>Your correspondent is confused. The question of Australian, etc.,
>intervention in East Timor never arose, simply as a matter of logic.
>Outsiders could no more "intervene" in Indonesian-occupied ET than they
>could in Nazi-occupied France. The sole claim that Indonesia had was that
>the US had authorized its aggression and slaughters, and actively
>participated in them, right until September 1999. My own view was that no
>peacekeeping forces would have been necessary in this
>Portuguese-administered terrority under effective UN jurisdiction if the US
>had informed its friends among the INDON generals that the game is over.
>That judgment was in fact confirmed in mid-September when Clinton finally
>made some ambiguous gestures, and the generals turned tail within a few
>hours -- something that could have been done for the previous 24 years. An
>Australian-led UN peacekeeping force then entered the territory, after the
>Indonesian military pulled out. Was I in favor of that? Absolutely.
>There were still plenty of Indonesian-run and US-trained and -armed
>paramilitary terrorists roaming around, and I'm all in favor of protecting
>people from them. I would also have been in favor of the USAF airdropping
>food to hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in the mountains
>to which they had been driven by the forces armed and trained by the US,
>and I would be in favor -- right now -- of the US informing the Indonesians
>to release the 150,000 people they are still holding in concentration camps
>in West Timor (and probably elsewhere in Indonesia). I would also be in
>favor the US and UK paying huge reparations for the crimes they have
>committed, right into September 1999, at which point 750,000 of the 888,000
>population had been violently expelled from their homes, and most of the
>country destroyed. If your correspondent regards this as support of
>"American imperialism," too bad: I would suggest some more careful thought.
>
>I've written and spoken very critically of Australian imperialism, not much
>here (where it is not important), but in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra,
>and on Australian radio and TV, even at nationally-televised press
>conference of the Australian national press association in Canberra,
>devoted to denouncing Australia's crimes, and particularly its high
>officials, including the much-admired statesman Gareth Evans, who was a
>particular target. That's easily accessible in print, in a book published
>in Australia and then republished here ("Powers and Prospects").
He's going to forward a just-finished article on ET shortly.
Doug