East Timor's Young Victims

Maria Usfini lights a wood fire to cook her family's ration of rice and tries to comfort one of her sick children, who stands naked and crying in the dirt beside her.

It's a scenario being repeated far too frequently at squalid camps across the capital, Dili, where thousands of children are becoming the latest victims of East Timor's ongoing unrest.

In a sign that the month-old violence is continuing, an official at Dili's main hospital reported six injuries overnight, four believed to have been hurt in an attack with a grenade or homemade bomb.

Figures from other hospitals were not immediately available, but there were reports of tensions between rival groups outside the capital, amid concerns that the violence that has largely been contained to Dili could expand elsewhere.

Some 600 striking soldiers were dismissed in March, triggering clashes with loyalist forces and leading to gang warfare in the capital last month. At least 30 people have been killed.

It is the worst unrest since East Timor's bloody break from Indonesian rule seven years ago, when retaliatory militia groups devastated much of the territory.

With the U.N. expected next week to debate dispatching a multinational police force to East Timor, Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta said Friday that the world body must make a decade-long commitment to rebuilding the country, adding that it was in no one's interest to see it become a failed state.

An even more pressing problem is preventing outbreaks of disease in the crowded makeshift shelters across Dili where more than 70,000 people have gone to escape the violence; another 60,000 are staying at shelters elsewhere in East Timor.

Malaria and measles already are spreading rapidly in a number of the camps.

Usfini's home was destroyed by rampaging mobs two weeks ago and she is still too scared to return to her neighborhood, one of many hit by arson and street clashes. Her extended family of 21, including six children, shares a plastic tarp and sleeps in a dirty park in downtown Dili.

Their children are all sick and don't have enough clean water or food, she said.

"We cannot go home because our houses were destroyed. Now we sleep on the ground. All our children are sick with coughs, runny noses and fever," Usfini said. "We don't know if the water is clean, but we have no choice."

Figures were still being compiled, but around 60 percent of around 30,000 children staying in the camps are believed to be suffering from acute respiratory problems and pneumonia, UNICEF said, with an increasing number of cases of diarrhea, malaria and skin infections. At least 11,000 children under age 5 are most vulnerable.

"Because of the crowded environment, respiratory infection spreads easily," said Dr. Arnold Calo-oy of UNICEF.

A cooperative of 30 aid agencies is rushing food and basic supplies to East Timor, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is building a camp to shelter up to 1,000 people sleeping outside Dili's airport.

East Timor Health Ministry official Valenti Carvallo Pereira said around a hundred additional cases of sick children are being reported every day at the airport camp alone, mainly due to bad water and sanitation.