| Subject: Feverish
and scared, refugees return to East Timor
The Independent [UK] 22 December 1999
Feverish and scared, refugees return to
East Timor
By Kathy Marks in Batugade
His face twisted with anxiety, Dasenio
Aldes pushed his way through the crowd queuing under the sun-bleached
awning and motioned imploringly at the limp bundle in his arms. It was his
11-year-old son, Marcelino, and he was in a wretched state. Feverish, eyes
glazed, the boy groaned weakly as he was placed on a stretcher and a
needle was inserted into his scrawny vein.
Five minutes earlier, a convoy of trucks
had arrived and disgorged hundreds of people, including Marcelino and his
family, on a parched piece of waste ground that serves as a transit site
for East Timorese refugees returning from camps in West Timor.
After surviving a murderous rampage by
pro-Jakarta militia in his birthplace, Liquicia, and more than three
months in acamp in Atambua, Marcelino nearly died on his way home last
week. He was in the throes of malaria and badly dehydrated when he was
brought into a field clinic that has been set up at the site in Batugade,
just over the border.
With the Indonesian army gone from East
Timor and the country secured by troops from Interfet, the international
peace-keeping force, thousands of refugees are pouring back over the
border, crossing to Batugade and to Suai, in the south. After months spent
crammed together in insanitary conditions, many are sick and some, such as
Marcelino, are dangerously ill.
The children and babies, vulnerable to
disease and malnutrition, are suffering the most. Malaria, which can
befatal if it is not treated, is prevalent among those emerging from West
Timor; so are measles and pneumonia, two other big killers of the young.
For East Timorese people deposited in
Batugade where UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees)
trucks wait to transport them on to the capital, Dili, and other towns
such as Maliana and Bobonaro the clinic is often their first contact
with medical services since they fled their homes in September during the
violence that followed the vote for independence from Indonesia.
The clinic, run by Timor Aid, an
Australian charity supported by War Child, has been staffed for the past
fortnight by an Australian doctor and nurse, Gerard O'Reilly and Julia de
Jonge, and an East Timorese interpreter, Sanchez Cosme.
Theirs are usually the first friendly
faces encountered by refugees returning from Atambua. After leaving the
camps, where many were harassed and intimidated by militia fighters, they
are driven through a bleak no man's land of burnt-out and deserted
villages before reaching a heavily sandbagged checkpoint where they are
simultaneously frisked and welcomed by Interfet soldiers.
Finally, around mid-morning, they arrive
at the transit point in Batugade, dazed, exhausted and apprehensive, for
lately the militia have been spreading scare stories to deter them from
leaving, telling them that Interfet troops have been raping their women
and killing their babies.
A unit of Falintil, the East Timorese
resistance group, has just moved into the border area. As the refugees
crouch in the shade of plastic tarpaulins, tracing shapes in the dust,
Falur Rate Laek, the local field commander, moves among them, reassuring
them that they are safe.
There are thought to be 90,000 to 130,000
East Timorese still in West Timor. On one day last week, 1,500 people
crossed to Batugade, and 90 of them found their way to Dr O'Reilly.
Conditions at the clinic, set up to
identify and treat people unfit to travel, are not ideal. Every few
minutes, a megaphone announces the departure of a truck to Dili or another
destination, provoking agitation among refugees waiting for a
consultation.
After the ordeal of recent months, they
are desperate to get home, and some forgo the chance of medical care for
fear of missing their connection. "They would rather die on the
trucks than risk getting left behind," one aid worker said.
Families are reluctant to be separated,
and parents often choose to carry their sick children on the next leg of
the journey rather than permit them to be taken to hospital.
Malnutrition is common. So is malaria; up
to 40 per cent of refugees seen by Dr O'Reilly are infected, and one of
the first things that he does is to feel a patient's abdomen. An enlarged
spleen is a reliable indicator of the disease.
As well as screening refugees at Batugade,
Timor Aid runs two mobile clinics in the area: one in the nearby village
of Palaka, and one in Beaku, just over the next mountain. It also operates
a clinic in Dili, where its three doctors each see 100 patients a day.
At Batugade, there is no time to assess
the psychological impact on children of witnessing their homes burnt to
the ground, of being transplanted to a strange place and, in some cases,
of seeing members of their family murdered.
The adults, too, can only be patched up
physically. Dr O'Reilly says it is difficult to gauge how traumatised they
are. "There are people who come into the clinic who have nothing
physically wrong with them," he says. "They just say that they
have a pain here and point to their hearts."
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