Just outside the East Timor town of Liquica, the narrow coast road plunges down to a little bay of white sand and coral, isolated by a tight semi-circle of miniature scrub-covered hills.
It is an idyllic tropical beach, the perfect site for a holiday hotel perhaps.
But knowing what happened there, the small group of people gathered in the hot morning sunshine found it a sinister place.
Just above the high tide mark, where the sand gives way to dusty soil, five East Timorese men with face masks were getting ready to excavate a small mound. They waited while the Rev Graeme Ramsden, a Catholic chaplain with the Australian army, read a prayer: "Gathering in the Presence of the Body".
Among the onlookers were several Australian and British soldiers wearing long green surgical gloves, a Russian civilian police officer, a handful of journalists and a ragged band of children. One soldier recorded everything on a video camera.
After half an hour's work the grave-diggers found what they were looking for. A long leg bone was handed up from the trench and placed carefully on a blue plastic sheet.
Other bones were quickly uncovered and soon we could see the skeletal outline of a young man. He was called Enrique and was killed here on April 15th by an Indonesian Army (TNI) soldier called Tobias, according to four East Timorese witnesses present, Dameo, Augusto, Jose and Zakhay.
On that day, they said, the TNI and police surrounded the little beach and chased three independence supporters towards the sea.
Two were stabbed to death by a policeman called Francisco. The third, Enrique, tried to swim for his life, said Dameo. The soldier shot him dead in the water. The body floated ashore next day and local people buried the three victims under the mound.
There are 70 such sites in East Timor where people claim that the remains of innocent people slaughtered by pro-Jakarta militias and their army backers are located, according to Mr John Harvey of the British Royal Military Police special investigation branch who was observing the exhumation on Saturday.
Some 46 sites have already been visited and where necessary dug up, said Mr Harvey, who is head of a team of 12 officers from the international force in East Timor (Interfet) given the huge task of investigating allegations of human rights abuses in advance of a United Nations Human Rights investigation team. So far they have recovered 95 bodies, said Mr Harvey, with the biggest single discovery being that of 10 corpses in a truck near Dili on September 9th. The British police officer said the confirmed death toll in East Timor was now in the "lower hundreds" and would probably end up in the "upper hundreds". This is much less than earlier predictions of many thousands dead, indicating either that earlier accounts were misreported or exaggerated, or that the militias and TNI have managed to get rid of much of the evidence. Maj Sean O'Connell, the Australian OC of the military police unit in East Timor, illustrated how estimates of killings sometimes got exaggerated. He said they had received reports of 700 people being pushed over a cliff at Liquica, but they found the numbers were coming from different sources and being added up. "It is more likely that the true figure is 10 to 20," he said.
There are many similar examples. On September 23rd I saw a body in a well at the Dili home of the independence figure Manuel Carascalao. It was impossible to tell if more corpses lay below but locals claimed 20 had been dumped there and this figure was widely cited. The well has now been emptied. It contained only one body.
Many international accounts of a high death toll were based on a September 15th report from the East Timor International Support Centre in Darwin, whose honorary chairman is the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr Jose RamosHorta.
It concluded that it was likely that at least 5,000 people had been killed in East Timor and "it is fair to assume the figure is well over 50,000". It named as "confirmed dead" many people such as Father Francisco Barreto, head of Caritas in Dili, and Sister Margarida Paulo Soares, who later turned up alive.
Mr Sonny Imbaraj, the centre's media officer, said yesterday that one must take into account that the information was given to them at the height of the militia rampage, before Interfet went into East Timor. He maintains that the final total killed could still be several thousand. Thousands were cruelly forced out of East Timor. Jakarta authorities initially said 250,000 East Timorese had arrived in Indonesian West Timor but Mr Jaques Franquin, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told me in Dili that he doubted the figure was that high - and he was not sure all wanted to come back.
About 25,000 people had returned and he expected 1,000 a day for the next 30 days to arrive with the co-operation of the TNI, which he believed was now distancing itself from the militias.
Whatever the cause, almost six weeks after Interfet's arrival in East Timor, more than half the population has yet to return to their homes. No western agencies or reporters have been allowed to investigate reports of atrocities at West Timor camps.