Traumatized children left neglected

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.