From: ST101019@brownvm.brown.edu
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Subject: The Truth About East Timor Part I
Date: 17 Apr 1992 04:43:23 GMT
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For all those who doubt what happened in East Timor, here is the
report on it.

========================================================================
Date:    Tue, 14 Apr 1992 18:57:43 EDT
From: "Bruno"
Posted on 20 Dec 1991 at 09:21:02 by Lorne Rider

If you don't know the latest
affair in East Timor, please read the following article, which I
posted to LISTS.ACTIV-L a couple weeks back, and was recently
published in the Brown Forum on Third World Affairs, which got a very
limited circulation.
=========================================================
News from Nowhere:  The Unheard of Massacre in East Timor

(c) November 21, 1991  by Lorne Rider

Secretary of State James Baker returned from his surrogate trip
to East Asia last month failing to produce a Chinese pledge on
human rights.  Earlier the same week, another part of Asia
witnessed even worse news for human rights:  a brutal massacre in
East Timor which in terms of relative population was fifty times
as devastating as even the highest estimates of the death toll in
Tiananmen Square.  Baker's diplomatic impotence in resolving an
issue which the U.S. has been treading lightly over since the
1989 democracy crackdown, gained front page attention in the New
York Times. The massacre in East Timor, in which Indonesian
soldiers opened fire on a crowd of over 3,000 mourners of all
ages, killing as many as 180 and wounding dozens more, was
relegated to a short column on a back page in the same
authoritative American newspaper.  The New York Times, after
reporting in another short back page article the next day that an
Indonesian general had expressed regret and promised to conduct
an investigation into the incident, dropped the matter entirely.
Apology accepted, case closed.

Chalk it up to a freak accident on a tiny little island no one's
ever heard of and you'd be wrong on all three points.  Firstly,
East Timor is about as large as the "tiny" Kuwait we heard so
much about earlier this year.  Secondly, this massacre is only
the latest in a series of massacres over the sixteen years since
Indonesia invaded its neighbor in 1975, initiating a genocidal
campaign of brutal extermination, forced relocation, and willful
destruction of crops which had left over two hundred thousand
people  (easily one third of the pre-invasion population) dead by
execution or starvation in the first five years alone.  Thirdly,
many people in very important postitions have heard quite a lot
about East Timor, and it is all they can do to make sure no one
else hears a thing.  As Noam Chomsky writes, "the story is so
revealing that it cannot be known, and indeed is not known except
in tiny circles."  In order to try to expand these circles, it is
necessary to take a few large steps backward before discussing
the most recent slaughters.

Indonesia, home of vast mineral and oil wealth and defender of
important sea lanes, has long been the linchpin of post-war (read
cold war) U.S. economic and strategic policy in Southeast Asia.
Especially since 1965, when the CIA and the U.S. Embassy in
Jakarta helped engineer a military coup which put the staunchly
anti-communist Suharto into power and resulted in the executions
of as many as half a million people suspected of being
communists, the US has had a stalwart ally in the region and has
continued to shower its friend with huge amounts of military and
economic aid.  After Portugal gave up her three century claim to
the eastern half of the island of Timor in 1974 and East Timor
began to move toward independence, Indonesian Minister for
Foreign Affairs Adam Malik assured a leader of the nascent
nationalist party, Fretilin, that it adheres to the principles of
the right of every nation to independence, and that Indonesia has
"no intention to increase or to expand [its] territory, or to
occupy other territories...."  Not surprisingly, when Indonesia,
which soon thereafter began to see the Timorese nationalists as
Timorese communists, decided finally to annex the "Cuba on its
doorstep," the US expressed no opinion in the matter.  The fact
that both President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
flew out of Jakarta after a state visit the day before the
invasion, well after Indonesian border incursions had begun,
proves acquiescence at the very least.  According to the
Australian Ambassador, Kissinger had instructed the U.S. embassy
"to cut down its reporting on Timor."

