East Timor Tent Camps Full
DILI, East Timor — When the rain-laden clouds open up, as they frequently do this time of year, the tarpaulin over Alicia Pinto's bed leaks and the pathway outside her tent home becomes a quagmire.
Still, a crowded tent in a camp for internally displaced people on the eastern fringes of Dili is better than going back where she came from.
The house where Ms. Pinto lived with her family in Baucau, about 75 miles east of the capital, was burned down in riots in April 2006, when a large part of the population was forced to flee.
"We are afraid to go back," Ms. Pinto, 21, said Friday, as a wood fire filled the entrance to her tent with acrid smoke. "The neighbors won't accept us."
Ms. Pinto's family is among an estimated 100,000 East Timorese — about a tenth of the population — who have been ejected from their homes and communities by violence in recent years. They fill dozens of camps dotted around Dili, some of them alongside the city's best hotels where foreign workers and better-off East Timorese sip coffee and eat cake in the afternoons.
But two years after the camps were set up, the United Nations Integrated Mission in East Timor and the East Timorese government are worried that they are a growing source of security problems and aid dependency, and that they risk becoming permanent. In an effort to reduce the camp populations and ultimately have the camps closed, authorities made the tough decision to cut food rations to residents this month and cease food aid completely starting in March.
Under instructions from the government of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, this month's deliveries to the camps by the World Food Program cut allowances for individuals in half, to about nine pounds of rice and 25 ounces of cooking oil. Some camp leaders have strenuously resisted the move, telling camp residents to refuse all aid rather than accept a reduced ration.
Until now, such deliveries have provided relief to about 35,000 people in 58 camps in Dili. Displaced people outside Dili are mostly scattered through local communities and do not receive food aid. The United Nations, brought in to help restore order after the outbreak of unrest in 2006, and the government both hope that the food reductions will provide incentives for many displaced people either to return home or to settle elsewhere.
"If we do not discontinue this, we basically support a policy of creating a nation of beggars and people who live on handouts," said Finn Reske-Nielsen, who coordinates United Nations relief operations in East Timor.
The United Nations and the government aim to replace general food aid with a distribution program that focuses on the most vulnerable people in and outside the camps, including the elderly, the sick and those widowed or orphaned in conflict.
But the goal of some in the United Nations and government to close the camps by the end of the year could prove difficult to achieve. The World Food Program reported in September that almost 87 percent of people in the camps were there because their homes had been destroyed or damaged.
Most of that destruction took place in 2006, when a confrontation between the government and elements of the army spilled over into wider unrest in Dili and parts of the countryside. During the violence, tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes and 37 were killed.
At the heart of the dispute was a complaint by soldiers from the western districts of the country that they were discriminated against in promotions and conditions. Many communities across the country divided along regional lines, neighbor suddenly pitted against neighbor.
The events of that year also gave rise to the rebellion of Alfredo Reinado, a former military police officer who led shooting attacks last week on Mr. Gusmão, who was unharmed, and President José Ramos-Horta, who is being treated for his wounds in Australia. Mr. Reinado was killed.
The attacks on the two highest-ranking officials in East Timor have underscored the problems East Timor has faced in overcoming a history of conflict since it gained formal independence in 2002. They will almost certainly exacerbate concerns among displaced people over their safety if they return home.
In 2006, 4,000 to 5,000 homes were considered uninhabitable. Only two have been rebuilt. Sophia Casson, an analyst in East Timor with the International Crisis Group, said camp inhabitants faced the problems of not only rebuilding but also of settling a complex array of communal issues. "Until you improve the security where people come from, they will not move back," she said.
East Timor was torn by civil war in 1975 after the abrupt end of colonial rule by Portugal, and virtually razed in 1999, when the people voted in a United Nations-sponsored referendum to end 24 years of occupation by Indonesia, prompting an angry reaction from the losers.
But many victims of the most recent troubles say progress toward reconciliation has been slow.
In the Becora camp in the eastern outskirts of Dili — home to about 362 displaced people — Annabella Fatima da Cruz occupies a tent only a short walk from her old home. Eight months pregnant with her first child, Ms. da Cruz said she would like to have a permanent home in time for the birth. She said she would like to go back to her old neighborhood, but that is not an option.
"The situation is not safe," she said. "There was a dialogue, but it has not produced anything yet."
Atul Khare, the chief of the United Nations mission, which oversees security, said in an interview: "The security situation is improving, going by crime statistics. But the actual security situation and fear of insecurity are two different concepts."
But the camps are not necessarily a haven. Relief workers say there are reports that in some camps residents are preyed upon by organized gangs.
Luiz Vieira, the head of the International Office of Migration in East Timor, said there was also evidence of aid being diverted and sold. "Many people who want to accept the half ration have not because they have been threatened either implicitly or explicitly," he said.
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