| Subject: WP: Report
on West and East Timor
December 8, 1999, Wednesday, Final
Edition
DIPLOMATIC DISPATCHES Nora Boustany,
Washington Post Foreign Service
Report From East Timor
An American relief worker who arrived
Sunday from East Timor described horrific conditions in resettlement camps
she visited across the border in western Timor, where she said she saw
mass graves of children, and refugees living as the virtual hostages of
Indonesian soldiers and local militias.
"Outside Atambua, I saw a grave with
24 children aged between 2 months to 6 years," said Pamela Sexton.
The cause of death, she was told, was diarrhea. "The biggest concern
is the health of children," she added. Most international aid
agencies are unable to operate in western Timor because of threats from
the Indonesian military and the militias they support, she said.
Sexton said she entered camps in the
southern and central parts of western Timor, and those adjacent to the
East Timorese border, in October and November. Thousands of East Timorese
remain trapped in makeshift camps with nothing but tarpaulins as shelter,
three months after they were driven from East Timor by rampaging
Indonesian forces, Sexton said in an interview Monday.
Several refugees who tried to cross into
East Timor were shot, she said. "In one horrible case, refugees saw
severed heads spiked on sticks in late September as a warning sign of what
might happen to them," Sexton said. In the camps, women would
approach her, touch her hand and quietly ask if she could help them
escape. "The minute a militiaman with a pro-Indonesia T-shirt would
show up, each woman would change her story, saying, 'Things are good.
Everything is fine.' This kept happening at every camp," she said.
The Indonesian forces are carrying out a
disinformation campaign to discourage leaving the camps, Sexton said.
Refugees are being told it is "very unsafe in East Timor. They tell
them that men, women and children are being separated and the men are
killed, taken out and dumped into the sea." She added that they live
in fear of being targeted as pro-independence.
Conditions along the border were the
worst, said Sexton, a former U.N. observer in East Timor who served as the
U.S. coordinator for the International Federation for East Timor Observer
Project during the Aug. 30 referendum on East Timor's independence from
Indonesia. She witnessed the violence and the exodus and returned with
Grassroots International, an international development group, to assess
reconstruction needs and visit western Timor.
Back
to December Menu
World Leaders Contact List
Human Rights Violations in East Timor
Main Postings Menu
Note: For those who would like to fax "the
powers that be" - CallCenter V3.5.8, is a Native 32-bit Voice Telephony software
application integrated with fax and data communications... and it's free of charge!
Download from http://www.v3inc.com/ |