The American mainstream press has dutifully followed Kissinger's
advice for the past 16 years (the New York Times has run an
average of about one piece per year on East Timor over the past
decade), much to the chagrin of the people of East Timor who are
increasingly depending on world and U.S. public opinion to free
them from the brutal Indonesian occupation.  It is a cruel irony
that, as it turns out, even their martyrdom has not bought their
plight international notice.  The Timorese national  resistance,
which has survived  air raids and mass encirclement campaigns
involving tens of thousands of troops and conscripted Timorese,
has focused its strategy in recent years on gaining more
widespread world attention.

The East Timorese believed that a 12-day visit scheduled to begin
November 4th by a Portuguese parliamentary mission, the
culmination of seven years of negotiations mediated by the UN
Secretary-General, would be their gateway to the world, and it
was to this mission that they tied their fates.  Never mind that
previous foreign delegations and even a Papal visit in 1989,
which had sparked nonviolent protests, warranted only a brief
fizzle in the world press.  Never mind that everyone knew that
the military would take extreme measures to squelch any
possibility of public dissent.  The East Timorese people feel a
strong affinity with the Portuguese, and some ethnic groups had
even creatively incorporated Portuguese colonial rule into their
cosmology.  In Mambai mythology, for example, the Mambai's
Portuguese younger brothers, the custodians of the political
realm, had already abandoned them once and come back after
hundreds of years.  Presumably, 16 years would not be too long to
wait for them to return again to resume their political role and
finish the decolonization process in a manner more in keeping
with the Mambai sense of cosmic order than the chaos of
Indonesian rule.

The Indonesian military, well aware of the tightness of the bonds
between the East Timorese and the Portuguese, was determined to
make a good show of the East Timorese people's "solemn desire"
for integration with Indonesia.  In order to guarantee that the
Portuguese mission would not turn out to be a public relations
fiasco, Indonesian intelligence began a one million dollar
"clean-up" security operation at the beginning of this year to
supplement normal intimidation tactics and police muscle which
have been used regularly to keep the people in line in the
presence of foreigners since East Timor was "opened" to tourists
in 1989.  According to a leaked army document, special forces
were ordered to infiltrate "underground networks involved with
the preparations for the visit or with the Fretilin guerilla
movement."  Over the last year, several thousands of additional
troops have been brought in, conducting obvious maneuvers in
remote villages and throwing disused military supplies into the
sea.  In October, Timorese had been forced to chant
pro-integration slogans, to fly Indonesian flags from their
homes, and to perform cultural showpiece dances for reporter's
video cameras in preparation for cultural fairs which were
scheduled for the upcoming Portuguese mission.  Aside from the
frequent short-term detentions, torture, and disappearances which
Amnesty International had been documenting throughout the past
year, Australian filmmakers reported stories that  "crowd
infiltrators" had been injecting people in public places with
needles and that those people had died of illness soon afterward.
Although these reports are probably untrue, the fact that people
had been terrified of contact in public places is testimony to
the level of intimidation the military had been able to create.

Despite these extreme measures to force the East Timorese into
submission, as the date of the mission grew closer, the
Indonesians began to have second thoughts.  First, they insisted
that any photographs taken would have to be sent through Jakarta,
not flown out directly.  Soon afterward, they vetoed the
inclusion in the delegation of an Australian reporter who the
Indonesians have called a "Fretilin propagandist."  The reporter
in question, Jill Jolliffe, has had good reason to be critical of
Indonesia's presence in East Timor, since she was the lone
survivor of a group of six Australian journalists who were
murdered by the Indonesian invasion forces in 1975, an event
which Indonesia has never come clean about and Australia has
never pressed.  For Portugal, which claimed to "uphold the
principle of democracy regarding the freedom to receive and
provide information," Indonesian intransigence in the matter was
the last straw.  On October 24th, Portugal "suspended" the
mission, a move which looks more like cancelation since the
monsoon season begins soon and most of the rural areas will be
inaccessible for months.

