Hope eludes Asian war victims

PAGALUNGAN, Philippines -- Insecurity and fear gnaw at Basaluddin Gialodin. Insecurity because he and his family have been forced out of their home and are living in a makeshift shack with a tarp for walls. Fear that if they go home, they will be killed in the battle between the government and Muslim rebels.

Gialodin, his wife and six children have been displaced since February, forced out when a government attack on rebels in the southern Philippines destroyed their home for the second time in three years.

Across Southeast Asia, more than 1.5 million people live the life of refugees, but are denied the protections of refugees because of a technicality: They have not crossed an international border. They are casualties of conflict, but their plight is often obscured by governments and news media focusing on the battles themselves. They live in tents, shacks, warehouses, wherever they can find shelter.

They have fled conflicts between government troops and rebels, or between Muslim and Christian militias, or between warring ethnic groups. Afraid to go home, they are the region's "internally displaced people," refugees in their own land.

25 million worldwide

The United Nations says there are about 25 million such people worldwide, almost twice the number of refugees. The number fluctuates as people are uprooted and, sometimes months or years later, make their way home. At the end of last year, Sudan, Colombia, Angola, Congo, Iraq, Burma and Indonesia had the highest numbers of displaced persons, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

Although refugees can seek protection from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, internally displaced people do not have such safeguards. They are not protected by international refugee law and many are inaccessible to outside monitors.

During war, civilians are supposed to be protected under international humanitarian law, but in today's conflicts, in which civilians are frequently targeted, the law often does them little good, said Marc Vincent, an adviser on internally displaced people with the United Nations in Geneva. "It's a global problem," Vincent said. "But ultimately the responsibility rests with the governments concerned."

In a typical tale of upheaval, Majria Hehanussa, her husband and four children find shelter in a plywood stall in a converted exhibition center on the island of Ambon in the Moluccas, the former Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia. They have fled two conflicts. The bloody 1999 violence in East Timor sent them to Seram island in the Moluccas, then the brutal sectarian conflict there sent them to nearby Ambon, where a peace agreement was signed last year. Although the conflict in Ambon has officially ended, they are among thousands of families afraid to go home.

In another part of Ambon, Max Reawaruw recalled wistfully how he used to live in a four-room house on 100 acres of land bursting with papaya, coconut and clove trees in the village of Waai. Today home is a 9-by-12-foot plywood stall in a former clove warehouse that he shares with his wife, two blind daughters and three other children.

Although the warehouse is only 13 miles by paved road from Waai, Reawaruw has not been back since he fled in 1999. "I'm afraid of the jihad fighters," he said, sitting on a wooden bench, his face gaunt and furrowed. "They say that they have gone home, but I know that they are still there." Now, at the northwestern end of the Indonesian archipelago, another battle has uprooted more than 35,000 people since it erupted in May. The conflict between the government and Muslim rebels in the northwestern province of Aceh has gone on for more than a quarter-century.