He has witnessed the run-up to the Timorese referendum on its future and interviewed the people involved on all sides.

As the violence in the region escalated in early September, Jonathan was pulled out of East Timor after he was attacked by militia in Dili. He had witnessed a man being hacked to death outside the UN compound.

Jonathan Head describes the joy as peacekeepers arrive in East Timor

As militias continue to clash with the International Force in East Timor, BBC News Online users put their questions to Jonathan Head who returned to East Timor last week. Read the answers below.

Tou, U.S.A.: What does the arrival of the peacekeeping force mean to the people of East Timor? Are they more aware now that the world is watching and listening to what has happened there?

Jonathan: I was very struck by the change in mood within the first few hours of the peacekeeping troops arriving on the streets in Dili. Most of Monday when they first arrived there was this constant procession of transport planes coming in and out and troops pouring off them. It was very much a logistical operation getting their equipment off the plane and of course they had to bring everything because there is nothing there at all and they had to be prepared to be self-sufficient. They weren't visible at all to the East Timorese and early on Tuesday I went out and had a walk and it was quite the most extraordinary scene.

The first most heavily armed and equipped Australian soldiers were armed and were walking down amid the charred ruins of the city, this skeletal capital of which almost nothing is left. It's a very empty town. I'd been there already for almost 48 hours and I'd seen almost nobody there and yet, as if by magic, people were emerging from the ruins and coming out with an expression that can only be described as pure euphoria on their faces. And quite amazingly they were wearing the t-shirts and insignia of the pro-independence movement, something which would have almost certainly condemned them to death only a few days before when the militias had been rampaging.

An extraordinary show of confidence in this international force, far too much confidence actually. Of course we've seen the enormous difficulties this force has had and the fact that its writ doesn't extend to all of the areas of the capital let alone anywhere else in the East Timorese territory. Yet despite the disappointment of the East Timorese and despite all the suffering they've gone through after the UN-supervised referendum when they were promised in every single poster the UN would stay and then they were driven out. They have every right to be disappointed and have no confidence in the international community. But they were there putting incredible trust in it and it is one of the most touching sights I can describe. I remember standing beside people who had been looting a government warehouse that had just been dragging out sacks of rice and sugar, desperately hungry people and Australian soldiers had to come and try and control them. A lot of people didn't get any food and they were genuinely very hungry. They had just come down from the mountains where they'd survived for two weeks with no food and yet when they were told that the international community would try to get aid to them soon and please could they be patient and obey the law, they just obeyed meekly. And these were really desperate people.

Their faith in the international community is something to behold after 24 years of complete neglect, of cynicism, appalling suffering and they still believe they were going to help them. And I have to say, as a journalist, that I doubt I'll ever experience anything as touching as that ever again.

Robert Baker, Canada: How long will the UN forces have to stay in East Timor?

Jonathan: It should be a very long time and I think there is an acceptance now in the international community that they have a responsibility to carry out in East Timor. I think a relatively quick response to the disaster that befell East Timor after the vote for independence shows that the UN realises that this is purely a moral case with very little strategic interest in East Timor which if it is not upheld by the international community will tarnish the idea of moral action and any kind of moral order in the world forever. And for that reason I think there's an acceptance of a long-term commitment there.

The first few months we'll have this multi-national force, as it's called. It's not officially a UN force, it's a force of willing nations, acting under a UN mandate to use force if necessary to protect security in East Timor. But that will after three or four months translate into a semi-permanent UN force where we will perhaps have troops wearing the blue berets of the United Nations administering order in the territory. Now that can happen once security is properly established and that will of course mean also a very troubled western district of the territory where infiltrators and members of the Indonesian army can come from over the Indonesian side of the border and I think it will be three or four months before you can say security's anything like restored in the territory. But once it happens we'll have the blue berets here. The United Nations says it will have a force here for perhaps two to three years.

