The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that at least 7,000 people died in the violence and that between 300,000 and 400,000 of the territory's people fled their homes or were forced into neighboring West Timor by the militias. Aid workers warn that outbreaks of malaria and measles are on the rise, and health officials fear the situation will only worsen with the onset of the monsoon this month. ''Cooking tables and open latrines are side by side in the camps. There is no water. Black exhaust from passing trucks hangs in the air,'' said a health worker who returned to Darwin from West Timor's capital Kupang. Dr Hendra Wajaya, an Indonesian who works inside the camps, said that up to half the number of children in Tuapukan camp, nine miles east of Kupang, are suffering from diarrhea, which already has proved fatal there.
Tuberculosis is another concern.
Local health officials say a lack of sanitation is speeding the spread of disease through Tuapukan. One nurse expressed concern for 10 newborns, who were delivered healthy but are now at serious risk of infection. She had just returned from a trip to the refugee camps at Atambua, near the border between East and West Timor and said she was only able to go into the camps because she is Burmese. But what is garnering the most international attention are claims of gross human rights abuses in the camps - from decapitations to repeated rapes. One report said militias took 12 pregnant East Timorese women from the camps, slit them from their throats to their abdomens, removed the fetuses and used large rocks to smash the heads of the unborn babies.