East Timor has been brutalized by Indonesia for over 20 years
On December 7, 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. It subsequently passed a law on July 17, 1976 proclaiming East Timor as the 27th province of Indonesia. This annexation has not been recognised by the United Nations but Indonesia continues to subjugate the East Timorese people. It is estimated that 300,000 East Timorese have been killed by Indonesian bullets, bombs and policies.
http://etan.org The East Timor Action Network provides information about, and ways to help, East Timor, which was invaded and subjugated by US ally Indonesia in 1975. ETAN advocates changing US foreign policy and urges support for self-determination and human rights for East Timor. The East Timor Action Network urges you to learn more about this island country and to join the struggle to free the East Timorese people.
http://amadeus.inesc.pt/~jota/Timor/ A must for anyone interested in the East Timor struggle.
http://www.peg.apc.org/~etchrmel/photos.htm Torture photos. Clicking on thumbnails results in downloads that require patience. The pictures are large (120 KB +) and two to a page.
http://www.uc.pt/Timor/TimorNet.html A good "course" on East Timor (includes photos and video).
http://www.ci.uc.pt/Timor/netret.htm U.N. Documents on East Timor, plus: history, geography, activism, human rights, news archives, mailing lists. On-line articles and Publications. On-line discussions.
http://www.amnesty.org/summaries/summaries.html Amnesty International's Indonesia & East Timor material.
The Indonesian embassy in the US wants to hear from you: indonsia@dg.dgsys.com
http://www.newsindonesia.com/ "News and Views Indonesia," the monthly newsletter of the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, carried the Press Release of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the Republic of Indonesia in response to the awarding of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to Jose Ramos Horta. They didn't like it.
.
THE WEST'S DIRTY WINK
By John Pilger; Source: The Guardian (February 12, 1994)
What has happened in East Timor is one of the world's great secrets. "Does anyone know where East Timor is?" asked Alan Clark, the former (British) Defence Minister, on Channel 4 not long ago. When I repeated this to him recently, he said, "I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another." It was a typically blunt Clark riposte, which itself was instructive, for it allowed a glimpse of how the unthinkable was normalised: how decisions taken at great remove in distance and culture had unseen and devastating effects on whole nations of people, albeit foreigners.
East Timor, half an island 300 miles north of Australia, was colonised by Portugal 450 years ago. The Portuguese partly Latinised and insulated the territory from the upheavals of the western half of Timor, which was part of the Dutch East Indies that became Indonesia in 1949. In 1974, the old Salazarist order in Lisbon was swept aside by the "Carnation Revolution" and Europe's last great empire began to disintegrate virtually over night. With the Portuguese preoccupied by events at home, the Indonesian military dictatorship of General Suharto invaded East Timor in 1975, and have illegally and brutally occupied it ever since. The result: some 200,000 Timorese dead, or a third of the population.
Few places on the planet may seem more remote than East Timor. Yet none has been as defiled and abused by murderous forces and as abandoned by the "international community", whose leaders are complicit in one of the great unrecognised crimes of the 20th century. I write that carefully: not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionately, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian generals have killed East Timorese.
Britain's role is also little-known. As the minister responsible for "defence procurement" under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Alan Clark approved a sale of ground attack aircraft to Indonesia, valued at more than #500 million. At the time he told Parliament, "We do not allow the export of arms and equipment likely to be used for oppressive purposes against civilians." When I asked him how this worked, he explained that it applied to "police-type equipment [such as ] riot guns, CS gas and anti- personnel stuff", but that "once you get into military equipment, you're into a different category of decision".
I said, "Hawk low-flying aircraft are very effective at policing people on the ground." He replied, "No, they're not....aircraft are used in the context of a civil war. Now depending on which side you support in the civil war, you tend to regard the other people as being oppressed or repressed."
"But," I said, "East Timor isn't a civil war. This is an illegal occupation, which the British Government acknowledges to be an illegal occupation."
"I'm not into that. I don't know anything about that."
"Well you were the minister."
"Yeah, but I'm not interested in illegal occupations or anything like that......I mean you call it illegal..."
""No, the United Nations does."
I said ministers had often talked about receiving guarantees from the Indonesians that the Hawks would not be used in East Timor.
