bboc/16_Fascist_annexion_of_East_Timor.tex

\chapter{Fascist annexion of East Timor}

\chapterauthor{Jacques JURQUET}

The island of Timor is part of the Sunda Islands archipelago. 

Its eastern part is located 350 kilometers from Indonesia and 500 kilometers north of Australia.

The indigenous population, about 600,000 inhabitants in 1975, 90\% peasant, was strongly marked by the Portuguese colonization that lasted for a little more than four and a half centuries.
Thus, unlike the Islamic populations living in the western part, the East Timorese have switched from animist practices to Christianity.
The Catholic clergy still retains an already long-standing popular influence.

In 1975, illiteracy was widespread. The sanitary conditions were very bad:
infant mortality rate of 40\% very high, tuberculosis and malaria widespread, for the whole country only twenty doctors all residing in the capital.
There were only thirty kilometers of paved road, which made it practically impossible to provide care in the countryside.

During World War II, the Japanese landed in East Timor and took their place by arms against the Portuguese.
Their violent occupation cost the lives of some 50,000 Timorese, but both then and after the war, these victims remained ignored by the Western world.
Their percentage of the total population of East Timor was, however, the highest of all those concerning the massacres perpetrated against the other peoples of Asia.

Thus, in 1945, after the defeat of the Japanese, East Timor appeared more than ever as a strategic issue that had long been awaited by distant Britain and near Australia.

In addition, the Indonesian rulers, freed from Dutch colonialism, considered this country to be part of their own and, at the very time when Sukarno still ruled without very strong opposition, hostile actions to the Portuguese colonialists were developed by some far-right activists.
In June 1959, in the region of Viqueque, there was a revolt manipulated most likely by these elements against Portuguese settlers living and working on farms.
The colonial repression was immediate and extremely violent. It killed about 1,000 East Timorese, and hundreds more were imprisoned in inhumane conditions.

From then on, the anti-colonialist patriotic sentiment of the indigenous peoples experienced a new boom throughout East Timor.

Moreover, the General Assembly of the United Nations would soon vote, on December 14, 1960, the famous \enquote{Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples}.
The world was living in the era of decolonization.

The maturation of the national claim was reinforced following the \enquote{Carnation Revolution} in Portugal.
Indeed, on May 16, 1974, General Spinola, the new head of state of this country, announced that the Portuguese colonies should become free.

The rise of nationalism was in the eyes of history quite rapid and caused as everywhere contradictions on strategy and tactics among the people concerned.

The Timorese Social Democratic Association (ASDT), led by a group of \enquote{progressive Catholic} intellectuals, became much more influential than other political parties.
In 1974, its founders, Francisco Xavier do Amaral and Nicolau Lobato came under strong pressure from younger elements such as Roque Rodriguès and Abilio Araujo, who closely sympathized with Mao Zedong's ideas and principles.
So when Australia announced its support for Indonesia's intention to annex East Timor, these young leaders decided to radicalize their positions, and on September 12, 1974, transformed the ASDT into the \enquote{Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor}, Fretilin.

At the beginning of 1975, this party, which had become the most popular, dominated all the other parties.

It declared that the only possible way for the people to be freed from exploitation and oppression in all its forms \enquote{was none other than that of independence}.

For several years, Indonesia, led by the fascist General Suharto, had been preparing, not without hesitation, the implementation of its project to take control of East Timor.
Indonesia acts in a skillfull and steady way trough the actions of an organization linked to the army, the BAKIN (Agency for the Coordination of National Intelligence Services). The BAKIN can be compared to the secret services of all capitalist countries, and to the Nazi Gestapo in particular.
False news were broadcast by Indonesia's national radio, claiming that Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese military advisers and armaments had been sent to East Timor to support a \enquote{minority group of communist intellectuals}.

The agents of this very special service managed to provoke a rupture between the leaders of the UDT and the Fretilin.
They did not go out of their way by proclaiming that Indonesia would never accept a communist government sitting in East Timor, next to Indonesia itself.
On April 14, 1975, the leader of the UDT, Domingos do Oliveira, impressed by this warning, cancelled a trip with Nicolau Lobato, leader of Fretilin, to visit Africa formerly occupied by Portuguese colonialism, as well as Europe, that is to say most likely Portugal where many Portuguese anti-colonialists were active, including in government circles.

The only one now to represent the anti-colonialist nationalism deeply rooted among the popular masses, Fretilin eliminated in 17 days of civil war the Apodeti, the \enquote{Timorese Popular and Democratic Association} supported by Bakin and the CIA, as well as the UDT which implored the Portuguese colonialists to stay.

The revolutionary patriots began to organize the management of independent East Timor from August 1975 and worked hard to overcome the many difficulties bequeathed to them by the history of their country.

