Traumatized children left neglected

By Santi W.E. Soekanto

JAKARTA (JP): Refugee children are abused children, said Sh. Melzak, an expert on traumatized children, in the 1993 congress in Hamburg on children, war and persecution.

Melzak noted similarities between the experiences of children abused in situations of domestic violence and children who witness and experience the terror of human rights abuses during armed conflicts.

Put in the Indonesian context, the number of abused children is indeed great. Official records put the number of internally displaced people--or refugees--due to recent and current armed conflicts in various parts of the country close to 800,000. They are scattered in Aceh, West Kalimantan, Maluku, Central, North and South Sulawesi, East Java and East Nusa Tenggara.

They all face the same problems: poor sanitation, infectious diseases, lack of privacy and basic health treatment, limited food supply and no schooling for the children.

The actual number of the refugees could be much higher. Aris Merdeka Sirait, the director of the National Commission for the Protection of Children, estimated that 60 percent of all refugees are those under 14 years old.

In Ternate, Maluku, some 50,000 people are still sheltering from the recent violence involving Muslim and Christian groups. Countless refugee children are now displaying signs of acute physical and mental problems as 50 percent of them witnessed the killing of their parents or other loved ones.

Hundreds of children were orphaned in the conflict and are now roaming the streets of Ternate, sleeping in abandoned buildings and scavenging for food. According to MER-C (Medical Emergency Rescue Committee), 7000 children have had to drop out of school and to work in order to survive. Some girls have had to sell their bodies in order to eat.

In Poso, Central Sulawesi, where similar communal clashes have exploded intermittently, some orphaned infants were taken from refugee centers and sold for Rp 200,000 (US$22.6) or less.

In Atambua, close to 130,000 people are still sheltered in refugee centers. In Aceh, thousands of displaced people are still longing to return to their homes.

The scale of the problem is overwhelming because we, as a nation, are not used to dealing with the problem. We are facing in the near future problems resulting from trauma left untreated.

There were armed conflicts in the past and refugee children, but the previous administration was so repressive and firm in its denial that the society was never trained to handle such occurrences. As recently as early 1998, journalists feeling the threat of the government gag bickered with one another over whether to publish stories and pictures from the communal bloodshed between the Dayaks and the Madurese in Sambas, West Kalimantan.

"Our psychologists and psychiatrists were not trained to deal with people, with children traumatized in armed conflicts," says Shinto B. Adelar, a psychologist with the Crisis Center at the University of Indonesia's School of Psychology.

When the veil of secrecy was lifted along with the removal of Soeharto in May 1998, we became exposed to a proliferation of horrifying news about atrocities committed by fellow Indonesians.

We read about the raping, the killing, the scalping and torture in various parts of the country. We mourned for the ultimate violation of people's rights, and for the children who witnessed the killing and raping of their parents and who even became victims of such violence.

We then found out that we were simply not ready to help.

One Muslim activist, Dwi Indah Handayani, sighs at the enormity of the task ahead of her -- caring for Maluku orphans and finding adoptive parents for them.

"The children were traumatized. They need treatment. Our biggest fear is their adoptive parents later abuse them," Dwi says. "I can't sleep when I think about this responsibility."

"The biggest problem for us is although there are people who are willing to help, there's no system in place to handle the matter in ways that put the children's interests at the forefront," she says.

"We have to grapple with the problem ourselves, think hard and just do it, hoping for the best," says the woman who was initially assigned by her organization PAHAM (Center for Human Rights Advocacy) to deal with the legal aspects but turned into a surrogate mother for 33 Maluku children. She now supervises the care of the children brought from Maluku by MER-C to Jakarta.

"We can't wait for the government to take care of the children. We have to do it ourselves, and now," she says.

Like Dwi, there are always people and groups who commit themselves to the children's cause. Unicef, Save the Children, Christian Children Fund, and a number of Indonesian non- governmental organizations. But as a nation we have yet to be able to help the children in a systematic and comprehensive way.

When, in July, little Sarah Payne went missing after playing with siblings in a small English town, the whole of Britain went into shock. A large-scale search was launched involving thousands of people who volunteered. When her body was found 10 days later, the community became angry and lashed out at suspected and identified pedophiles.

In Indonesia, we read stories about missing children every day. We read about their killing and raping so frequently that we become immune to unpleasantness. Many of us no longer feel the shock.