Dili's streets have been relatively calm in recent nights, but most of the estimated 100,000 people living in makeshift refugee camps throughout the capital are still too scared to go home, an official said yesterday.
While East Timor's foreign minister told the UN this week that the emergency had almost ended, Child Fund Australia's chief executive officer, Nigel Spence, said the population displacement in Dili is "most definitely a humanitarian crisis."
"It's generally portrayed as a law-and-order problem which obscures the fact that it's a serious humanitarian crisis and the kids in particular are at risk," Spence said as he inspected the camps.
"The relief agencies that are here have made an effective response but the scale of this crisis which is going to go on a long time yet means they're struggling to cope," he added.
The government says about half of Dili's nearly 200,000 people have fled their homes, many of which have been torched in a wave of violence that killed at least 30.
Discrimination?
Violence flared after the government fired around 600 soldiers who say they were discriminated against because they came from the west, seen by easterners as having only weakly supported the fight for independence from Indonesia.
Since May, gunbattles between the police, loyalist army troops and renegade soldiers have made the streets unsafe. The security services have split into factions along east-west lines and the division has spilled over to gangs who terrorized inhabitants and murdered opponents with machetes.
While the violence has ebbed since Australian, Malaysian, New Zealand and Portuguese security forces were deployed to patrol the streets and search cars for weapons, officials say many in the camps remain too scared to return to their villages.
"There's a lot of distrust and fear at the neighborhood level and it could be weeks or even months before families are confident enough to go back to their villages," Spence said.
Segregation
Christian Children's Fund manager Kirsten Hongisto said people from the east and west initially lived side by side in the first refugee camps they could find. But the UN was not sure whether a drift of people between camps is now creating a segregation.
"We are definitely not encouraging that sort of separation," Hongisto said.
The UN this week launched an emergency appeal for US$18.9 million to help the East Timorese refugees.
It also reported an increase in diarrhea and chest infections in the crowded camps along with fears that malaria could spread.
Since late April, the Canossian Sisters convent in the Bekora neighborhood, a community of 60 nuns, has hosted more than a thousand people on verandahs and under tarpaulins.
The population of the convent grounds -- one of 60 or so makeshift camps in Dili -- swells to 6,000 at night, with people sleeping on the bare ground under trees because they're scared of their village neighbors.
"There's not enough food," Sister Elsa Fernandes said. "But we can't tell them to go away."
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