Supported by the vast majority of the people, Fretilin proclaimed, on 28 November 1975, the independence of the \enquote{Democratic Republic of East Timor}.
Its president, Francesco do Amaral, exalted the people's armed struggles for independence and declared:
\enquote{We are appealing to Indonesia for peace, but we are sticking to the slogan: independence or death}.

In a subsequent report to the United Nations Security Council, Australian MP Ken Fry, who was in East Timor from September to December 1975, provides the following testimony:
\enquote{We found here a responsible and moderate administration that had the strong support of the Timorese people...
Like all Australians who visited Portuguese Timor during this period, I returned full of admiration for the Fretilin Central Committee.
I was enormously impressed by his moderation, integrity and intelligence, as he faced a very difficult situation.}
(Cf. \emph{Timor-Est génocide oublié, Droits d'un peuple et raisons d'États} (East Timor forgotten genocide, Rights of a people and reasons of States) by Gabriel Defert, page 83, L'Harmattan 1992)

Preceded by kommando actions and military incursions violating the border between Indonesia and East Timor, an aggression by the Indonesian army (Abri) was launched on the night of 6 to 7 December 1975.
About twenty warships sprayed shells on the center of the capital, Dili, and its surroundings.
Then, around five o'clock in the morning, a general landing was coordinated with the parachuting of many soldiers on the waterfront.
In all this operation engaged ten thousand men, under the command of General Murdani, right-hand man of the fascist dictator Suharto.
But the fierce resistance of Fretilin soldiers, grouped in the Falintil (Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor) prevented him from occupying the capital in twenty-four hours according to the planned plan.
The attackers did not manage to occupy the entire city until after three weeks.

One could mention the serious military blunders that led to the drowning in the open sea of many paratroopers, or to fighting between invading units themselves, but the most important, from the historical point of view, lies in the manifestations of savagery of these Indonesian troops supervised by officers worthy of the Nazi SS.
The latter were guilty of deliberate massacres.
From the first two days they had one hundred and fifty prisoners executed in cold blood on the port, most of whom were civilians, men and women, who did not belong to the Fretilin or the Falintil.
These victims, once dead, were thrown into the sea.
In addition, the population of the southeastern suburbs of the city was forcibly gathered on a stadium, where they were summarily mowed down by bursts of automatic weapons.
There were only a few survivors, wounded who managed to hide their bodies under corpses.

From then on, Timorese populations and fighters adopted the tactic of withdrawal and abandoned some cities to continue the struggle in the countryside and mountains.
Indonesian radio itself provoked a patriotic stiffening by making terrifying threats, including the threat to kill all the communist soldiers of Fretilin.

The last Portuguese soldiers still present on the island of Atauro fled on December 8 to Darwin, definitively ending 460 years of Portuguese colonial presence.

The Indonesian offensive did not allow General Murdani to accomplish the plan of conquest of the whole country. 
The Falintil, helped by their knowledge of the terrain, managed to keep two-thirds of the territory under their control.

So the Abri was forced to send new reinforcements to conquer the main cities.
10,000 marines landed to reinforce the ten thousand soldiers already present, but held in check.
They managed to occupy the largest cities, but in no way eliminated the forces of resistance.
The Fretilin Central Committee retreated to the south-west of the island, to Ainaro.
Eventually the Indonesian troops, unable to crush the Timorese guerrillas, reached the figure of 32,000 men in East Timor, while a reserve of another 10,000 soldiers was stationed in West Timor.

For their part, the Falintil consisted of 2,500 Timorese from the Portuguese army of occupation, 7,000 infantrymen who had performed military service in the latter in the past and 10,000 volunteers without effective military training.

In all its communiqués from 1975 to 1977, Fretilin ensured that 90\% of the territory was kept under its authority, and, while this assertion can be taken as somewhat exaggerated, it should be noted that the few journalists who were able to visit the country thanks to the Indonesian authorities all indicated that the Abri controlled only 30\% of the country.
This situation of relative failure did not prevent the government of Jakarta from proclaiming on 17 July 1976 that East Timor was now the 27th province of Indonesia.

The behavior of Indonesian soldiers and officers was fierce. They ruthlessly massacred women, children, old men in all the villages where they managed to penetrate.
In 1976, all the Chinese in the city of Maubara were gathered on the beach and shot dead, while their wives and daughters were raped.
In the same year, the Abri used chemical weapons along with napalm bombs. The Western capitalist states and the United States supplied almost all the armaments used.
In addition to the multifaceted support of the United States, contracts in this case bound Indonesia with the Netherlands, Australia, Spain and the Federal Republic of Germany.
For its contribution, France sent Alouette helicopters and Puma 330s.