News of the "suspension" came as a devastating shock to the East
Timorese and deflated their last hopes for recognition.  When
plainclothes Indonesian police entered the grounds of Motael
church in Dili in the early hours of October 28th and murdered
Sebastio (Gomes) Rangel and arrested most of the other youths
who had taken refuge in the church for over a year, the East
Timorese had finally been driven to desperation.  Despite the
violence that had been inflicted on them over the years, the East
Timorese placed a great deal of faith in the Church as an
institution whose sanctity the Indonesian soldiers would not
violate, and the blood on the parish walls had proven them wrong.
Official versions of the incident involved alternately a skirmish
between "pro-independence activists and passers-by" and a riot
which the police had been summoned to quell.  This version of
events was debunked by three Australian filmmakers present at the
scene who vouched that no such riot had taken place and that in
fact  they "watched people being summoned by [church bells] for
over half an hour with great urgency and vigor."  Following
Sebastio's murder, Jose Ramos-Horta, the spokesman for the Timor
National Resistance Council in the UN, issued an urgent plea for
Portugal to "alert the international community" of the slaying, a
plea which was never heard on U.S. shores.

It was in this greater context which the massacre of Tuesday,
November 12th occurred.  It was also this context which was
entirely absent from the New York Times' account of the massacre.
Readers unfamiliar with East Timor were brought up to date on the
sixteen-year occupation with the following two sentences:

     East Timor, the eastern half of the island of Timor at the
     eastern end of the vast Indonesian archipelago, was annexed by
     Jakarta a year after Portugal gave up the colony in 1975 after
     three centuries of colonial rule.

     Jakarta's rule is not internationally recognized and human rights
     organization have frequently made accusations of human rights
     abuses there.

A+ for brevity and geographical accuracy and a big F for
relevance and complete coverage.  To say that human rights
organizations have "frequently made accusations of human rights
abuses there" is a little like saying that Jews have frequently
made accusations about human rights abuses in Nazi Germany.

Aside from the sheer desperation of the mourners at the funeral
procession for slain Sebastio Rangel, one other thing
differentiated the November 12th massacre from previous massacres
"carried out away from prying eyes" in East Timor.  Namely, the
presence of at least seven foreign journalists, all of whom were
beaten or threatened, barely escaping alive, and one of whom was
killed in the morning melee, should have guaranteed the story a
good deal of prominence in the world press.  For the benefit of
those who missed the huge media outcry, the 6 a.m. morning mass
began solemnly, like many funerals for martyred opposers of
police oppression elsewhere in the world, and soon escalated into
violence.  Sometime before 8 a.m., hundreds of Indonesian troops
opened fire on the crowd of thousands of men, women, and children
with American-supplied M-16 automatic rifles.  The journalists
all corroborated that although the  mourners were carrying
pro-independence banners and calling for self-determination,
there was no physical provocation of the soldiers whatsoever.  In
fact, as evidenced by the fact that the soldiers walked
deliberately toward the crowd, surrounding the mourners from two
sides, this was clearly not a spontaneous action.  New Yorker
magazine reporter Allan Nairn said, "This was a case of planned
and systematic massacre....This was not a situation where you had
some hothead run amok."  The soldiers continued to fire their
weapons mercilessly into the crowd for as long as five minutes,
reloading them when empty.  Nairn told Reuters that  "looking
down the road, I saw body after body, and the soldiers kept
firing at those who were still standing."  When English
photographer Stephen Cox heard the "almighty burst of fire," he
took refuge in a crypt for thirty minutes along with "children as
young as six or seven piled on top of each other, cowering and
reciting prayers over and over."

Amy Goodman of Pacifica radio and Nairn believed that if they
moved toward the front of the crowd conspicuously brandishing
cameras as the soldiers were approaching that they could prevent
any violence from taking place.  Instead, they soon found
American-made M-16 rifles pointing at their heads, only being
spared by repeating "We're Americans, we're Americans."  When an
Indonesian plainclothes policeman discovered Cox in the crypt, he
was shocked and yelled "What are you doing here, what are you
doing here?  You've seen everything!"  Cox and Australian radio
journalist Russell Anderson forced their way onto a plane in
Dili, managing to make it to Darwin, while Goodman and Nairn,
after being beaten severely, managed to escape to a hospital in
Guam.  Chris Werner of Britain's Yorkshire Television succeeded
in smuggling out a three minute video tape, which was quickly
shown on Portugal's main TV news program, by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, in the Japanese Diet and in the English
Parliament, but was not shown over American airwaves for over a
week, and then only briefly.  A Malaysian charity worker holding
a New Zealand passport was not as lucky as the journalists--he
was listed as one of the official dead.

