| Subject: Ind: Youth
of Timor Who Have Lost Everything
The Independent (London) December 29,
1999, Wednesday
YOUTH OF TIMOR WHO HAVE LOST EVERYTHING
EXCEPT LIFE
Kathy Marks In Suai, East Timor
IT IS 8am, the start of another
sweltering day in Suai, and nearly 100 children are squeezed into what was
once a classroom but is now a burnt-out concrete shell. Dozens more are
queueing in the doorway; others are hanging in through the broken windows,
straining to hear what is happening inside. Outside, a soldier carrying an
automatic weapon stands guard.
A month ago, lessons started again in the
ruins of the Catholic high school in this coastal town in East Timor's
south-western border region. Classes are limited to a few subjects and run
for just two hours a day. There are no desks, no blackboards, no books, no
pens. But teachers, the few who remain here, are anxious to teach and the
children of Suai are itching to learn.
Slowly, hesitantly, the rhythms of
ordinary life are resuming in Suai, site of one of the bloodiest acts of
retribution during the wave of violence that followed East Timor's vote
for independence from Indonesia on 30 August. In the compound of the
wooden parish church, across from the school yard where children are
excitedly milling around, three priests, three nuns and at least 100
refugees who had sought sanctuary there were massacred on 6 September by
pro-Jakarta militia gangs armed with assault rifles and machetes. Some
witnesses say that 250 people were killed.
Suai, which was a stronghold of Laksaur,
one of East Timor's most feared Indonesian Army-backed militias, also
suffered some of the worst effects of the scorched earth policy carried
out by the militias as they withdrew from the territory. About 95 per cent
of the buildings in the town and surrounding villages were torched.
Physically devastated, psychologically
traumatised, Suai presents an enormous challenge to the international aid
agencies that are attempting to rebuild East Timor and prepare it for
nationhood under the guidance of the United Nations Transitional Authority
for East Timor. In Suai, they must begin virtually from scratch.
Entire streets of houses were reduced to
rectangles of ash by the departing militias, who took care to gut public
buildings such as schools, shops, hospitals and administrative offices.
The infrastructure has been crippled, too: wells were poisoned;
electricity generators stolen. What could not be destroyed was looted.
"Zero" is one of the few words of English understood by the
people of Suai, left with no possessions but the clothes they stood up in.
"When you have a natural disaster
like a cyclone or an earthquake, you always find a few things if you root
around in the rubble," says Richard Uxton, shelter co-ordinator of
Timor Aid, an Australian charity supported by War Child. "Here, there
was absolutely nothing." With half of the 50,000 locals who fled to
refugee camps in West Timor now returned home, a reconstruction programme
is beginning, and not before time, for the plastic tarpaulins distributed
as an early stop-gap are inadequate protection against the monsoon rains
that have just set in.
Timor Aid and another charity, Care
Australia, plan to distribute enough tools and materials to build 4,000
houses in the Suai area over the next six months. Some East Timorese,
astonishingly resilient, are not bothering to wait. They are already
constructing temporary dwellings of bamboo and palm leaves, and are
planting maize and other vegetables in the nutrient- rich squares of
cinders where their homes once stood.
The school has reopened; so has Suai's
Saturday morning market, in its former premises, now a charred concrete
wasteland, off the town's main street. Traders squat among the rubble,
their wares displayed on plastic sheets. Every week there is a little more
fresh produce for sale: pineapples, garlic, betel-nut, bundles of cassava
leaves. The town, like the rest of East Timor, requires more than physical
rehabilitation. Most of its bureaucrats and professionals - doctors,
lawyers, teachers and engineers - were Indonesian, and they have left. One
of the tasks facing the UN authority, which has a mandate to administer
the territory for three years, is to train locals for key jobs.
Despite the privations of daily life,
there is a mood of optimism in Suai. Already, remarkably, some people are
talking about reconciliation. "I own nothing, but the fear has
gone," says one young man, Jose Dos Santos. "I can walk around
in the dark; I can sleep at night without worrying about a knock on the
door." Some memories will never fade. Human remains, presumably from
the churchyard massacre, are said to have been found in the town's rubbish
dump earlier this month. Outside the church, currently being rebuilt,
there is a scorched patch of grass bordered by pebbles; inside it are
empty bullet casings, fragments of a jawbone, two belt buckles. A group of
independence supporters were gunned down here and their bodies burnt on
the spot.
Down the road is a half-built Gaudiesque
cathedral. Suai's new parish priest, Father Renee Manubag, believes it
important that a project begun by his murdered predecessor, Father Hilario
Madeira, an outspoken critic of the Indonesian military, should be
completed. "We would be keeping a promise to the people who
died," he says.
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