Word: timor
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...East Timor: Up in Smoke
...East Timor: Up in Smoke
During the bloody insurrection that produced the new nation of East Timor, Hasan Basri presented residents of the small town of Venelale with a proposition: give me your youngest children. I will feed them, I will educate them, and most importantly, I will protect them. At the time, Jose Pereira, a poor local farmer, awoke each morning wondering if that day the truckload of Indonesian soldiers would appear in their vengeful hunt for independence fighters and attack his family. He listened carefully to what the stranger offered. Hasan said he had government funding. He would take the children...
...Four years have passed. East Timor is peaceful and its people are getting on with the business of nation-building. Yet Pereira has not been reunited with his sons. Hasan refuses to let them go. He holds them, as he does about 50 others, in orphanages far from their birthplaces. They are part of a lost generation of East Timorese children cut adrift from their parents by civil unrest. The United Nations estimates there are 400 children like Jacinto and Marito scattered in orphanages and homes throughout Indonesia. Despite the intervention of international agencies and repeated requests from parents...
...Another boy, 15-year-old Zachariah, seems to want to talk. But when Hasan is near, Zachariah lowers his eyes and tries to slip away, only to be drawn back again when a visitor produces a personal letter from East Timor addressed to Hasan, complete with photos of villagers back home. The letter prompts Hasan's wife, who is from the island, to burst into tears, but Hasan shouts at her and she retreats into a rear room. Zachariah picks up the letter. Hasan has repeatedly told the teenager?who was spirited away by Hasan's associates in 1999 without...