Subject: Rebuilding ravaged East Timor
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 09:14:29 -0400also: ASIA LETTER/from Dili by Conor O'Clery
Irish Times Tuesday, September 28, 1999
Rebuilding ravaged East Timor
>From Conor O'Clery, in Darwin
EAST TIMOR: In Dili, where people are dying from disease and near-starvation, there are
only 40 patients in the 250-bed general hospital. This is because the people of the East
Timor capital have always been nervous about going there for treatment, especially with
wounds which might identify them as victims of militia violence and therefore
pro-independence.
The hospital was run by the Indonesian Ministry of Health, and the staff were all
Indonesian. Today they have gone, the flag of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) has been hoisted over the building in the eastern suburbs, and word is getting
round that things have changed. Officials from the Red Cross are in fact starting the work
of building it up as the reference hospital for East Timor.
In the hospital lobby, Acasio Da Costa, a pro-independence activist who has been trying
to get help for the refugees in the mountains south of Dili for several days, was waiting
patiently to find a Red Cross official to ask for help. "We need food and medicine,
people are dying," he said.
People like Acasio (25), an agriculture student, will be vital to the future of the
ravished country. During the 24 years of Indonesian occupation, East Timorese were largely
excluded from participation in the running of the hospital, the schools, the
administration, the electricity system, the telephone network, the water supply, the food
distribution network: everything that makes a society work.
All the primary school teachers in East Timor were Indonesian. They all have gone,
leaving the former Portuguese colony with the task of finding a complete new set of people
to be taught how to run basic services.
A senior aid official said he believed there was "an amazing window of
opportunity" to rebuild East Timor because "international goodwill can be
translated into continuing positive action".
The greatest, long-term need is for education and training, he said. This is an area
where countries like Ireland, which have encouraged the East Timor independence movement,
can make a significant contribution.
>From their initial assessment Red Cross officials also believe that a humanitarian
catastrophe can be averted. "Cholera is not round the corner like in other emergency
situations we have dealt with around the world," said an official. But the medical
situation is dire for a society where disease is on the increase and there has been a
massive displacement of the population. The rains will begin to fall next month on an
island without roofs, and urban people sheltering in huts made from banana and papaya
leaves and will be particularly at risk.
The only other treatment centre in Dili is the tiny Motael clinic, where an American
general practitioner, Dr Dan Murphy, coped as best he could with few resources until he
was barred by the Indonesian authorities in August during the referendum campaign.
Dr Murphy returned to Dili on Friday to resume his work. He warned of an increase in
the number of people contracting tuberculosis, a highly contagious disease which can only
be cured by antibiotics during lengthy treatment. The clinic, he said, had been treating
250 people for TB, so these people were all without treatment and crowded into conditions
with poor sanitation.
"TB was a ready epidemic. I can't imagine what it is doing, right at this point,
as far as spreading to large numbers of the population," he said, "and to get a
grip on that is going to be an immense problem. I estimate that even when everything was
functioning well, 50 to 100 people died every day from diseases that are easily
preventable, so can you imagine what is happening now?"
Dr Murphy said the medical infrastructure outside Dili was "pretty much
non-existent" and non-governmental organisations would have to take up the slack.
"We need surgical teams to take care of the unattended wounds, of which I am sure
there are many," he told Reuters. "We have got to start establishing nutritional
programmes, and water and sanitation have got to be the key."
A ship with 230 tonnes of relief supplies has been sent by GOAL to East Timor and is
expected to discharge its cargo in Dili tomorrow. GOAL's field director in Dili, Mr Ken
Ryan, said the cargo contained more than 200 tonnes of food, as well as large quantities
of medicine and plastic sheeting.
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