"Well, I never asked for a guarantee. That must have been some thing that the Foreign Office did.....a guarantee is worthless from any government as far as I'm concerned."
Continued at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/00/peace/timor.gopher/background/2
Xanana Gusmão's Autobiography
East Timor resistance leader Xanana Gusmão's autobiography entitled "East Timor: One People, One Fatherland" was excerpted and published by the newspaper "Público."
By nature I was already a rebel, and the beatings of my education were just passing pain. My father had a part time job as inspector in Mr. Ricardo's cheese and butter factory. A happy childhood, full of presents... godparents and godchildren... and the schoolmaster. My father discussed the Development Plan with his own circle of friends... In the town, where there were few "assimilated" Timorese, he spoke of Salazar as if he had actually met him in Soibada. I admired my father, at the time. He bought a horse and off he went to some elections or other in Viqueque. He was not political, he had become an "assimilated" Timorese, and tried to sever the links between his children and a barefoot culture.
My father belongs to a specific link in the chain of East Timor's colonial presence. At a particular time, the post war period, a handful of schoolmasters, earning a pittance, aided colonial power to recultivate a nation and, imperceptibly, reinforce the domination of cross and sword, side by side with the feudal authority.
Many is the time I witnessed prisoners at the administrative post being whipped as they groaned on the pebbled ground, out in the scorching sun with feet shackled. Sometimes, escaping with the sons of the "liurais", school friends, I also saw orderlies or local people setting off in search parties, or returning with the "band" bringing back bloodied offenders who had not shown up for the forced labour on the roads, or the obligatory service as manual labourer in the homes of the colonialists, Chinese, and the "assimilated" Timorese.
More available at http://amadeus.inesc.pt/~jota/Timor/articles/xananas.autobiography.html
THE COMPLICITY OF THE WEST IN THE RAPE OF TIMOR
Byline: Noam Chomsky; Source: The Age; Date: 7 July 1994
Australia shared this judgement. Pilger describes how, in August 1975, the ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, advised in secret cables that Australia take "a pragmatic rather than a principled stand" with regard to the forthcoming invasion because "that is what national interest and foreign policy in all about".
Along with the ritual reference to "the Australian defence interest", Woolcott suggested that a favorable treaty on the Timor Gap "could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia... than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor".
The reasons for support for Indonesia's crimes went well beyond oil and "defence interests", including control of a deep-water passage for nuclear submarines. Indonesia has been an honored ally since General Suharto came to power in 1965 with a "boiling blood bath" that was "the West's best news for years n Asia" ('Time'), a "staggering mass slaughter of communists and pro- communists", mostly landless peasants, that provided a "gleam of light in Asia" ('New York Times').
Euphoria knew no bounds, along with praise for the "Indonesian moderates" who prevailed ('New York Times') and their leader, who is "at heart benign" ('Economist').
Not only did the welcome blood bath destroy the only mass-based political party in Indonesia, but it opened the rich resources of the country to Western exploitation and even justified the American war in Vietnam, which "provided a shield for the sharp reversal of Indonesia's shift toward communism", as Freedom House soberly explained with no reservations. Such favors are not quickly forgotten.
The US ambassador, David Newsom, informed Woolcott that if Indonesia were to invade, the US hoped it would do so "effectively, quickly, and not use our equipment" - 90 per cent of its weapons supply.
Another lesson in realism was given by the UN ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, celebrated for his courageous defence of international law and human rights. "The United States wished things to turn out as they did," he writes in his memoirs, "and to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measurers in undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."
Moynihan cites figures of 60,000 killed in the first few months, "almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War", a foretaste of still greater successes soon to come.
Western governments were fully aware of what was happening throughout, contrary to subsequent pretense. As revealed in leaked internal records, Henry Kissinger's worst fear was that his complicity in the aggression might become public, and "used against me by real or imagined political enemies.
Cable traffic shows that after "Suharto was given the green light" the main concern of the US embassy and State Department was "about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware" of the American role, according to Philip Liechty, then a senior CIA officer in Jakarta, in an interview with Pilger.