As the smoke cleared, human rights groups, the church, and the
Indonesian military were all struggling to assess the damages.
Reports of four truckloads of corpses being carted away for mass
burial clearly demonstrate that the casualties were severe.
Bishop Belo estimated 180 dead, and other human rights groups
were placing the figure at 115 dead.  General Try Sutrisno,
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, alarmed that these high
figures were getting into the foreign press, stated "the number
of those who died, I am certain, would not reach 100, let us say
50 at the most, 20 injured, and no foreigners are among the
victims."  A few days later, the army had revised the official
estimates downward to 19 dead and 91 injured.  General Sutrisno
defended the adjustment by saying that the revision "does not
mean the government has no regard for human rights.  We are a big
nation that upholds human rights since the days of our
forefathers."  No matter how high the final death will turn out,
as one Portuguese diplomat aptly put it, "we're not counting
corpses, even if it's 19, it's a massacre."

From the Indonesian point of view, the presence of foreign
witnesses to the ugly affair could have led to a huge public
relations disaster, and as a result, they quickly scrambled to
produce an official version of events.  The first official
statement was simply that "there has been unrest in Dili by
people who had been incited and influenced by the remnants of GPK
[Gang of Security Disrupters, the official name for Fretilin and
other separatist groups elsewhere in Indonesia] in East
Timor....The situation is now under control."  Realizing that
this statement was neither satisfying or convincing, they then
admitted soldiers had fired into the crowd, but only after they
had been provoked by guns, lobbed hand-grenades, and knives.
This was a bit extreme, especially since the Indonesians had been
long claiming that the resistance numbered less than 200 and had
exhausted all their supplies.  Foreign Minister Ali Alatas
perhaps gave the most passionate defense of the integrity of his
soldiers when he explained that "the deputy commander of the
local battalion tried to tell them, 'Look, you can demonstrate,
but please don't be so wild, don't be so unruly.  Don't destroy
property along the way and things like that.'  It was then that
[the commander] was attacked by a machete."  Alatas, who deplored
the foreign media's "biased" presentation of the events, told
reporters, "Give us a break.  The picture is not of very
peaceful, gospel singing people suddenly being shot at.  Come
On."

But it was increasingly clear to many parts of the outside world
that the picture was in fact one of peaceful people being shot
at.   On November 14th, every one of Australia's major dailies
were running multiple reports and front page banner headlines
such as the Sydney Morning Herald's eight-column "Massacre on our
Doorstep."  In response, the Indonesians pursued the unusual new
strategy of expressing regret.  Ali Alatas backed off from his
earlier justifications and diplomatically stated "This is not
something the government has ordered or condoned. We indeed very
much regret what has happened...We are going to investigate what
happened." Udayana Military Area Commander Sintong Panjaitan
clearly indicated that world opinion was influencing his approach
when he said "the world is pointing a finger at us.  I accept
that.  I am very sorry.  I regret this."  He went on to say,
however, that there would be no court martials and that the
troops had no choice to fire, even if it was a mistake, echoing
his earlier claim that the soldiers had misheard an order of
"Don't shoot."  President Suharto, for his part, expressed his
concern by embarking as planned on a 25-day visit to Africa and
South and Central America on November 21st, a move which would
make absentee President George Bush proud.  By expressing regret
and promising an investigation into the situation, the
Indonesians were carefully saying to the world, "don't worry, the
situation is under control," just as they had in their original
statement. Indonesia is predictably insisting that this is a
domestic concern, that foreign countries should not "meddle in
internal affairs [which involve] the sovereignty of Indonesia."
Despite outcries from human rights groups that an Indonesian-led
investigation without any outside monitoring would be a total
sham, it appears that this is exactly what is going to happen.