Ian Martin, the head of the UN mission that carried out the referendum told me that the day after he arrived with the Australian peacekeepers that the UN will stay as long as the East Timorese want them to stay, as long as the East Timorese authorities leading to independence think they should be there and that means probably a period of two to three years and that means when this young country is ready to stand on its own two feet.

Eily, Canada: I admire your courage to go back to East Timor to cover the news. Are you ever afraid for your safety and do you feel that the peacekeepers can really prevent more murders?

Jonathan: Tragically of course we've seen that they can't. My friend and colleague Sander Thoenes of the Financial Times was killed this time round, apparently shot by militias and that's been a terribly sad and shocking reminder to all of us that we're very, very vulnerable. The peacekeepers are doing the best they can. They can't be everywhere. They're only a force of less than 3,000 at the moment and the Indonesian military and their surrogates and militias have been there for 24 years and have infiltrated the area thoroughly and they are very, very hostile to western journalists in particular. We are very vulnerable. I knew it after I'd been attacked and I knew it when I went back.

But beside that you have to realise the fact that the East Timorese people suffered almost as no other people have and I think I can speak for all of us and Sander, who was a journalist for a financial newspaper - East Timor wasn't a core concern to him - no journalist who has been to East Timor could escape from a tremendous sense of involvement and commitment to reporting the story. All of us felt absolutely devastated to leave the territory after the vote when security conditions became absolutely impossible for us. It was terribly, terribly hard, one of the hardest things I've ever had to do to leave East Timor although I was injured and couldn't really function properly. And we had no facilities and it wasn't safe.

We sat back in Jakarta getting trickles of information back from East Timor in a terrible emotional state. It was awful not to be there reporting it and at literally the first opportunity I got back in there and made it in with the BBC team 24 hours before the Australian peacekeeping forces. We were the first western journalists to get back there after the last handful of brave individuals who hung on in the UN compound had left. And I have to say I would have gone in sooner if I could have done.

It's a story that we have to go back and report. The East Timorese people need that and it is the opponents of their right to exercise their self-determination, who want to keep us out. It's a classic, fundamental duty of a journalist to go against that, to break through the shrouds of secrecy that those who want nothing reported, want to keep up over a territory like East Timor.

Kirk Spence, USA: There are about 200,000 East Timorese refugees now in camps in West Timor, under the "protection" of the Indonesian military. When will they be allowed to return to their homes, and how can their safety and welfare be assured in the meantime?

Jonathan: They are a particularly difficult problem because whilst the international community has a mandate and some influence over what is happening in East Timor, West Timor is a territory that is very much under Indonesian jurisdiction and a legal part of Indonesia. And even humanitarian aid organisations who have been trying to get access to those camps have been finding it very difficult in part because they have had to deal with a very prickly and tense Indonesian bureaucracy that is feeling very embarrassed about its withdrawals from East Timor and it's reluctant to allow too much foreign intervention in refugee camps in West Timor and in part because of the pervading influence of militias and undercover Indonesian military, operatives who are gradually withdrawing from East Timor but are setting up strongholds in West Timor where they can't be challenged and are very hostile to foreigners.

It's a bizarre part of this destructive withdrawal from East Timor where they are burning everything they can. But they have also been driving the East Timorese out of East Timor and into West Timor many of whom don't want to leave. We don't know what the ultimate objective of that is but we believe that for the moment, of the 150,000 or so people who are believed to have fled to West Timor, a significant number didn't particularly want to go but felt that they had no choice.

And aid agencies are trying to sort out who would like to go back once conditions improve in East Timor. They are finding it very difficult and are subjects of attacks and threats themselves and are not getting the co-operation of the Indonesian authorities. And they do fear that it's possible to justify the Indonesian claims that a large proportion of East Timorese did not support independence, that there will be significant numbers of people who will be blocked from going back to East Timor and who will be held in West Timor or even moved to other parts of the Indonesian archipelago.

