On The Razor's Edge

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The future for East Timor is uncertain. Much of the territory's infrastructure has been demolished, and even with topflight international help, it will take years to sculpt the shell-ruined jungles and villages of East Timor into a real nation. In Jakarta, politicians seemed to be coming to terms with the fact that East Timor must be freed. But that may be a more difficult sell on the streets of Dili, where pro-Jakarta militias must still be disarmed and--in some cases--arrested and tried for their crimes. That task now belongs to the U.N. As well as two other tasks: resettling the nation's 300,000 refugees and asking the rest of the world how, less than six months after Kosovo, it allowed this kind of civil horror to strike again.

--With reporting by Lisa Clausen/Darwin, William Dowell/New York, Barry Hillenbrand/Washington and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta