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Fear keeps East Timor refugee camps full

When the rain-laden clouds open up, as they frequently do this time of year, the tarpaulin over Alicia Pinto's bed leaks and the pathway outside her tent home becomes a quagmire.

Still, a crowded tent in a camp for internally displaced people on the eastern fringes of Dili is better than going back where she came from.

The house where Pinto lived with her family in Baucau, about 120km east of the capital, was burned down in riots in April 2006, which forced a large part of the population to flee.

"We are afraid to go back," Pinto, 21, said on Friday, as a wood fire filled the entrance to her tent with acrid smoke. "The neighbors won't accept us."

Pinto's family is among an estimated 100,000 East Timorese -- about a tenth of the population -- who have been ejected from their homes and communities by violence in recent years.

They fill dozens of camps dotted around Dili, some of them alongside the city's best hotels where foreign workers and better-off East Timorese sip coffee and eat cake in the afternoons.

But two years after the camps were set up, the UN Integrated Mission in East Timor and the East Timorese government are worried that they are a growing source of security problems and aid dependency, and that they risk becoming permanent.

In an effort to reduce the camps' population and ultimately have them closed, authorities made the tough decision to cut food rations to residents this month and cease food aid completely starting next month.

Under instructions from the government of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, this month's deliveries to the camps by the World Food Program cuts allowances for individuals in half, to about 20 kilos of rice and 0.75 liter of cooking oil. Some camp leaders have strenuously resisted the move, telling camp residents to refuse all aid rather than accept a reduced ration.

Until now, such deliveries have provided relief to about 35,000 people in 58 camps in Dili. Displaced people outside Dili are mostly scattered through local communities and do not receive food aid. The UN, brought in to help restore order after the outbreak of unrest in 2006, and the government both hope that the food reductions will provide incentives for many displaced people either to return home or to settle elsewhere.

"If we do not discontinue this, we basically support a policy of creating a nation of beggars and people who live on handouts," said Finn Reske-Nielsen, who coordinates UN humanitarian operations in East Timor.

The UN and the government aim to replace general food aid with a distribution program that focuses on the most vulnerable people in and outside the camps, including the elderly, the sick and those widowed or orphaned in the conflict.

But the goal of some in the UN and government to close the camps by the end of the year could prove difficult to achieve. The World Food Program reported in September that almost 87 percent of people in the camps were there because their homes had been destroyed or damaged.

Most of that destruction took place in 2006, when a confrontation between the government and elements of the army spilled over into wider unrest in Dili and parts of the countryside. During the violence tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes and 37 were killed.

At the heart of the dispute was a complaint by soldiers from the western districts of the country that they were discriminated against in promotions and conditions. Many communities across the country divided along regional lines, neighbor suddenly pitted against neighbor.

The events of that year also gave rise to the rebellion of Alfredo Reinado, a former military police officer who led the shooting attacks last week on Gusmao, who was unharmed, and President Jose Ramos-Horta, who is being treated for his wounds in Australia. Reinado was killed.

The attacks on the two highest ranked officials in East Timor have underscored the problems the nation has faced in overcoming a history of conflict since it gained formal independence in 2002. They will almost certainly exacerbate concerns among displaced people over their safety if they return home.

In 2006, 4,000 to 5,000 homes were considered uninhabitable. Only two have been rebuilt. Sophia Casson, an analyst in East Timor with the International Crisis Group, said camp inhabitants faced not only the problems of rebuilding but also of settling a complex array of communal issues.

"Until you improve the security where people come from, they will not move back," she said.

East Timor was torn by civil war in 1975 after the abrupt end of colonial rule by Portugal and virtually razed in 1999, when the people voted in a UN-sponsored referendum to end 24 years of occupation by Indonesia, prompting an angry reaction from the losers.

But the camps are not necessarily a haven. Humanitarian workers say there are reports that in some camps residents are preyed upon by organized gangs.

Luiz Vieira, head of the International Office of Migration in East Timor, said there was also evidence of aid being diverted and sold.

"Many people who want to accept the half ration have not because they have been threatened either implicitly or explicitly," he said.
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