R. Menon, Canada: Is there any plan to contain the movement of militia between West and East Timor? Without demilitarisation of West Timor with the threat of economic blockade I do not see how people in East Timor can be protected.

Jonathan: That's going to be an enormous challenge to the multi-national force and it's something they can't even begin to address yet. I think that this force has come in to a very difficult situation in which their intelligence was not very complete and they're finding it difficult just to establish security over the capital, Dili.

The western parts of East Timor are going to be the most problematic. Those are the areas that the Indonesian military has chosen to set up the strongest militias and it's obviously very easy to go over the border. It's an artificial boundary. It's very mountainous as well. It won't be very difficult for people to wander across - perhaps the Indonesian military in disguise, perhaps hardline militias.

I would suspect that those areas will be insecure for the Timorese people living there for a very long time to come as long as the Indonesian military is determined to avenge its perceived humiliation in East Timor by trying to de-stabilise the new East Timorese state which is clearly what they are doing at the moment. With only 3,000 multi-national soldiers here they can't begin to concentrate on that area.

The multi-national force has only just sent a small delegation of about 120 to the small town of Baukau in the east which is much safer and where pro-independence forces are stronger. It'll probably be many weeks before they start establishing beach heads in the west and they're likely to face more opposition there.

Until Indonesia comes to terms with the fact, and in particular the Indonesian military, that they have lost East Timor and lost it through their own harsh and repressive rule in the territory, they will probably continue to undermine the state over that very leaky border and it's going to be very difficult for any international force or any new East Timorese force to prevent those kinds of infiltrations from happening.

Ray Anthony, Indonesia: Does Interfet have the mandate to attack militia bases outside East Timor if clear evidence is found that the militia are using the bases to plan, prepare and co-ordinate attacks?

Jonathan: Absolutely not. The mandate only applies within East Timor and it isn't even clear how aggressive they can be in East Timor itself. It was very interesting for me to watch the first potential clash between the military, the militias and the multinational force. We were in our own BBC compound in East Timor which was right next to a detachment of British Gurkhas. There was a tremendous barrage of gunfire as militias went past, shooting into the air. The Gurkhas were ready as their mandate would clearly have allowed them to shoot at the militias had they been threatening their lives but they weren't. This was a point that was made very strongly by the multinational force afterwards. They did not open fire on the militias because as far as they could see, they were not threatening the lives of the multinational force. But they were terrorising the population and they were able to pass through Dili unmolested by the multinational force.

They can use force if they believe that people are being directly threatened by the militias and if the militias are carrying weapons and refusing to obey orders to hand them over. That is a tough UN mandate. Usually the UN has to be a lot more reserved than that. Despite that, they cannot take aggressive measures to attack militia bases. They can disarm them but not actually attack them and they cannot go outside the boarders of East Timor.

The multinational forces will be very aware that any armed clash that results in fatalities of the Indonesian armed forces could result in a very unpleasant nationalist reaction in Indonesia itself and that is something that the commanders of this force will go out of their way to avoid.

Vijaya Jakkula, India: Do people of west Timor & east Timor belong to the same ethnic group, and speak the same language? What's the difference between west Timorese & East Timorese. Is it religion?

Jonathan: It's not religion. And it is a hard question to answer. There is no doubt that the boarder between West and East Timor is an artificial colonial boarder and it is made even more absurd by the fact that there is a little piece of East Timor that sits entirely within West Timor.

They are not ethnically different, they are all Melanesians and ethnically quite similar to people from the neighbouring islands which are within Indonesia itself. What is different is that within East Timor and West Timor there are multiple clans which have lived for many years in often quite isolated regions.

The main difference between the two is their colonial experience. West Timor was very quickly absorbed into the new Indonesia Republic in 1949 and although its animist population has become Christian the influence of the Dutch Reform Church hasn't been that strong and there are a lot of Muslims there as well. Especially a lot of Muslim immigrants who have come over in the last 50 years or so and made it quite a diverse territory.

