A young East Timorese refugee collects water as others wait at a camp outside Dili in July 2007. (Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters)

East Timor trying to close refugee camps

By Donald Greenlees

Published: February 15, 2008

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DILI, East Timor: 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 to where she came from.

The house where Pinto lived with her family in Baucau, 120 kilometers, about 75 miles, to the 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 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 - to have been ejected from their homes and communities by violence in recent years.

The camps are dotted around Dili, sitting alongside the city's best hotels where in the afternoon foreign workers and better-off East Timorese sip coffee and eat cake. The United Nations integrated mission in East Timor, brought in to help restore order in 2006, counts 58 camps in Dili, occupied by about 35,000 people.

But two years after the camps were set up, the UN mission and the East Timorese government are anxious to see them closed before they become a permanent fixture. Officials express concern over signs of growing aid dependency among some displaced people and the role the camps have played as focal points of unrest in the past.

This month, under instructions from the government of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, the monthly food ration supplied by the World Food Program to camp residents has been cut in half. In the latest food deliveries each individual has been allocated 4 kilograms, or 8.8 pounds, of rice and three-quarters of a liter, or 1.6 pints, of cooking oil. Starting next month, food deliveries by the Rome-based World Food Program will cease altogether.

The United Nations and the government hope that the cuts to food supplies will provide incentives for many displaced people either to return home or to settle elsewhere. The decision to reduce and then end food aid to camps is in part driven by a World Food Program survey last year that concluded that half the occupants of the camps did not need assistance and might have been encouraged to stay on in the camps to receive free food.

"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 all the United Nations' humanitarian operations in East Timor.

The United Nations 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 conflict.

But the goal of some in the United Nations 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 various parts of the countryside. During the violence tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes and 37 people 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 this week on Gusmão, who was unharmed, and President José Ramos-Horta, who is being treated for his wounds in Australia. Reinado was killed.

In returning home, camp inhabitants face not only the problems of rebuilding but of settling a complex array of communal issues. In about 6 percent of cases, according to the World Food Program, the homes of displaced are occupied illegally by others.

The East Timorese have in the past shown a considerable ability to reconcile conflicts and rebuild communities.