>
> Not picking up on the issues raised by Hardie, but the analogy made by Horta.
>
> Surely, it is a faulty analogy in the extreme. The E Timorese
> anti-war demonstrators had it spot on.
There is a great documentary called "The Diplomat" made by some people who set out to film Ramos-Horta and got caught up in the whirlwind, quite unexpectedly, as Habibi anounced elections. It is a very revealing film. Ramos-Horta at one point is calling the Indonesian collaborators, "the worst kind of opportunist puppets". Five minutes of film and a few months later, they're good mates and he is denying ever having said any such thing. He's a political operator - unusual mostly in allowing us to peek into the operation...
I think that it is probably more than little pointless to worry about East Timorese foreign policy. They don't have one, just as you can't read too much into the fact that Micronesia is a staunch ally of Israel in the UN. ET officially supports the Indonesian line in Aceh, and even more astonishingly, in West Papua ,where, incidentally, the Indonesian state and its Al-Qaeda mates are busy waging jihad on the local population and the occasional American teacher. Surely if the ET leadership followed self-interest, they would avoid multiplying jihadi elements around their neck of the woods, so I doubt this boils down exclusively to callous hypocrisy.
Thiago
------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: www-mail.usyd.edu.au