Initial official international reactions to the incident varied
quite closely with their relationship to Indonesia.  Portugal
asked for a total arms embargo and declared a national day of
mourning on November 19th, where all flags were flown at half
mast and teachers were to instruct their students about the
massacre.  The European Economic Community released the harsh
words that the EEC and its member states "vehemently condemn such
violence which is in clear contravention of the most fundamental
human rights."  Germany expressed "deep alarm" at the "bloody
escalation of violence."  New Zealand, who saw one of its
passport-holders perish in the slaughter, vowed to re-evaluate
its entire policy toward Indonesia.  On the other hand,
Australia, which recently completed a very lucrative treaty with
Indonesia involving vast oil reserves in the Timor Gap, has
characteristically pursued careful diplomacy in the situation.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke initially explained that he has tried to
discuss the matter with Indonesia in a "constructive and friendly
spirit at this time of tragedy."  What he meant, of course, is it
is a "time of tragedy" for Indonesian public relations and the
situation is going to require some quick patching.  The UK,
resolved that although it felt "an arms embargo would be neither
appropriate or effective," was considering providing humanitarian
aid, which is a very poor idea indeed if the military's past
record of aid appropriations for profit is any indication.

Washington, whose influence Lisbon considers critical, is
hesitant to comment on the affair until it can get a "completely
accurate picture of what took place," but nevertheless would
contact Indonesia to "express our concerns."  So far, Washington
has ignored a resolution sponsored by several members of Congress
asking for the suspension of military aid to Indonesia, resolving
that the $2.3 million dollars in military aid for fiscal year
1991-1992 which began October 1, would go through as planned.
State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher explained that
military training programs which the U.S. funds would "expose the
trainee to democratic ideas and humanitarian standards," and that
"we think that a continued and well focused military assistance
program for Indonesia can contribute to the professionalization
of the Indonesian military." However, Boucher failed to explain
why over 25 years of such aid has not produced these
"humanitarian" results or why they should suddenly be produced
now.  President George Bush, to whom the mourners had appealed to
for help in their protest banners, has said nothing about East
Timor, but he did say on the day of the massacre (in reference to
Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) that he remains "deeply committed to
building closer ties with the Asia-Pacific region," which
presumably also includes Indonesia.

Bush's excitement about developments in Indochina is
understandable, especially with Cambodia's new prospects for
peace, multi-party democracy, and capitalism so close on the
horizon. Under the U.S.-backed UN peace treaty between the
Cambodian rebel factions and the Vietnamese-backed government
signed in October, the Supreme National Council will begin ruling
the country until the scheduled 1993 elections.  These hopeful
changes in Cambodia (which Indonesia's President Suharto has been
working to accomplish for at least a decade) warranted long,
visible articles in the New York Times nearly every day during
the week following the East Timor massacre.  One might think it
is commendable that in a world of tragedy that hope is being
given predominance over violence.  Unfortunately, it is not even
the case that hope is being emphasized.  The story that has
played large in all of Philip Shenon's "Special to the New York
Times" articles is the violence of the notorious Khmer Rouge,
whom he stresses still have a chance to to return to power.
Shenon has placed great emphasis in each of his articles on the
"reign of terror" which the Khmer Rouge began after they
"overran" Phnom Penh in 1975.  In one article, he writes that
"from 1975 to 1979, more than one million Cambodians were either
executed or died from ill treatment, hunger, and disease."  For
comparison, in the same week, none of the three pieces on East
Timor pointed out that between 1975 to 1979, more than 200,000
East Timorese (a greater proportion of the population than those
who died in Cambodia) were also either executed or died from ill
treatment, hunger, and disease.  The Indonesian occupation of
East Timor is never referred to as "a reign of terror." The
significant difference, of course, is that the Khmer Rouge are
communists, and thus the disrupters of American security
interests, whereas the Indonesians are the defenders of regional
stability, and thus our allies.

Some say the cold war is over and we are living in a new world
order.  The world is beginning to recognize the legitimacy and
the right to self-determination of small nations which have long
been parts of larger empires.  East Timor, the Baltics of the
Pacific, has yet to be granted that right.  The United States
claims to condemn, out of principle, "naked aggression" of one
larger country against a smaller neighbor. Indonesia, which
annexed East Timor in 1975 and declared it Indonesia's 27th
Province in 1976, has yet to be so condemned by the United
States.  As we pass the 16th anniversary of the Indonesian
invasion of East Timor on December 7th, we can sadly expect to
see more continued violence and brutality.  Recent reports have
indicated that house to house searches are under way, and at
least 80 more people, said to have witnessed the massacre, have
been marched out to pits, stripped naked, and machine gunned by
hooded executioners.  In the current political climate, these
slaughters are just thorns in the side of realpolitik, and the
sooner they are plucked out and forgotten about the better.  But
at a time when the United States should have less and less of a
need to support murderous regimes in the name of the defense
against communism, it is difficult to understand why we
unapologetically continue to do so.  Chalk it up to habit, I
guess.