The enormous superiority in weapons of the Abri did not allow it, from the end of 1975 to the end of 1977, to achieve the strategic objectives set at the beginning of the invasion.
The continuous attacks of the Falintil, ambushes followed by retreat to the still free areas, imposed heavy losses on the conquerors.
If we add up the toll of the fighting provided by Fretilin during the years 1975 to 1979, we reach the figure of 17,000 invaders killed, to which must be added thousands of wounded.

The losses suffered by both the Fretilin and the Timorese civilian population are difficult to assess if we take them back to that period alone, but it is clear that they were already far greater than those of the aggressors.
The latter had sophisticated armaments, including in addition to heavy and light artillery, absolute control of the air allowing terror bombings.

An event with adverse consequences occurred on September 7, 1977.
Strategic disagreements had already opposed during the previous year the president of Fretilin to the members of its political committee.
He had proposed to enter into negotiations with the occupier.
Moreover, he believed that the Central Committee should take the initiative to ask the United Nations to hold a referendum on self-determination.
Xavier do Amaral was then deposed and arrested by the other Fretilin leaders, who accentuated the radical nature of their proclamations and activities.
Accused of treason, he was soon to fall into the hands of the Abri, was not executed but sent to a camp. His replacement was Nicolau Lobato.

Under these circumstances, the Abri decided to do everything possible to destroy the Resistance.
From September 1977 to March 1979, it launched three offensives as part of a strategic campaign of \enquote{encirclement and annihilation}.

The primary objective was to isolate the guerrilla fighters from their logistical support, the Timorese population.
Then came two successive campaigns reducing the civilian population to starvation, in 1979 and 1981.

These military operations used new and modern armaments, bombing aircraft, and the systematic destruction of crops under the slogan \enquote{seek and destroy}.
The resistance was fierce, but eventually suffered inevitable setbacks.

The Catholic clergy did not abandon the patriots. Here is what a priest from Dili wrote to two Dominican sisters:
\enquote{Since the end of September, the war has intensified further. The bombing lasts from morning to night.
Hundreds of human beings die every day and their bodies are left to graze by scavengers (if it's not bullets that kill you, it's epidemics).
Some villages were completely destroyed and some tribes decimated.
Barbarism, cruelty, unspeakable destruction, executions for no reason, in a word \enquote{organized hell} has taken deep root in Timor...
No one but Indonesian soldiers can be seen in the streets of Dili.
There are very few Timorese left, they are refugees in the forests, dead or in prison.} (\emph{Ibid.}, work by G. Defert, page 110)

After some time and after furious engagements, the Fretilin fighters and sixty thousand unarmed civilians withdrew to the mountain areas deep in the jungle.

The surviving key leaders were captured after fighting of appalling intensity and killed.
The president of Fretilin, Nicolau Lobato, was first wounded, then died on the plane that transported him to Dili, probably assassinated.
With the exception of those who belonged to the external delegation of the Government of the Democratic Republic of East Timor and three members of the Central Committee, all Fretilin leaders were exterminated.

Fascist barbarism, quietly approved and supported by the Americans and deliberately ignored by Western and Australian rulers, had the same characteristics as that of the Hitlerites.
Amnesty International spoke openly of the systematic executions of civilians and soldiers who had surrendered or had been captured by the Abri.
It was also learned that some of them had been burned alive after being tortured, others had been thrown into the void from helicopters.

In several mountainous regions, thousands of Timorese were killed in systematic cleansings.

Villages in which residents who had not had time to flee had remained were turned into special camps.
Numbering about 150, these camps kept in detention 250,000 to 350,000 people who had no food, carried only rags on their bodies, suffered from epidemics without receiving any care.

A Western journalist who managed to visit one of these camps, probably under the indonesian Red Cross, gave this mind-blowing account:
\enquote{Men, women and children, all showed traces of deprivation: frail bodies, dressed in rags, emaciated and empty faces, already marked by death.
The children's bloated bellies were so protruding above their lean waist that the little ones had to take off their shorts if they didn't want to lose them.} (\emph{Ibid.}, p. 118).

Tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery and other infections caused the death of tens of thousands of these people who lived about the same existence as that of the Nazi death camps (except for the industrial character of the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz).
Those who tried to move away to try to find food were shot without warning.

However, although 80\% of their strength was destroyed, the Falintil did not surrender.

One of the three surviving members of the Central Committee, Alexander Gusmao known as Xanana, endowed with legendary energy and courage, managed to reconstitute some units and launched bold operations to the heart of Dili.
In the summer of 1980, these patriots managed to sabotage a newly built Indonesian television station in the Timorese capital.

The new management of Fretilin decided to change its strategy.

It was necessary to take into account the situation created throughout the country of which all the cities were occupied, as well as many rural regions.
The Falintil were no longer numerous enough to carry out large-scale operations as before the failures at the end of 1978.
A decision was made to reorganize the surviving forces into small units capable of carrying out rapid operations followed by immediate withdrawals making them elusive.

