According to Chomsky, when Suharto stepped down in favor of Habibe, Habibe surprised a lot of people by allowing a referendum on independence in East Timor. This prompted the Indonesian military, with lots of help from the US in terms of money and advisors, to train a counterinsurgency corps during late 1998 and early 1999, which it then deployed in East Timor in early 1999.
Predictably, they started committing atrocities, so that by the end of the spring about 3,000-5,000 people had been killed (as Chomsky pointed out, about twice as many people as the Serbs were believed to have killed in Kosovo in the 12 months before the bombing started).
This continued for about 2 weeks after the referendum until Australian pressure prompted the US to call off the Indonesian generals. Since then, the US has delayed the arrival of forensic experts, presumably to make the task of uncovering the scale of atrocities more difficult.
The most striking thing about this is US influence - when the US wanted the atrocities to stop, it stopped. Intervention was never required - a simple phone call from Clinton to Wiranto would have sufficed.
Does everyone agree with this verison of events? Anybody have any thoughts on this?
Brett