In East Timor, the experience of Portuguese colonial rule has given the Timorese a quite distinct sense of their own identity, despite the many differences between the different regions of East Timor. They do have their own language Tetum which is spoken by some people over in West Timor but Indonesian has largely replaced Tetum in West Timor whereas it is definitely the main language used in East Timor along with Portuguese and Indonesian.

The Catholic Church has also played a vital role. After the invasion, the Catholic Church became virtually the only institution to speak up for the East Timorese against the abuses of the Indonesian army and as a result it is passionately followed now by perhaps 95 per cent of the population. Just the experience of occupation by Indonesia has given the east Timorese a tremendous sense of suffering and of resistance to Indonesia which simply does not exist in West Timor.

Ola Westerberg, Sweden: One thing that never seems to be mentioned in the reports is how large the Indonesian minority in East Timor is - or was before the recent mass exodus. How ethnically homogenous is East Timor, and what are the prospects of creating a harmonic society, free of ethnic hatred?

Jonathan: Certainly there has been rather large-scale migration from Indonesia over the past 24 years into East Timor but even so, out of a population of perhaps 850, 000, a maximum of 100, 000 are immigrants. Many of them are from the eastern islands of Indonesia. But a lot of those people have gone back to Indonesia over the past year fearing political changes in East Timor. They have often found it quite difficult in East Timor. A lot of them are devout Muslims, a lot of the East Timorese are devout Catholics. The lack of security in the territory and the fear of the East Timorese Independence Movement have largely kept large-scale migration away from the territory.

Also, it has to be said that there are Indonesians who are living in East Timor who are determined to stay. Over the past few days I have meet quite a lot of Indonesians who are married to East Timorese who are just as supportive of the independence movement as their Timorese colleagues.

I met among the refugees a women from Java, the heartland of Indonesian culture, and I asked her what her plans were. She said that she had no intention of leaving, she was just as horrified by the attacks on her own army as the East Timorese. I have met many others like that. I suspect that we will see a lot of the Indonesians leaving voluntarily. The pro-independence movement themselves have assured any Indonesians that want to stay, that their welfare will be respected and their rights will be respected and they will be protected from retribution. They cannot guarantee that of course. Obviously if things continue as they are there is a risk there could be some kind of retribution.

Claire McCarthy, USA: When an independent state is established in East Timor - what will be left for the people to survive? What will happen to all the Suharto controlled industries and plantations? Are there systems in place for a viable sustenance for the people?

Jonathan: No. There's nothing left. This is a territory that was unprepared for independence in 1975 and is equally unprepared now. The Indonesians have argued, of course, that they have been pumping in huge amounts of money to develop East Timor and they've used that as justification for their occupation over the past 24 years. But it's very hard to see the evidence of that. And over the past month we've seen Indonesians destroy huge amounts of what little they built. A lot of the money the Indonesians did pour into East Timor was siphoned off into corruption or was directly used by the military to support their occupation.

There was a reasonably good road network in East Timor which was a little better than that in West Timor. But that's deteriorated a great deal over the past year with a lot of neglect and virtually nothing on it. And of course we've seen this extraordinary scorched earth policy by the militias and their army allies which has left almost every single building either burnt or damaged.

It's going to need a massive international operation. I say massive, it's a small country - a small amount of money will go a long way in East Timor and I don't think the donor countries are too alarmed by the amounts of money involved. But this country will require international assistance for a long time just to get itself back on its feet. The economic potential though, once it does, is reasonable for a population of only 800,000 and coffee has long been one of East Timor's main products. It won't earn it huge amounts of money but it will be a reasonable mainstay. There is also thought to be a significant amount of oil offshore. Nobody knows exactly how much. It's in quite deep water and is not necessarily that economically viable to exploit. But some people argue that the amounts of oil in the sea south of East Timor have been under-estimated and there could be larger amounts than people realise.