When riots broke out in East Timor in the spring of 2006, thousands were forced from their homes. Nearly two years on, an estimated 100,000 people, or nearly 10 percent of the population, are still displaced and living in camps, 30,000 thousand of them in the capital Dili. Some 1,500-2,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) are even camped out with their goats, pigs and chickens on the paths and corridors of Dili's national hospital, posing a health and security threat to patients and fellow IDPs.
East Timor's "IDP problem" is a hard nut yet to be cracked. The government wants people to return home Â? so much so that it has approved a cash compensation package for repatriated IDPs, to be paid out according to the level of damage done to their houses in the unrest.
As Neil Campbell, an analyst with Brussels-based International Crisis Group, writes on OpenDemocracy, this is more than simply an issue of ending dependency on food aid and moving the country forward. Campbell says the camps have become a threat - both as a source of and magnet for criminal activity and as a base of opposition support.
IRIN, the U.N. news wire, reports that many IDPs are reluctant to go home for fear of future violence. Many have no home to return to, as up to 6,000 houses were destroyed in Dili alone in the violence two years ago.
There are also the wider issues involved with any compensation programme. IRIN says the government must make sure the compensation package doesn't create new tensions between recipients and poor Timorese who don't get handouts.
To encourage IDPs to go home, the United Nations and the government are scaling back food distribution programmes in IDP camps and other feeding centres around the country. They halved rations in February and plan to end the programme completely in April.
The U.N. refugee agency, which in recent years has expanded its mandate to work with IDPs, has already been forced to end its programmes in East Timor due to a lack of funding.
Radio Australia reports that the change in the U.N.'s food aid arose from concerns the system was being abused, and more importantly, that there is a wider issue of country-wide food insecurity that needs to be addressed.
A U.N. representative told Radio Australia that food-for-work or school feeding programmes are a possibility, but that the blanket feeding of huge numbers of people on a monthly basis has created dependency and is not sustainable.
Radio Australia cites a recent World Food Programme report on East Timor that suggests food insecurity is as much a threat to the population outside the camps as it is to those inside. The agency's country director told IRIN that 46 percent of children throughout the country were stunted due to malnutrition.
Anne Barker, with the Australian Broadcasting Company, writes that recent floods and plagues of locusts have increased the possibility of a food crisis in East Timor. Relief authorities are warning that wet-season rains have caused serious damage in 11 of the country's 13 districts.
This raises the question of what livelihoods will be available to repatriated IDPs. Two months of rice rations promised by the Ministry of Social Solidarity to families willing to go home will not provide a long-term solution to the greater issue of food insecurity throughout the entire country.
As Angela Robson writes in Le Monde diplomatique, East Timor is ranked behind Sudan, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe in the alert category of the 2007 Failed States Index, compiled by an independent NGO. In other words, the future of this young state is far from certain. Giving people the means to make a living and the possibility of self-sufficiency is an important element of the country's future security.
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