Subject: AU: An age of suffering: refugees on edge
of abyss
Date: Sat, 07 Aug 1999 09:51:18 -0400
From: "John M. Miller" <fbp@igc.apc.org>Received from Joyo Indonesian
News:
The Australian 2 August 99
An age of suffering: refugees on edge of abyss
FOUR-YEAR-OLD Sabil Pieres Carione sat as still and hunched and silent as a very old
man in the middle of the narrow bed, only whimpering when his mother got up to move
around.
He is one of 60,000 or so East Timorese refugees, and one of the few thousand who have
suffered the most horrible privations – the villagers who lie sick for weeks with
malaria and tuberculosis in a territory strange to them, and who gradually dwindle and die
from a lack of food and medicine.
Sabil, his stick-thin, six-year-old brother, Fernando, and their mother, Esperanza
Carione, arrived in Dili three or four days ago. They fled their homes near Liquica, 40km
west of Dili, six months ago, driven away by militia violence and threats, and they wound
up in Madebau, a remote village three hours by car from the nearest regional centre of
Atabae.
Mrs Carione's husband died two years ago and, helpless and friendless in a strange
village, she moved her six children into a school, along with many other refugee families.
For a while, she eked out a precarious existence sewing rice bags, which she exchanged for
food when the trucks came. But then the trucks stopped coming, nd Fernando and Sabil went
down with diarrhoea and their already meagre bodies wasted to a skeletal thinness.
"In Madebau there's no food," Mrs Carione said, "so the priests and nuns
come sometimes and bring us food. The refugees, they are hungry. The people who own land,
they can grow food."
Sister Lourdes, a nun who has relocated from Liquica west to Atabae to help with the
crowds of desperate refugees in the mountainous country, found the Carione family, plucked
them from the edge of the abyss and took them to her sickhouse in Dili. But it might be
too late for Sabil, whose feet are swollen with liquid and whose spine juts from his back
like a row of beads.
"His life is in danger," said Dan Murphy, an American doctor who treats
patients at the sickhouse. A physician with Medecins du Monde, a France-based aid group,
he has been treating the East Timorese in his Dili clinic since November.
"It's very tricky when they get to that stage, but he is drinking some iquids now.
You just wonder how many more there are like them, and how many have already died."
Dr Murphy estimated there were 2000 refugees in Madebau alone, and they were among the
sickest and hungriest in East Timor. "The whole district is filled with terrible
cases," Dr Murphy said.
The chief of the UN High Commission for Refugees in East Timor, Luis Varesy, agreed the
mountains behind Liquica and Maubara were home to thousands of suffering refugees, and he
said that once an assessment of the region had been made, an aid convoy would be planned.
Sister Lourdes brought a carload of the worst cases back with her every time she
returned to Dili, but many were left behind, and many were frightened to leave the
familiar site of their suffering, Dr Murphy explained.
"They are used to being there with other sick people, they're used to seeing
people die. They're not used to getting in a car and leaving for Dili.
"Really, we should be out there in that village and doing healthcare. They
(Indonesia) have got to open the door and let foreigners in to help these people. So many
aid and development agencies would like to come and help," he said, adding that
Indonesian bureaucratic foot-dragging had left most of them snarled in red tape.
A chronic shortage of doctors had left the second-biggest hospital in East Timor, the
one in Baucau, without a surgeon. So, when a Baucau woman needed a caesarean section last
week, a fairly simple procedure, she was sent to Dili, Dr Murphy said. She died on the
way.
Mrs Carione is now one of the lucky ones – she is extremely happy that her
children have expert medical care. For the rest, she said she had no plans to return to
her home near Liquica. "I'm afraid to go back; I'm alone with the children," she
said. "I'm afraid."
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