Our legacy into 2000: Refugees in their own land
By Ati Nurbaiti
JAKARTA (JP): "Nearly all of today's conflicts churn within national boundaries, and 90 percent of war's victims are civilians, mainly children and women," states the report of The State of the World's Children 2000, issued by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef).
"Soldiers, rebels and marauders target and slaughter children and women with impunity ..." The report cites Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and East Timor among the sites of conflict.
For Indonesians, the harrowing images are sadly too familiar: hundreds of thousands of civilians, young and old, trapped in virtual war zones in Maluku, Aceh, East Timor and West Kalimantan. The country is no longer home for many Chinese- Indonesians, who moved overseas after the riots in May 1998. They have also been targeted in other internal conflicts, such as Maluku.
Assistance to internal refugees has been obstructed by the helplessness of local and international humanitarian organizations in the face of the unwillingness, or inability, of the government to provide staff with the necessary security to go about their tasks. The death of a doctor, Fauziah, in Aceh, who was killed while traveling in an ambulance in which soldiers insisted on hitching a ride last year, remains an enduring excuse for medical staff in refusing to venture out to assist refugees, whose number peaked at 180,000, in danger-prone zones in the province. However, groups of international and local medical experts have strived to assist refugees in various areas.
There are continuing scenes of armed men toting arrows, crude rifles, machetes, spears and homemade bombs, readying themselves for battle, not against a foreign enemy but fellow townspeople and villagers, sometimes their own neighbors and acquaintances.
Many who fled their towns and villages since the beginning of this year have not returned, while more continue to pour out as the government struggles to cope with the necessity of providing homes for those permanently displaced.
Children educated in the national motto of Unity in Diversity are suddenly learning a new, bitter teaching; stick with your own, stay away from those of other faiths and ethnic groups. The trauma of the children is yet to be told, and vengeance is feared to be growing in many a youngster's heart following the senseless, savage loss of a family member, not to mention scorched homes and the uprooting of their lives.
The Unicef report shows that "currently an estimated 540 million, or one in four, children live with the ominous and ever- present hum of violence ..., or are displaced within their countries or made refugees by conflicts that are already raging".
The National Commission Against Violence toward Women has only started counseling programs for victims of civil war -- indeed unprecedented in Indonesia. As of mid-November, the Ministry of Home Affairs estimated some 640,000 people were still living in shelters across the country, among which the number of children has not been revealed. Also unknown is the total number of female-headed households as widows tend to children and elderly parents on their own after the death or disappearance of their menfolk.
As of August alone the office of the Ministry of Health in Aceh recorded at least 2,954 infants aged up to 11 months in shelters in North and East Aceh in Pidie, 91 of which were born in 36 of the camps. Their mothers could spend barely a day in the clinics after giving birth as other refugees were also waiting to go into labor. The elderly and the youngest suffered most from highly cramped shelter conditions, many of them exposed to the heat or the cold of night. In June, 80 infants had died in refugee shelters in West Kalimantan.
From June to August, 15,049 under-fives in Aceh joined their families as refugees. Among those of school age, as of July, some 15,000 children in Aceh were known to have been forced to end schooling either because their schools were razed by fire or their families displaced.
State Minister of Transmigration and Population Al Hilal Hamdi said earlier this month that 33,131 families would be relocated in March 2000 to new transmigration areas.
He said the resettlement areas were in West Kalimantan, Southeast Sulawesi, South Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara, Aceh, Maluku and on Madura off East Java.
Half of the displaced people targeted in the resettlement program are from East Timor, he added, as a result of the exodus following the Aug. 30 self-determination ballot and ensuing violence. The exodus reached some 400,000 people, half of the former province's population.
He said families would be allocated fields and provided with farming equipment and materials. For the first year after their resettlement, the migrants would have basic necessities secured through a subsidy for each family of Rp 20 million.
Al Hilal acknowledged that not all the East Timorese wanted to join the resettlement program, particularly those who supported independence.
The government's approach of helping refugees through a transmigration-like program has been criticized by the National Commission Against Violence toward Women, which noted the many empty homes in Maluku.
"If the government had consulted the people beforehand they would have found that not all are farmers" who wanted land, and most did not want permanent houses as they wanted to return home, said Kemala Chandrakirana, the commission's secretary-general. Among refugees are teachers, entrepreneurs and civil servants.
Chairwoman Saparinah Sadli said that the government, then under president B.J. Habibie, had no sense of crisis as it was treating the problem of internally displaced people with a routine transmigration approach.
While the commission appreciated the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, it questioned the government's seriousness in enabling victims to return home. It noted the continuing sense of insecurity as armed militias roamed the border of East Timor and East Nusa Tenggara, threatening refugees and the outnumbered local population.
Local and international humanitarian workers waited for weeks for access to East Timor following the ballot, as families who fled to the mountains were on the verge of starvation.
With an average age expectancy of 55 and an infant mortality rate of 124 per 1,000 births, the relatively poor state of health of East Timorese compared to Indonesians in general was a fact long before the ballot. It has been worsened by the forced exodus, stress, food insecurity and the destruction of sanitation facilities and almost all health services, according to a recent report compiled by non-governmental organizations Yayasan Hak and Sa'he Institute on Timor Lorosae, as the new nation is called.
East Nusa Tenggara authorities coped their best with 260,000 refugees from East Timor and as of mid-December 117,000 had returned, according to UNHCR.
Some refugees in Aceh, their dignity stripped to dependence on daily handouts, have retorted that "we are not poor people, we have wide plots of land". But they had no choice but to stay in shelters and let their thousands of hectares of crops of rice, coffee and vegetables be ruined, rather than face the risk of armed contact between rebels and the military, or the military searching either for rebels or suspected rebel supporters among villagers.
Minister of Resettlement and Territorial Development Erna Witoelar has said that the ministry of transmigration can only handle 10 percent of refugees who want to be resettled due to the costs involved.
Erna told The Jakarta Post last week that current efforts to help the country's displaced were not in concert; non- governmental organizations were trying to help with trauma counseling and reconciliation, while the government stresses the resettlement program and other physical aspects, such as provision of clean water. Both parties cannot possibly work on their own, she said, and cooperation between them was urgent.
Many areas have been on the receiving end of the conflict as the exodus of fleeing people streamed into neighboring provinces. Erna's office will also have to deal with at least 470,000 refugees from Maluku, East Timor, Aceh and Irian Jaya in South Sulawesi alone, an estimate as of August this year. Apart from problems of supplies, inhabitants in the neighboring areas also fear intergroup tension spilling over into their areas.
Among children of refugees in West Kalimantan, many were found roaming around as beggars and hawkers.
The minister said many Madurese refugees sent home following ethnic strife in West Kalimantan earlier this year have come back, saying they could not stay long in Madura because they long considered West Kalimantan their home.
For now, young and old are still trying to come to terms with their predicament.
"In my own free country, my child must give birth in a refugee camp," an old man in Aceh said.
In a boarding school near Sigli in Aceh Besar, a makeshift home for dozens of families, a mother consoled her son every day. "He keeps saying, 'what are we doing here, I have to go to school'," she said." (anr)