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Harassment, illness taking toll on Timorese

Source
The Irish Times - August 2, 1999

Tjitschke Linksma looks at the plight of East Timor refugees after travelling with a UN convoy which brought one group their first consignment of aid in weeks.

Two rusty oil drums are lying in the soft shoulder of the small country road which leads to the area of Sare, which is 70 km west of the East Timorese capital, Dili, just inland from the north coast. Last weekend the oil drums were functioning as a roadblock controlled by the local militia, who would stop all passing cars and chase away unwanted visitors, waving violently with their machetes in the air.

On Friday, the militia stayed at their posts but allowed an official convoy of four trucks, organised by the United Nations Refugee Organisation, UNHCR, and POSKO, the network of local aid organisations, to pass.

Just after the roadblock, the convoy entered an empty noman's-land. For miles, the landscape is dominated by villages that have been burned to the ground and looted.

Hundreds of concrete floors show where wooden houses once stood in the tropical countryside of palm trees, bushes and long grass. A crossroads is littered with school-books and empty envelopes, evidence of a sudden exodus of villagers.

It is only after 12 km that the first houses and people begin to appear. Near a makeshift grass hut, a man is carrying his son. The four-year-old is terribly pale and too ill to walk. They belong to the first wave of refugees who fled at the beginning of the year from a variety of places to Faulara in the Sare region.

"The refugees are malnourished. They suffer from malaria, diarrhoea. respiratory infections and skin infections – illness related to poor nutrition and lack of sanitation," says Galuh Wandita of POSKO.

In the past months, 100 people around Sare have died through lack of food and and insufficient medical care. "Someone who becomes ill will die within a few days," says Gohanna, a young woman who months ago fled with her husband and four children to Faulara.

According to UNHR estimates, there are about 7,000 internally displaced people in the Sare region. The number of refugees in East Timor is put at 50-60,000 refugees, nearly 10 per cent of the population. While some of the trucks of the convoy unload rice, sugar, medicine, dried fish and jerry cans, the refugees wait patiently for the relief workers to distribute the goods.

This is the second aid convoy to arrive in the Sare region. The first, which was supported by the UN, was attacked by militia on July 4th on its way back to Dili.

Though the attack provoked an international outcry, violence still continues in the Sare region, with the militia regularly burning houses.

On the morning of July 18th, the Indonesian army and militia captured five men and took them to the town of Maubara on the road to Dili. One escaped, "but we have no news about the others, they are missing", the village head said. Eventually, in the afternoon, the trucks in the convoy are unloaded when the village head manages to ease the concerns of an aid worker, who believes the militia may come later that night to steal the supplies.

He has already ordered the male refugees of Faulara to guard and defend the village against a possible militia attack.

"We are made into refugees because the militia and army don't want us to register for the referendum, since we are pro-independence," the village head explains. The United Nations Mission for East Timor is facing big problems in registering refugees for the ballot.

This is not only because the location of many refugees is unknown and refugees are still fleeing, but also because "many of us are too weak and too ill to walk for hours to the registration centre", Gohanna says. Nevertheless, aid workers believe that the refugees of Faulara have begun the 7 km walk to the nearest registration centre.

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