Word: timor
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...Although he was raised a Catholic in an East Timor village and was originally named Roberto Freitas, the 39-year-old Hasan became a Muslim when he was still a teenager. He is not the only Indonesian running questionable shelters for East Ti-morese children. The nephew of the former Governor of East Timor, Octavio Soares, has 156 children in his charge and has clashed frequently with U.N. officials seeking their return. Critics claim people like Soares and Hasan are motivated less by altruism and their religious beliefs than by greed. Hasan uses children "as an asset or a bargaining...
...Jakarta, says the government is doing all it can to help. But "the fact is we have other priorities that demand much more of our attention than just these children," he says. Bureaucratic inertia and a lack of funding?it costs $500 to bring a single parent from East Timor to Sumedang?all combine to hinder progress. "It's an agonizingly slow process," says Jake Moreland, a UNHCR spokesman in Dili, East Timor's capital. "And time is precious. The longer they are apart, the looser these children's links are with their parents...
...Hasan also produces other papers, these relating to what he cheerfully calls "my terrible past." The documents indicate he was once a low-level agent for the Indonesian military intelligence service in East Timor, a group blamed by human rights activists for hundreds of killings and disappearances. Hasan, a small man who on this day is wearing a cotton sarong, tracksuit top and traditional pillbox hat, is proud of his service as an informer. He seems puzzled as to why others might not be. In fact, he says, it was through the military that he first...
...Backed by government money, he says he spent six years helping East Timorese escape violence and poverty, and converting them to Islam. His best year was 1999, he says, when he smuggled 661 refugees?about two-thirds of them children?out of East Timor. "I have the right to turn my people into Muslims. And why not when others were allowed to turn East Timor to Catholicism?" His viewpoints are not universally shared by other Muslims. "I don't care about how he earns his living these days," says Salim Musalam Sagran, who has known and occasionally worked with Hasan...
...feelings about his son into words. Finally, he speaks: "I don't care what religion he is or what he has done. Tell Roberto I want to see him one more time before I die. I just want him to come home." The parents of East Timor's lost children may worship different gods, but they share the same pain...