More at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/00/peace/timor.gopher/background/10
Free East Timor
October 26, 1995 NY Times Op-ed by Allan Nairn
When candidate Bill Clinton was asked about East Timor, he said, "We have ignored it so far in ways that I think are unconscionable." But as President, he has continued Washington's 20-year support of Indonesia's occupation of neighboring East Timor. When President Clinton meets Friday with President Suharto, the Indonesian dictator, he should tell him that America can no longer go along with the repression, which even the pro-Suharto State Department. admits is worsening.
East Timor is in turmoil, with riots, mass arrests and the secret police going from door to door. The Clinton Administration is making matters worse by its willingness to sell General Suharto 20 F-16's and approve $60 million in weapons sales. If Mr. Clinton were serious about pro- moting democracy, he would call off the deals and instead embrace the solution offered by East Timor's Roman Catholic Bishop, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo. In 1989, risking his life, he asked the United Nations to hold a referendum on East Timor's future political status. The army cut off his phone and mail and threatened him with death.
About a third of the populace has been killed in massacres and by enforced starvation. Ignoring the evidence of mass murder, Washington maintains that terrorism is not Jakarta's policy. That position willfully ignores what even the Indonesian generals say. After the massacre in Dili, the capital, in 1991, General Try Sutrisno -- whom President Suharto later promoted to Vice President -- said of the Timorese who opposed the occupation : "These ill-bred people have to be shot... and we will shoot them." Gen. Herman Mantiri said the massacre, which involved American M-16 rifles, was "quite proper" because the Timorese "were opposing us, demonstrating, even yelling things against the Government."
More at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/00/peace/timor.gopher/background/12
Belo, Ramos-Hortas Share 1996 Nobel Peace Prize
October 11, 1996, OSLO (Reuter) - Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Friday.
They shared the prize "for their work toward a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor," Committee Chairman Francis Sejersted said.
Sejersted said the committee had tried in vain to telephone Belo and Ramos-Horta to tell them they had won the prestigious prize.
"Belo...has been the foremost representative of the people of East Timor. At the risk of his own life, he has tried to protect his people from infringements by those in power," the committee said in a statement.
Belo, East Timor's outspoken, and often fiery Roman Catholic bishop, is long used to walking a tightrope between his flock and the government.
The committe said Ramos-Horta "has been the leading international spokesman for East Timor's cause since 1975 when Indonesia took control of East Timor."
gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/11/peace/timor.gopher
East Timor: The Struggle for Self-Determination and Its Future in Southeast Asia
Jose Ramos-Horta is the Special Representative of the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM),underground umbrella organisation based in East Timor comprising all East Timorese groups opposed to Indonesia's occupation and led by Xanana Gusmao. On April 23, 1996 he addressed The Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, London.
The invasion of East Timor which took place within hours of Ford's departure from Jakarta was a mere footnote in the geopolitical events of 1975. Thousands of East Timorese who died in the days, weeks, months and years that followed were mere footnotes to the post-Vietnam and Cold Wars.
We were not unaware of the developments taking place in our region nor were we insensitive to the concerns of our giant neighbours, Indonesia and Australia.
In June 1974 I visited Jakarta, in my capacity as secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Timorese Social Democratic Association, that had just been created, less than a month earlier. I had the privilege of meeting with the then Foreign Minister of Indonesia, Mr. Adam Malik. After our third round of talks, Mr. Malik addressed to me a letter which read in part:
"The independence of every country is the right of every nation, with no exception for the people of (East) Timor; "...whoever will govern in Timor in the future after independence can be assured that the government of Indonesia will always strive to maintain good relations, friendship and co-operation for the benefit of both countries.
In the course of our discussions, I conveyed to Mr. Malik our desire to develop close relations with Indonesia and our intention to seek membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the future after independence. In an effort to appease our neighbour, I went as far as proposing that our future diplomats and security forces be trained in Indonesia. Adam Malik's words were those of a statesman conscious of his country's lack of any valid historical claim to East Timor. He viewed the emergence of an independent East Timor as a natural outcome of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire.
The following year, in April 1975, I again visited Indonesia and met with President Suharto's senior adviser, Gen. Ali Mortopo, to whom I reiterated our collective desire to develop friendly relations with Indonesia. Gen. Mortopo reassured me that Indonesia harboured no territorial ambitions over East Timor. However, we soon learned that the word of an Indonesian general or diplomat can be broken as easily as it is spoken.
More available at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:70/00/peace/timor.gopher/9