Some may wonder why this is separate from my "Agitprop" page. I've done this as a deliberate choice, since what we are talking about here is being opposed to genocide, nothing more. Being anti-genocide is not something I view as an inherently left-wing belief (at least I hope it's not, because then the world is in even bigger trouble than I have imagined).
Note: I typed the following history in the autumn of 1995. Since then, there has been yet another event that has caused a big increase in the knowledge of East Timor among the general public: the awarding of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to CNRM Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta and to Carlos Felipe Ximines Belo, Bishop of the Diocese of Dili. As I type this (June 1997), there has just been an Indonesian parliamentary election marked by widespread violence (as well as the routine vote-rigging and lack of choice of opposition candidates), especially in East Timor, and the police are currently engaged in a crackdown against the resistance.
On 7 December 1975 in an event almost totally ignored by the American media, the Republic of Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, comprising the eastern half of the Island of Timor (about 350 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia). At the time, East Timor was (and technically still is) a colony of Portugal that was in the process of declaring its independence.
The day before the invasion, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger had consulted with President Suharto of Indonesia, after which Kissinger announced that "the United States understands Indonesia's position on the question" of East Timor. It's only speculation, of course, but I can't sometimes help wondering if the date of the invasion was chosen (perhaps even suggested) to conflict with existing memories of Pearl Harbor, thereby making it even easier for East Timor to stay out of the public consciousness. At any rate, the event received practically no coverage in the US media at the time.
At the time of the invasion, Indonesia received significant amounts of military aid from the United States (and many other Western countries); the US doubled its military aid to Indonesia in the year immediately following the invasion.
During this same time, Indonesia was embarking on a campaign of genocide against the East Timorese. Estimates of the number of civilians killed are about 200,000 of a pre-invasion population of approximately 600,000. Expressed as a percentage of the population, this is worse than what Pol Pot did in Cambodia, and Pol Pot himself killed a larger fraction of civilians than Hitler!
Not surprisingly, the Timorese fought back. But the forces were wildly mismatched -- a nation of nearly 200 million people, well-armed with the latest weapons, fighting against a few poorly-armed guerillas who had no foreign beneficiaries. Yet to this day, there are still a few Timorese freedom fighters hiding in the jungles of Mt. Ramelau and Mt. Matebian, and from time to time one hears of Indonesian patrols in this area being ambushed.
Two recent events have been responsible for most of the attention on East Timor in the media. In November 1991, a funeral procession assembled in Dili, the capital of East Timor. This was a funeral for a young Timorese that had died at the hands of the Indonesian forces; in response a number of those in the procession decided to carry protest signs and Fretilin (part of the resistance movement) flags. When the procession reached the Santa Cruz Cemetery, the Indonesian military opened fire on the unarmed and peaceful crowd, killing an estimated 270 people. Unbeknownst to them, Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman, two American journalists, was present and had captured the scene on film. After having been beaten and injured by Indonesian troops, Nairn managed to escape from East Timor with his film. ** Find exact number killed (Church records) **
More recently, the Asia-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) meeting in the autumn of 1994 in Jakarta, Indonesia was disrupted by protests staged by Timorese students studying in Indonesia. A number of students scaled the fence of the US Embassy and held up protest signs, creating scenes that were photographed by the many reporters who were in Jakarta to cover the conference. (A number of other students were arrested before they got to the Embassy and their exact whereabouts are unknown.) There were also riots and demonstrations in the streets of Dili, where there were a number of foreign reporters that Indonesia had let visit in a failed attempt to prove that nothing was out of the ordinary there. These events probably got more coverage in the news media than there has been on East Timor in the previous 19 years put together.
At this point, many of you reading this probably think I'm nuts, so much does what I'm telling you fly in the face of conventional wisdom. I can't completely blame you -- I thought I was imagining things when I started listening to shortwave broadcasts around 1980 and heard the occasional mention of East Timor on the BBC or Radio Australia. The idea that something so significant and horrible as genocide could be going on virtually unreported just staggers the mind at first.
As I later learned, such a thing is (depressingly) not unprecedented -- the Nazi genocide of the Jews was largely ignored in the US, at least until our entry in World War II provided the need for a moral backing which was filled by advertising the crimes or our enemy. But during its first years, the Holocaust was essentially ignored here -- even to the point of boatloads of Jewish refugees being refused entry and sent back to death in the concentration camps. But I digress.
Anyhow, I'm not going to insist that you take my word on any of this; for the doubters among you, here's an abridged list of references and sources that I encourage you to check out:
Any entry above preceded with an asterisk is available in reprint form from:
East Timor Action Network / United States
P.O. Box 1182
White Plains, NY 10602 USA
Tel. +1 914 428 7299 FAX: +1 914 428 7383
E-mail: cscheiner@igc.apc.org
Perhaps the most important thing to do is to write your elected representatives and tell them of your concerns. For those of you who, like me, are citizens of the USA, you should request that military assistance to Indonesia not be renewed (it was cut off last year, and the State Department is trying to get the ban lifted).
Also very important is to spread the word on East Timor to others. Most people don't care about what is happening there because they simply don't know what is happening there.
As long as our leaders are allowed to think that we really don't care about what happens in East Timor, they will ignore it. Change will only come when we make it clear to them that the political cost of ignoring human rights in East Timor is too great.
Last changed: 11-JUL-1997 17:46:17
David Barts | davidb@scn.org | http://www.scn.org/~davidb/