01-28-2008, 11:54 PM
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#16 (permalink)
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| Older..but.....wiser?
Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Kent
Posts: 2,550
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Here you are..... Quote:
The entire duration of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, from 1975 until the pull-out in 1999, coincided with continuous Western arms supply and training to the Suharto's regime in Indonesia. There's a detailed description of that trade here starting...
Negotiations began between an Australian company and Indonesia on extracting the vast oil resources on both the island itself and in the Timor Gap, the seabed between Timor and Australia which is just of the coast of East Timor.
By December 1989, the negotiations were finally settled with a joint agreement to exploit the Timor Sea, the Timor Gap Treaty, involving Australian, British and U.S. companies, among others. A month after the Dili massacre, the Australian government alone approved with Indonesia eleven oil production contracts for exploitation of a jointly controlled area of the sea
[...] Taking into account the political and diplomatic support that the mentioned States gave to the Indonesian Government and the supply of planes and other war equipment used to fight the Timorese Resistance and the covering up that they did of the crimes committed against the People of East Timor, we can say that it were the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Vatican, Japan and other powers who invaded and occupied the territory through the Indonesian intermediary. The soldiers were Indonesian but the interests and the support were mainly those of the Western powers.
So, yes, the 1991 massacre was the one glimpse of high publicity into decades of state terrorism and it made the international news because of on the spot reporting which was smuggled out past Australian censorship attempts:
The massacre was witnessed by two American journalists — Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn (who were also attacked) — and caught on videotape by Max Stahl, who was filming undercover for Yorkshire Television in the UK. The camera crew managed to smuggle the video footage to Australia. They gave it to Saskia Kouwenberg, a Dutch journalist to avoid it being seized and confiscated by the Australian authorities, who had been tipped off by Indonesia and subjected the camera crew to a strip-search when they arrived in Darwin. The video footage was used in the First Tuesday documentary In Cold Blood: The Massacre of East Timor, shown on ITV in the UK in January 1992, as well as numerous other, more recent documentaries.
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