INDONESIA took advantage of a messy civil war in East Timor in the wake of the Portuguese withdrawal to move in and annex the territory (David Watts writes).
At a time when the Americans were on the verge of being expelled from Vietnam, and Indonesia was only ten years on from what was billed as an attempted pro-Communist coup, the United States and Britain were in no mood to countenance a new and potentially unstable South-East Asian state. Henry Kissinger gave Jakarta the green light for the operation. A large army and naval force moved into what was a backward territory which the Portuguese had done little to advance in almost 500 years of colonialism.
The Indonesian Army crushed all opposition, later annexing the territory in a move which has never been recognised by the United Nations. A small insurgent group of the tough and largely Catholic East Timorese has never yielded to the occupiers despite Indonesian investment in what Jakarta terms a province. Jakarta's extensive efforts at attempting to win over the population and transmigration of ethnic Javanese to try to change the balance of the population have not had the required effect.
The Bishop of Dili, the Right Rev Carlos Ximenes Belo, in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize with José Ramos-Horta, said that about 200,000 of the prewar population of 700,000 had died from the fighting and starvation. Continuing brutality against the population of East Timor brings the problem back into the world's headlines regularly. The recent death of David Alex, a Timor resistance leader, after being captured by Indonesian forces, has again brought negative publicity for Jakarta.
There are indications that Indonesia has moved fresh reinforcements into the territory in a fresh attempt to crush the resistance.