East Timor

On May 5, John Pilger was presented with the Order of Timor-Leste by East Timor’s Ambassador to Australia, Abel Gutteras, in recognition of his reporting on East Timor under Indonesia’s brutal occupation, especially his landmark documentary film, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy. The following was Pilger’s response…

John Pilger, whose film, Death of a Nation, revealed the atrocities and political machinations that befell tiny East Timor reports on the discovery of documents that reminds us of the enduring piracy of great power.

In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. Like Saddam’s attack on Kuwait, the occupation was declared by the UN to be illegal. But no action ever followed. In the last 18 years a third of the East Timorese population has been killed, while Western governments have remained silent, or, like Britain, have sold arms worth hundreds of millions to Indonesia…

Few care about their subjection to the Queen. But they’re jumpy about the Asiatic hordes.

Blair makes much of ‘humanitarian values’ but sells arms to Indonesia which are used against East Timor.

More than 200,000 people have been killed since Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975. For decades, the British government was complicit in these killings. All that was supposed to change in May 1997. Instead, it’s been business as usual. John Pilger reports on the sham of Labour’s ethical foreign policy.

What is the “international community” really doing in East Timor? After their arrival almost two weeks ago, Australian troops have secured only the capital, Dili, and a few towns.

It had been a long night of waiting for the Indonesian troop convoy to pass. Two of us then crossed the border into East Timor clandestinely, through a forest of dead, petrified trees that appeared as silhouetted needles around which skeins of fine white sand drifted, like mist. As the sun rose, there stood the surreal crosses.

For the few of us who reported East Timor long before it was finally declared news, the “disclosures” last weekend that Washington had trained Indonesia’s death squads are bizarre.

It is grotesque hypocrisy for Tony Blair to weep for the children of Dunblane.