or "Thorn".

It is not a few buildings that are destroyed: it is hundreds of them.Among our stops yesterday was the port. Outside the Unamet compound there is virtually no one left to terrorise in Dili and precious little left to burn or loot. "Isn't all that perhaps due to the fact that the people of Dili have all been driven out of the city?" asked a sceptical Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British envoy to the UN.Martial law may have ensured our safety, but the killings, the deportations and the destruction have already been committed The city has been laid waste, and the people are gone. The Indonesian army, known as the TNI, had made sure to be quiet. We were treated to a surreal briefing at the military headquarters, where a general used a slide show to demonstrate that levels of violence in all five categories - "lootings, killings, kidnappings, burnings and terror" - had dropped off dramatically since martial law was imposed on Tuesday. "It's interesting how they can switch it off when they really want to," remarked Mr Martin, as we toured the city.But there are reasons for that.