Hunger becomes common feature at 'hotspot' areas

Santi W.E. Soekanto, Contributor, Jakarta

Baharudin and the other men of Buyung Katedo, a small Muslim enclave in the Christian village of Sepe, Poso, Central Sulawesi, knew they risked their lives by returning home only days after they had fled an enemy attack that claimed the lives of 13 women, children and elderly men in July last year.

Armed with sharpened machetes, Baharudin and three other survivors stood on top of the hill overlooking the clove plantation that they built years ago as migrants from South Sulawesi. They had toiled, they had built a good life in Poso, but unrest flared in 1998 that claimed thousands of lives from both the Christian and Muslim sides. Buildings, trees and places of worship were burnt down. Neighbors became enemies, and none could enter the home or land of the other without risking death.

"We have to return home and maintain a vigil here, "Baharudin told me. "This land and these clove plants are our only possession, if we abandoned them the enemy would take over and what would we eat then?"

Tiwi was a three-year-old girl; however, so undernourished was she that she weighed far less than most two-year-olds. She had not yet learned to speak and had not yet walked, much less run around like other toddlers. She also suffered from shortness of breath and when she cried her face turned blue due to lack of oxygen. Her mother was concerned about Tiwi's health but was also very confused.

"I have taken her to a shaman, I have taken her to a midwife for some treatment, but she remains like this," the mother of four said in front of her hut in a small fishing village, Labuan, Poso subdistrict, Central Sulawesi. Tiwi definitely needed to see a doctor, but she said, "I have never taken any of my children to the hospital. Do you think I should?"

Before the Malino peace talks in late 2001, the only health facility available was Poso Hospital in Poso City, 30 minutes away by car from Tiwi's village. However, since the violence erupted in December 1998 a long trail of destruction had been created, the district was almost deserted and not many public buses were seen around Poso. Besides, anyone from Labuan wishing to enter Poso would have to go through some enemy-controlled areas. Sniper attacks were not uncommon.

The Muslims, however, were not the only party suffering from food shortages in the Poso conflict. A Christian woman, driven by desperation for food following restriction of movements affecting enclaves on both side, donned a Muslim woman's headscarf, a jilbab, and entered the Poso city market one July afternoon last year.

She was stooping to select vegetables when the crucifix pendant of her necklace swung out of the fold of her jilbab, right before the watchful eyes of the vendor. "We beat her up, and sent her away," one local man told me. Without her groceries, certainly, but at least she was alive.

Hunger is part of the scenery of any armed conflict in the country. Some 90,000 Muslim refugees in Ternate, Maluku Utara, who have been sheltering in various makeshift refugee camps, are used to it.

In this hotspot of Indonesia, 10-year-old Mito waved his right forearm, severed at the wrist following a bomb explosion in 2000, while begging for scraps of food from passersby in front of the Ternate post office. He had lost not only his hand but also his parents, and now begged in order to survive.

"I could have saved his hand, he wouldn't have needed the amputation, had it not been for a feud between doctors (sent from Jakarta by the Ministry of Health and the local ones)," the orthopedic surgeon, who worked at the clinic that treated Mito told me ruefully. "But, OK, I think he would still have needed to beg, even with his right hand intact, because there are simply too many refugees in Ternate and not enough food."

Some young girls and women refugees in Ternate have had to sell their bodies for food.

Compared with the relatively recent past, we live today in a world of abundance. Improved health and increasing agricultural productivity in the 20th century have catalyzed unprecedented social and economic transformations.

Today there is more than enough food for all ... theoretically. The problem is that food is neither produced nor distributed equitably. All too frequently, the poor in fertile developing countries stand by watching with empty hands -- and empty stomachs -- while ample harvests and bumper crops are exported for hard cash. Short-term profits for a few, long-term losses for many.

Hunger is a question of maldistribution and inequity -- not a lack of food. That is why, despite abundance, hunger hovers; despite progress, poverty persists.

Who gets to be at the lowest rung of poverty-driven hunger? Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in conflict zones, certainly, and Indonesia has thousands of them. Earlier this year, 1.3 million refugees were scattered across 22 provinces, mostly from Aceh, Ambon, Poso and North Maluku.

Coordinating Minister for Peoples' Welfare Jusuf Kalla vowed to solve the refugee problem by the end of 2002; he recently announced that 900,000 refugees had been repatriated and resettled. In areas where violence still simmers, such as Poso, Ambon, Aceh and North Maluku, an announcement such as this did not mean prompt settlement of the hunger problem for many.

Aid continues to be poured into these conflict zones, but in a country known to be the most corrupt in the region, this often means that the officials get richer while the refugees continue to suffer. This is what happened in North Maluku, where a former senior official at the administration is being accused of embezzling Rp 79 billion of aid for the refugees.

At the end of the 20th century, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, food emergencies affected 52 million people in 35 countries, mainly in the developing world. Some of these situations have resulted from adverse weather or economic and financial crises, but violent conflict, mainly in the form of civil wars, was frequently the major factor.

In February, 2000, armed strife left more than 11 million people in 6 developing and transition countries in need of food aid and other international humanitarian assistance, and vulnerable to malnutrition. In addition, over 3 million people continued to require food assistance in the aftermath of conflict, as they remained displaced from their homes and sustainable livelihoods.

Protecting nutrition, especially that of young people, is a great challenge facing Indonesia today. More so in regions of conflict such as Aceh where hunger is only one of a multitude of threats hovering over refugees.