Loren Ryter (92.5) is a Brown undergraduate concentrating
in Development Studies and East Asian Studies.

For further reading

 Budiardjo, Carmel and Liem Soei Liong.  The War Against East
Timor.   (London:  Zed Books, Ltd., 1984).

 Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman.  The Washington Connection
and  Third World Fascisim.  (Boston:  South End Press, 1979.)

 Dunn, James.  Timor:  A People Betrayed.  (Queensland:
Jacaranda Press,  1983).

  East Timor:  Five Years After the Indonesian Invasion.
Cultural Survival  Occasional Paper no. 2.  (Cambridge:  January
1981.)

TAPOL  Bulletin  (periodical).

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the efforts of the Coordinator of Task
Force Indonesia, who tirelessly compiled reports from world wire
services and newspapers, statements by non-government
organizations such as Amnesty International and TAPOL, and
unpublished interviews during the week following the massacre and
made them available to the public in an electronic format.
Without such a medium, most of this information would remain
unknown.  For those who wish to obtain over 100 pages of printed
documentation, Charles Scheiner has offered to make it available
for $15 to cover photocopying and shipping costs.  His address is
PO Box 1182, White Plains, NY 10602.
========================================================================
Date:    Tue, 14 Apr 1992 18:58:00 EDT
From: "Bruno"
Subject: Who Cares About East Timor? (ST701831)
X-Topic: Entry #2630 of BBOARD.POLITICS
To: "BBOARD.POLITICS.2630"

Posted on 18 Jan 1992 at 18:06:45 by Loren S. Ryter (104770)

Who Cares About East Timor?                   (ST701831)

Here is a shorter summary of the East Timor Massacre, and an announcement
that Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman will be coming to Brown.
===========================
Who cares about a Massacre in East Timor?

by Loren Ryter  (January 17, 1992)


Perhaps I shouldn't be too critical about what George Bush
didn't say about East Timor on his recent trip to Asia. After his
graceless gesture in Japan, he might be advised to keep his mouth
closed as tightly as possible. Still, even if he had whisked through
Asia healthfully and happily, creating American jobs and military
bases wherever he went, he certainly would not have bothered to
comment on the cold-blooded massacre of over a hundred East
Timorese by Indonesian troops last November, or on the tortures and
further killings which continued while he was touring the region. To
comment on the grotesque affair would open up a whole can of
embarrassing worms.

It is an embarrassment that the Bush administration's reaction
to a massacre which in terms of relative population was easily fifty
times as severe as the 1989 democracy crackdown in Tiananmen
Square, has been characterized not by cries of indignation but rather
by nervous silence. In the wake of the Gulf War, it is particularly
embarrassing that the US has never once condemned the "naked
aggression" of Indonesia in the sixteen years since it invaded and
annexed its tiny neighbor, proclaiming East Timor the 27th Province
of Indonesia, just as the villain Saddam Hussein had proclaimed
Kuwait the 19th Province of Iraq.

Since the Indonesian annexation of East Timor, over 200,000
people, or one-third of the pre-invasion population, have died by
execution or famine resulting from the willful destruction of crops
and the withholding of food used as a tactic to starve out the
resistance. The Indonesians believed that such intense military
pressure, applied with the help of American made and supplied
military hardware, would crush the East Timorese resistance once
and for all. Instead, as demonstrated by the tenacious persistence of
the East Timorese in defying Indonesian authority and proclaiming
their solemn desire for self-determination and independence at the
risk of death, the resistance movement is clearly as strong as ever.

The massacre of November 12th can be seen as an Indonesian
reaction to brazen defiance. For nearly a year, the Indonesian army
had been pursuing a campaign aimed at intimidating the East
Timorese into submission and silence in the presence of a planned
Portuguese Parliamentary mission which was to investigate the
human rights situation in East Timor. Soldiers had gone door to door
warning people that if anyone dared to speak to the Portuguese, the
army would execute every member of their families to the seventh
generation. When the Portuguese were forced to suspend the mission
due to various last minute Indonesian stipulations, the hopes of the
East Timorese people to prove to the world their desire to be freed of
the brutal Indonesian occupation were shattered.

Frustrated at having no outlet for their dissent, the East
Timorese used the occasion of a funeral procession for two youths
slain in a church by Indonesian plainclothes policemen to unfurl the
protest banners they had been painstakingly making by candlelight
over the previous weeks.  Over three thousand people were moving
toward the Santa Cruz cemetery, waving these banners of
independence, when hundreds of Indonesian troops marched in
formation from army trucks toward them, raised their American M-
16 Automatic rifles, and opened fire directly into the crowd without
so much as a warning shot.  They continued to fire for between five
and ten minutes, picking off survivors or beating them to death with
their rifle butts.

One person who had his skull fractured by an M-16 but
survived was Allan Nairn of the New Yorker.  He was one of several
foreign journalists who witnessed this massacre and managed to
escape to tell about it.  He and Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio, who
also was beaten, will be coming to Brown in early February to give
their eye-witness accounts of the latest massacre in East Timor.  I say
"latest" because East Timorese spokesmen  say that the only thing
that differentiated this massacre from other massacres in East Timor
was the presence of foreign journalists.  The few lines of
communication that remain open to East Timor report that witnesses
to the massacre have been rounded up by Indonesian soldiers, driven
out to mass graves, stripped naked, and executed.  Others have been
arrested and may stand trial for subversion, which carries the death
penalty.

Despite the eyewitness reports of foreign observers and even
the availability of a video tape smuggled out of the country by a
British cameraman, the US State Department saw it fit to wait for the
results of Indonesia's own National Investigation Commission to
report its findings before making a comment on the incident.  After
the report was finally released on Christmas Day, State Department
spokesman Joseph Snyder said only that "we believe the commission
has take a serious and responsible approach" and that "we consider it
crucial to see how the Indonesian legal system will deal with those
members of the security forces who used or condoned excessive
force."

The Commission's report concluded that the "incident" occurred
as a "spontaneous reaction by soldiers not under command control" to
the "wild and unruly" behavior of the youth in the crowd.  It placed
the blame for the incident on the crowd itself, which had been incited
by the remnants of the "gang of security disrupters" [the resistance].
The report also claimed that the foreigners actively participated.  It
refuted testimony that the victim's bodies had been buried in mass
graves by exhuming a single corpse which was buried in a coffin and
offering it as evidence to the contrary.  So far, the only action which
has been taken against those involved was the replacement of two
regional commanders.  This is no consolation, and may even be worse.
Brig. Gen. Theo Syafei, who replaced Brig. Gen. Rudolf Warouw as East
Timor Operational Commander, was quoted as saying "I'm not as
patient as Warouw."  If the hasty slaying of nearly two hundred
civilians at a funeral procession is patience, we can only fear what
will happen when Syafei loses his temper.

We here at Brown have a rare opportunity to hear the accounts
of two witnesses to the latest massacre in East Timor when they come
to speak at a forum early next month. (Date and Location to be
announced.)  Their testimony will prove that the Commission's report
is nothing more than a shameless whitewash, whose only chance for
popular acceptance is popular ignorance.  In the "New World Order"
where our country claims to stand up to dictators and murderous
regimes out of principle, someone should tell George Bush to wipe the
egg off his face.
======================================================================== 14
Received: from BROWNVM (ST701831) by BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU (Mailer R2.08 R208004)
 with BSMTP id 1605; Wed, 15 Apr 92 12:28:24 EDT
Date:         Wed, 15 Apr 92 12:27:07 EDT
From:         Loren Ryter <ST701831@BROWNVM>
Subject:      migration
To:           Su-Lyn <ST101019@BROWNVM>

perhaps you can remind our friend that East Timor is part of an
island.  Ever hear of the East Timorese boat people?  The
Timorese community in Australia and Portugual, prob the only two
places where there are East Timorese, numbers no more than
about 10,000 total.

--Loren
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean