wfn.org | NEWS RELEASE - September 9, 1999

[News News <NEWS@ELCA.ORG>]

CHURCHES AIDING SOME EAST TIMORESE WHO REACH SAFETY

New York, Sept. 9, 1999 -- With much of East Timor cut off from the outside 
world, churches in West Timor are providing some shelter, food and basic medical
care to people fleeing there for safety.  Action by Churches Together, the 
emergency coalition that includes Lutheran World Relief, is on stand-by to 
provide assistance there if requested and in East Timor when that becomes 
possible.

As many as 200,000 people may have fled or been removed from the troubled 
province of Indonesia, United Nations officials now say.  The numbers of 
casualties and displaced inside East Timor are not known.  After 24 years under 
Indonesian occupation, East Timorese last week voted overwhelmingly for 
independence.  A rampage by anti-independence forces ensued.  Indonesian 
authorities have not stopped the violence.  

West Timor's churches are already providing limited assistance to people who had
fled East Timor's troubles earlier this year.  For the current crisis, they are 
using resources on hand, a protestant pastor there told ACT.  Australia's 
council of churches is sending a staff member to West Timor to help assess the 
situation for ACT. 

(30)

IN TURKEY, LINGERING SADNESS AND NEW TENT CITIES

Istanbul and New York, Sept. 9, 1999 - An all-season tent city for 1,000 
earthquake survivors near Izmit, Turkey, is almost finished.  Residents are 
pleased and grateful, reports Alan McCain, an American pastor and long-time 
resident of Turkey. Water, sanitation, and food for any who need it are 
available on site, McCain says. McCain is now working with the international 
church emergency coalition that includes LWR, Action by Churches Together.

Local churches supported by ACT are also distributing 2,000 food and hygiene 
packages in villages stricken by the powerful earthquake three weeks ago.  

Together with a local engineer, ACT aid workers are preparing to restore water 
to 50,000 people in Adapazari, the town at the epicenter of the quake.    The 
Churches of Turkey Steering Committee for Disaster Relief has promised 
winterized tents for 150 families there, McCain reports, but has to have them 
made first because Kosovo and other crises have exhausted tent supplies in 
Europe.  

While life is returning to the earthquake zone and rubble is cleared around the 
clock, much sadness lingers.  "Hearts are heavy and lives are shattered," McCain
said.  "One young man in our tent city told me he had never been so ashamed, but
he and his family had no other recourse but to depend on the help of strangers."

(30)

A FRESH KOSOVO PEACH FOR EACH PERSON WHO CLEARED THE BOMB IN THE BATHROOM

The first autumn rains have now come to Kosovo.  Lutheran World Relief-supported
aid work there is directed at winterizing damaged houses, supplying relief food,
and restoring water supplies and farming activities in three project areas.  But
at some sites all aid must wait until the ground underfoot is safe.  Rod Booth, 
an information officer with Action by Churches Together, reports.

Decani, Kosovo -- Peter Jepsen is big, gregarious, and very, very careful.  He 
has to be.  He makes his living blowing up things -- things such as the 
unexploded mines, shells and bombs that modern warfare leaves behind.

Kosovo is no exception. There are defensive mine fields laid by both the Serbian
and KLA armies, nuisance and booby trap mines left by the retreating Serb 
forces, and unexploded NATO bombs, all to be dealt with.  

Thanks to Jepsen, a Danish aid worker, and local de-miners he has trained as 
part of the ACT church aid program in Kosovo, Sefer Qujol can breathe easier in 
his house in the village of Prilep. A Serb mortar grenade came straight down 
through Qujol's roof and buried itself, between the toilet and the washing 
machine, in his bathroom floor!

The digging out had to be done by hand and the unexploded bomb - lying on a foam
cushion in Jepsen's lap - transported to a remote location and destroyed. Sefer 
Qujol gave each of the team a peach to express his gratitude. He didn't have 
much else. None of the Kosovo Albanians returning to this devastated rural area 
have much else.

Higher up the hill lies the village of Jasiq - or what's left of it. The village
school and clinic, destroyed in a NATO raid, yield abundant evidence of the 
hurried departure of the Serb army detachment billeted there. Further along the 
rocky track one finds the depressingly familiar scenario: farmhouse after 
farmhouse - gaunt, looted and burned.

Near the end of the track is the home of Dervish Jasiq. War came to his family a
year ago when, with five minutes notice in the middle of the night, they were 
told to pick up and go. Wife, son, daughters, grandparents, in-laws, the family 
walked for 32 hours over the mountain passes to Albania. Dervish, a former 
policeman, returned to join the KLA and keep an eye on his property.

It didn't do him much good. 50 years of struggling to carve a home and a living 
out of a hillside, in a location of steep and barely passable mountain roads, 
has  left him with a home looted and torched by Serb forces, a barn ruined by 
NATO air-raid, his livestock dead, and his fields too dangerous to work.

The de-mining crew walks Dervish's farm track in the summer sunshine, tempted by
the nearby overhang of succulent blackberries. Jepsen points to innocent looking
objects in the grass, appearing to be discarded yellow beer cans.  One, two, 
three, four, five-they are unexploded NATO cluster bombs.

They go up with a bang. Or rather down. De-miners blow such things to 
smithereens before they get a chance to go off.

Clustered behind a wall of the roofless house for protection against the 
anticipated explosion, one marvels anew at the resilience of the human spirit. 
The Jasiqs, all of them, are hard at work, scraping away the charcoal from their
walls, working with ACT's shelter rehabilitation program to winterize at least 
one room of their house before the snow flies. With the help of Jepsen's 
de-miners and the ACT agriculture program, they and the others who have returned
to Jasiq may even be able to plant some winter wheat.

"Every one of them" says Jepsen, "has a story to tell that will break your 
heart".  Unfortunately those stories are far from over. In the mountain villages
of western Kosovo, it is going to be a long, hard, winter.

(30)

For more information, contact Jonathan Frerichs at Lutheran World Relief, 
212-532-6350.