You might also believe, if you were naive enough, that the UN, humiliated by Indonesia, would call upon the military might of the USA to guarantee the lives of the little folk in East Timor, that American troops would bombard Jakarta in the way they bombed Belgrade and Bagdad with President Clinton in the star role on our TV screens telling us, with the heavy weight of responsibility on his shoulders, that America is the indefatigable defender of human rights. All this would be possible were it not for the fact that the US is the most reliable ally of the Indonesian tyrants and if, behind the media circus, everybody, when push comes to shove, doesn't give a damn about East Timor. However that may be, East Timor is a blueprint of oppression. But Timor is too far away for it to be of interest. All the same it proved to be a real televisual catch for the summer programming schedules, particularly when you bear in mind that the massacres began more than 20 years ago.
Indignation burns out fast when a different focus is required every three months.
Reassuringly we can count on the world coming up with a new focus soon and the journalists will have something to report because, for sure, East Timor will not entertain us through the Christmas period. And while we wait for the next catastrophe the Indonesian mercenaries have finished destroying Dili, killed or flushed out the population and looted all there was to loot. They are now on their way, with their spoils, leaving behind them a terrorised population and a few blue helmets who have come to guarantee the status quo - meanwhile the world can go back to sleep. For East Timor read oil. But above all this little plot of land represents a safety valve for the internal colonisation policies for the Indonesian archipelago.