From: ST101019@brownvm.brown.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean
Subject: Notes from the Lusitania Express
Date: 17 Apr 1992 04:48:01 GMT
Organization: Brown University
NNTP-Posting-Host: brownvm.brown.edu
Disclaim1: Brown University accepts no responsibility for the
Disclaim2: contents of this article.  Please do not sue us!
News-Software: tBRUNO v0.9

Just in case you don't know, the Lusitania Express was a Portuguese peace
ship with students and journalists from all over the world on board.
The aim of the mission was to lay wreaths at the Santa Cruz cemetery where
the massacre took place. The Lusitania Express, armed with TV cameras and
flowers, was met by an armada of Indonesian warships. These were international
waters. Remember, the UN does NOT accept Indonesian sovereignty over
East Timor.
========================================================================
Date:    Tue, 14 Apr 1992 18:59:21 EDT
From: "Bruno"
Subject: Thoughts from the Lusitania, East Timor
X-Topic: Entry #2830 of BBOARD.POLITICS
To: "BBOARD.POLITICS.2830"


THOUGHTS FROM THE LUSITANIA EXPRESSO

by Lorne Rider

11 March 1992

Timor Sea

For those of us aboard the _Lusitania Expresso_, it has been an
astonishing Wednesday morning, but half way around the world it
is still Super Tuesday.  Anchored just outside the territorial
waters of East Timor and surrounded by three Indonesian warships,
it's hard to imagine the banter being broadcast over American
airwaves right now.  Yet I can state with conviction that none of
the candidates are putting East Timor high on their foreign
policy agenda.

Especially for former CIA director George Bush, who understands
fully the embarrassing parallels between Iraq's illegal
occupation of Kuwait and Indonesia's illegal annexation of East
Timor, any mention of the situation would further puncture his
already-deflated "foreign policy president" balloon.

Even for the enlightened Jerry Brown, who has been afforded the
luxury of becoming a presidential candidate by his family's flow
of Indonesian oil wealth, East Timor (whose oil reserves could
make Australia a net exporter for a half-century), is a touchy
subject indeed.  Only Tom Harkin had kept the genocidal situation
in East Timor on the congressional agenda, but in the end, Harkin
must have felt that US-sponsored slaughter does not command
sufficient American concern to turn it into the cornerstone of
his campaign.

Although our video is more dramatic than pictures of a man
wearing a gas mask in a tent, I'd be truly surprised if any of it
pre-empted Super Tuesday exit poll results.  In Portugal the
story of a peace boat's face off with the Indonesian navy is a
story writ as large as the Gulf War.  One might think that images
of an unidentified ship suspensefully trailing the _Lusitania
Expresso_ throughout the night, followed by pictures of our dawn
reception by the force of Indonesian warships, helicopters, and
spy planes, might pique the curiosity of network media moghuls.
But as we were informed days ago by CBS and NBC:  no blood, no
story.

It's a sadistic paradox.  Sinking a boat full of 120 students and
journalists from 21 countries, a scenario which some Indonesian
hard-liners publicly advocated, would have guaranteed us a flash
of US media attention.  But unlike a quarter of a million East
Timorese who have died in the past 16 years, we are not martyrs,
and none of us ever intended to be.

Despite the prudence the Indonesian navy showed in their restrain
from physical attack which would have been recorded by dozens of
cameras, the unchallengeable threat of violence was never absent.
The captain of the _Lusitania Expresso_ was told seven times to
turn back or risk retaliation.  At no time did the Indonesian
commander allow us to plea the case we had hoped to articulate:
international law does not recognize Indonesia's authority over
East Timor and we should therefore be allowed to proceed without
further molestation.  The captain, who had been informed by
Reuters in Jakarta last night that the Indonesians unequivocally
intended to sink the unarmed peace ship, was not prepared to run
the risk of provocation by his persistence.

We were prevented from achieving our objective of laying flowers
at the Santa Cruz cemetery in memory of the 180 East Timorese
massacred last November.  Yet in the context of East Timorese
tradition, we were still able to honor those slain.  The East
Timorese believe that flowers thrown into the sea to pay
reverence to the deceased will be received by their spirits on
the peak of Mount Ramelau, East Timor's highest mountain.  After
reciting words of prayer in a dozen languages, we threw wreaths,
flowers, and olive branches given to us by the East Timorese
communities in Lisbon and Darwin into the sea, all while navy
helicopters circled noisily above.

On our voyage home to the United States, we feel contented with
the idea that we have set a historic precedent today.  For the
first time, a group of individuals from many countries have acted
independently from their governments to uphold international law
as decided by the United Nations.  We return with the profound
understanding that individuals can succeed, however slightly, in
drawing world attention to injustice which our leaders, whose
hands are too deep in the coffers, seek to conceal.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean