The Dili Doctors

Dr Richard Dinatale works at Anyinginyi Congress.
When the call came for doctors to assist with the refugees
from East Timor, he was on the first plane out.
He explains what he found ...

A fax came here to Anyinginyi Congress asking for Territory doctors to go to Darwin as volunteers. I put my name down on Friday and on Sunday night I got a phone call asking if I'd like to go up for the following week.
After arriving in Darwin I was put on the roster for Tuesday morning.
There were about a thousand refugees coming in off the plane. The Mirrara Sports Complex had been divided into three sections and people were filtering their way through firstly for a food stop, then to an emergency immigration section where they had their paper work rushed through.
The last section was the medical triage where the refugees were sorted according to their medical needs. That was what we did.
It was really sick people we were on the lookout for; the people we suspected had tuberculosis or malaria. If we suspected that someone was sick enough to be in hospital or who may have had malaria, then we sent them to the public hospital.
It was very confronting thing to see masses of people who were obviously traumatised and who just kept coming through one after another, after another - all with all their tragic stories. It was pretty heavy going.
Did you get a feel from any of these people about what had actually happened?
It was more than a feel. There had been lots and lots and lots of atrocities. The stories were just amazing; people who had been slaughtered in the streets. Lots of women and children there had found their way to the compound. Their fathers and husbands who had been actively involved in the ballot, had been killed.
We saw lots of grandparents, older people, young women and kids who had lost their husbands and fathers through the violence. The stories were pretty graphic but they were all lots of isolated incidents, shootings in the streets and people just sleeping out in the hills for days and days on end until they had managed to find their way to the U.N. compound. They were just trying to avoid bullets really.
Did you get the sense that this was a random happening caused by a minority of the population who didn't agree with the independence vote or do you think it was a premeditated event?
There was definitely a feeling that it was organised. There was an anti-Indonesian feeling, an anti-government feeling. There were lots and lots of stories that the military had not just been passive but had been active in the killings. I don't think there was much doubt that what was going on was systematic and structured. They weren't random events.
When we were discussing it afterwards, my perspective was that, yeah, there were lots of factions of the military acting independently and because of the structure of the Indonesian military, the hierarchical system had fallen down along the way.
I suppose at worst it may have been organised from much higher levels. I don't think anyone knows, but the bottom line was that regardless of the cause, the Indonesian government was reluctant to get help at any time.
For us, that was the bottom line. For all the Timorese people, regardless of who orchestrated the killings -whether it was at the highest level or not - the bottom line was that the Indonesian government did not allow anyone to come in and help. So whether they were responsible directly or indirectly, wasn't really the point. They were responsible for it.
Another thing that was pretty hard to take was that the West had said that it would stand by these people. Australia said that we would stand by these people but it took a long time before we actually did something. And that was only at the point at which the Indonesian government said, "We'll allow you to come in."
You've got to wonder what would have happened if they'd said, "No, we're not going to allow you to come in."
We had said that we were going to stand by these people and in the end we didn't, and that was not a good chapter in Australian history.
Darwin was a really tense place to be throughout all of this. You could just feel this tension that was in the air, there were a few American war ships docked in the harbour, lots of uniformed people around and jet fighters roaring overhead.
The whole debacle was a series of mistakes. It is something that should have never happened, although I suppose you could say that about any conflict.
Wasn't Brereton kicked out because he was being fairly forthright in his language and that was seen as a public relations disaster. Meanwhile Howard and Downer were patting themselves on the back because they'd managed to have a talk in Bali with the Indonesian Prime Minister.
In retrospect, Brereton was absolutely right. Something needed to be done because the writing was on the wall and a lot of people saw it.
I was interviewing a lady as part of the triaging process and she relayed through the interpreter that one of the Indonesian chaps behind her was actually part of the militia. He was standing only two metres away from us. He had tacked onto another family who I think were probably too frightened to say anything.
But this lady had relayed the message that this guy was part of the militia and had snuck into the UN compound. No one had said anything at the time for fear of their lives but she was brave enough to tell us.
This left us in a position where we had to somehow get this guy away from there and in to the immigration police or the central police.
I went and relayed the story to the police and we somehow managed to convince him that he needed to have a blood test done and we led him through a series of doors and ultimately the police were waiting for him. He was one of the guys who was refused a safe haven and was sent back to Indonesia.
So that was a bit scary. There were lots of incidences where you could just feel the mistrust of the people. For example, we had to take them to the hospital on a bus and we'd lead them to the bus and you could feel that these people were just a little bit uncertain. They had been fooled so many times that for them there was no guarantee we weren't going to put people on a bus and send them off to somewhere.
There was always this sense of, "Do I trust this person or not?"
How did the volunteers cope with all of this?
There was an outbreak of diarrhoea amongst the health staff from too many contacts with the sick kids. There was lots of acute, infective diarrhoea, lots of acute respiratory tract illnesses and some chicken pox.
I got sick and spent my last day on the toilet!
In any refugee population there are standard illnesses which reflect living conditions and decreased immune function - they've been awake for three weeks, inadequate toilet facilities, hygiene, all those sorts of things. Tuberculosis is another thing that occurs in people whose immune system has been compromised.
Most of the acute stuff was all just a reflection on what had happened to them over the past few weeks. You can see that pattern repeated in the Rwandan refugees and in the Bosnian refugees, those similar sort of illnesses, highly contagious things when people are cramped in small rooms, can't wash, can't clean their hands, all that sort of stuff.
Underneath it all, they were incredibly nice people, I've got to say, they were lovely people, really just warm people and genuine. So it was a really sad thing and there was never any feeling of animosity or hatred or anything like that, a lot of them were just tired and relieved really.
It's just going to be a monumental effort now, a monumental effort to try and get it back on track. They're literally building it from the ground up and I think it will take years.