To: KLP who wrote (134813 ) 5/29/2004 2:41:13 PM From: Maurice Winn Read Replies (1) | Respond to KLP, regarding East Timor, Kissinger sooled Indonesia onto them. He flew out one day from Indonesia and Indonesia drove into East Timor the next. Permission was given, the same as Saddam was given permission by the USA to attack Kuwait. According to documents released by the National Security Archive (NSA), in December of 2001, this invasion was given the green light by the US government. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger met with Suharto on December 6, 1975. In response to Suharto saying "We want your understanding if it was deemed necessary to take rapid or drastic action [in East Timor]." Ford replied, "We will understand and not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have." Kissinger similarly agreed, with reservations about the use of US-made arms in the invasion. Similarly, Australian governments protested loudly in public after the event but had already provided private assurances that no substantive action would be taken. This was an unpopular policy with the Australian public, as the heroic actions of the Timorese people during World War II were well-remembered, and vigorous protests took place in Australia, but to no avail. It is widely believed that the primary motivating factor for the Whitlam and Fraser governments lack of opposition was the possibility of oil being found in the waters between Australia and Timor. >encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com During the invasion mass killings and rapes took place: 60,000 Timorese were dead by mid-February. > Several Timorese groups fought a resistance war against Indonesian forces for the independence of East Timor, during which many atrocities and human rights violations by the Indonesian army were reported. A sad highpoint was the killing of many East Timorese youngsters (reportedly over 250) at a cemetery in Dili on November 12, 1991. In total, estimates of the number of deaths in the war range from 100,000 to 350,000—out of a total East Timorese population of only 800,000. The Dili Massacre was to prove the turning point for sympathy to the East Timorese cause in the world arena as, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union that same year, the "Marxist bogey" that Indonesia had often used against the idea of an independent East Timor had vanished. >Activists in Portugal, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere pressured their governments to take action, with US President Bill Clinton eventually threatening Indonesia, in dire economic straits already, with the withdrawal of IMF loans. The Indonesian government consented to withdraw its troops and allow a multinational force into Timor to stablilize the area. >
