Fact on Atauro famine

I welcome Melody Kemp's interest, March 9, in my article on alleged starvation in Atauro, East Timor, though her accusing me of "prejudices" and "bias" is hardly necessary.

Ms. Kemp alluded that I was not able to see (what she calls) the "green famine" in Atauro because I was traveling by air, thus "seducing observers into thinking that all is well". I assure her that my observation of the food situation in Atauro is based not on what I see from my helicopter window, but from actual tour of the island on foot, from talking to a variety of on-site sources such as farmers, families, the village chief, health workers, staff of local cooperatives, and from seeing for myself the corn crops and the food supply in the island's storage.

I would, of course, be very much interested to know if my observation were inaccurate, for example, if all these people had lied to me, or if the corn crops from fast-yielding seeds which I saw were mere hallucination. Unfortunately, however, Ms. Kemp failed to offer one single hard fact to contradict the information which I obtained from the ground and to refute my basic viewpoint that the food shortage which does exist now in Atauro is not a situation of "mass starvation" as propagated abroad by Jose Ramos Horta and nor is it likely to be.

I was also puzzled by Ms. Kemp's point about Chinese shops being burned and being empty in Nusa Tenggara. We all share Ms. Kemp's concern about this problem, but with regard to Atauro, which is really the focus of my article, there has not been an anti-Chinese riot there, perhaps because there is no Chinese shop in Atauro. Meanwhile, Kemp's comment that the "15 battalions" (I thought there were only six) in East Timor might go "hungry" suggests that she is, to put it mildly, unfamiliar with the Armed Forces' system of logistics.

In her comments, Ms. Kemp did not indicate if she had been to Atauro. Which leads me to conclude that her excessively spirited remarks are at best cynical rhetorics rather than fact-based observation.

DINO PATTI DJALAL

Jakarta