BEIJING, May 30 -- East Timor's Cabinet held a crisis meeting yesterday as thousands of residents fled the burning capital and rival gangs prowled the streets armed with machetes.

    Fighting between factions inside the East Timor security forces last week ignited a wider feud between residents from the east of this tiny country and those from the west.

    The Cabinet meeting came amid growing speculation that the government could be near collapse or that parliament would be dissolved.

    Escalating violence

    A week of bloodshed has killed at least 27 people, raising concerns that one of the world's youngest nations is plunging into a civil war, seven years after its traumatic break from Indonesia¡¯s iron-fisted rule.

    The number of dead in the latest wave of violence has risen to at least 20, with more than 50 people wounded, hospital officials in the capital, Dili, said.

    Some 27,000 East Timorese sought refuge at shelters, said Robert Ashe, regional representative for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. But the tent camps have almost no sanitation. Children splashed in puddles polluted by human waste and many didn¡¯t have access to food or drinking water.

    Aquilino Soares Torres, 34, fled to the airport with his wife, relatives and eight children. He complained that the foreign troops were failing to end the conflict.

    "They don't move into the neighborhoods where the violence is taking place," he said, holding a baby in one arm. "I think the situation will get worse. I am ready to leave the country with just the shirt on my back."

    Foreign intervention

    Australia sent about 1,300 troops last week to help quell the unrest that began in March. East Timor has grown more difficult for Australians to police because political violence has given way to widespread mob rioting, Australian Gen. Peter Cosgrove said. Cosgrove also commanded the multinational peacekeeping force in East Timor in 1999.

    Australia said it will send up to 50 federal police officers to help contain marauding gangs and that around 2,000 Australian troops were either on the ground or in transit to East Timor. The peacekeepers come from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Portugal. The New Zealand Government has said its troops are likely to remain in East Timor at least until next year, when new elections are scheduled to be held.

    The United Nations evacuated hundreds of employees over the weekend, while its special representative in Dili said more international peacekeepers might be needed to restore order in the capital.

    Japan joined Australia, the United States and other nations in pulling out non-emergency staff as more than 60 Filipinos were evacuated Sunday on a Philippine air force plane.

    Behind the violence

    The current outbreak resembles East Timor's upheaval in 1999 when its referendum on independence from Indonesia sparked widespread bloodshed by militants linked to the Indonesian military. East Timor declared itself independent in 2002.

    What began in recent months as a schism within the armed forces spilled over in the past week to the general population. The country is divided on geographic lines of east and west and between those perceived to have been pro-Indonesian against those who wanted independence.

    Cabinet meeting

    Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri and President Xanana Gusmao ¡ª a hero in the country's war of independence from Indonesia ¡ª met with the Cabinet yesterday for the first time since the violence began.

    "They have been communicating but have not met face-to-face,"said a Gusmao aide.

    Alkatiri had earlier called the violence an organized plot to overthrow him.

    The mayhem was triggered when Alkatiri sacked some 600 of the 1,400-strong army in April after public protests claiming discrimination against soldiers from the east.

    A few dozen protesters outside Gusmao's office in Dili brandished hastily prepared banners reading ¡°Down With Alkatiri.¡±

    Sources close to the government say Gusmao is pushing for the country's army and police force to be disarmed and returned to barracks. Foreign troops would then take control until a full investigation into the rebellion has been completed.

    The president wants dismissed soldiers to be reinstated while their grievances are looked into, sources say.

    Alkatiri, who is reported to have opposed foreign intervention or to have pushed for a more limited mission, wants the rebels disarmed but the rest of the security forces to resume work as soon as possible.

    The U.N. special representative to East Timor, Sukehiro Hasegawa, appealed to leaders not to fan the flames of hatred.

    "They have a difference of views on how to manage the country and the (situation) is very, very fragile in their state,"he said Sunday.

    According to Jacquelina Siapano, wife of opposition leader Fernando Lasamma: "In 1999, I was here and became a refugee. We understood the violence then because it was the price of independence."Speaking by telephone from the west of the country where she had fled, she continued: "Now there are so many conflicts ¡ª ethnic conflicts, political conflicts. Now it seems they feel violence is the only way they can solve things."

    An attempt to find a way out of the current political impasse will be led by Ian Martin, whom U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week named as special envoy to East Timor.

    Martin, who was expected in Dili yesterday, won the respect of locals when he supervised the U.N.-sponsored referendum in 1999 in which they voted overwhelmingly to leave Indonesia, the country they had forcibly been incorporated into in 1975.

    More than 1,000 people were killed in 1999 and as many as 70 percent of East Timor's buildings damaged or destroyed.

    East Timor, 640 kilometers north of Australia and with a population of 1 million, is one of the world's poorest countries. It had been a Portuguese colony for 400 years before the Indonesian invasion.

    (Source: Shenzhen Daily/ Agencies)