Nicolau Lobato's successor was Xanana Gusmao, who had been involved in the struggle since the days of the ASDT. He became the new leader of Fretilin and the Resistance.

The change in strategy was not limited to military matters, but also manifested itself ideologically.
Instead of a single formation holding all the truths to lead the just struggle of the Timorese people, Fretilin opened up to others despite the ancient contradictions.
The only point required of a volunteer to enter the Resistance was the reality of his patriotism and no longer his unconditional allegiance to the ideas of the leaders in place.
Former members of the Apodeti and the UDT were thus able to join the Falintil.

The Apostolic Representative of Dili indicated as early as 1983 that Fretilin was inseparable from the entire population of East Timor and that it was entirely in solidarity with its activities.

For their part, the generals of the Abri believed that they had definitively got rid of the Fretilin, after having ordered the execution without trial of 80 of its leaders.

The helping hand in Dili in 1980 provoked surprise and anger among Indonesian fascists.
They then carried out a crackdown that Amnesty International deemed the most violent and deadly since the beginning of the war.
Torture and executions followed one another in ferocious conditions.
600 residents of Dili were arrested and deported to the island of Atauro, while hundreds more were summarily killed in the streets of the capital.
The Indonesian army was acting in exactly the same way as in October 1965 in Jakarta against communists or supposed communists.

The latter also adapted to the new strategy of the Resistance. It implemented the so-called \enquote{limb barrier} tactic.
Indonesian soldiers forced the Timorese to build human chains tens of kilometers long to rake the island from east to west.
The fascist generals felt that they could thus catch the Falintil, supposedly unable to escape this fine comb.

The main result of this measure was that countless Timorese civilians died of cold, hunger, exhaustion and malaria, while all those who tried to escape were mercilessly shot.
At the same time, the fascist occupiers burned all the expanses of grass where resistance fighters could hide, and in fact many of them were burned alive.
However, a number of Falintil fighters managed to cross the human barrier thanks to the spontaneous complicities of their compatriots.
Realizing this reality, the officers of the Abril became more and more criminal, if it was still possible. In the autumn of 1981 they began to massacre more and more systematically.
Following the mutiny of a unit of auxiliaries organized by them, on September 7, 1981, they annihilated the entire population of the Craras camp, near Viqueque, first 200 people, then 800 others who had managed to cross a river, mowing them down with machine gun fire. There was only one survivor.
Later fascist soldiers who had participated in these operations boasted about it and explained how they had Timorese dig their graves, then shot them at point-blank range, which made them fall into the hole.

Operation \enquote{barrier of limbs} had another appalling consequence. The people required for this criminal task were almost all peasants who could not take care of their crops.
As a result, the result of agricultural production used to feed local populations was therefore very low. Malnutrition and disease were the direct consequences.
The second great famine then reached the people of East Timor, causing thousands more victims.

Contrary to the hopes of the fascist generals, the Falintil escaped this new form of encirclement and annihilation quite easily.
On the other hand, all the civilians who were compelled by force to participate in the human chain, at least those who survived, spontaneously asked to join the Falintil.
Xanana refused to integrate them into the already existing units, to which he intended to retain the characteristics of the guerrillas.
But he had them organized into groups of three to six, remaining in the city or in the villages, with the mission of monitoring all the activities of the Indonesian soldiers and reporting immediately to Fretilin.

There were some of these groups called \enquote{Nurep} everywhere. The failure of the Indonesian initiative became bitter.

Also at the end of 1982, a new military commander of East Timor, Colonel Purwanto, was appointed. 
His mission was to try to win the sympathy of the Timorese not through gun violence, but through negotiation.
After various prevarications, a meeting brought together in neutral ground, in Lari Guto, from 11 to 13 March 1983, the Indonesian General Purwanto and Xanana Gusmao, President of Fretilin.
The Resistance Party demanded \enquote{the use of a United Nations contingent that would interpose itself between the belligerents and guarantee the smooth running of a free and democratic consultation ensuring the establishment of a parliamentary system in East Timor}.
The representative of the Indonesian fascists refused, arguing that the discussion could only concern the conditions and forms of the surrender of the Falintil.

However, four months of truce allowed the Timorese resistance fighters to reorganize and strengthen themselves.
But they earned his dismissal to Colonel Purwanto who was replaced by officers close to General Murdani, already known as a war criminal against humanity.

The very serious incidents in Dili in November 1991 prove that the Timorese population, although disarmed, still rejects the Indonesian occupation.

As requested by the patriots of East Timor, a local visit by United Nations delegates had been decided since 1982 and Secretary-General Perez de Cueilar had been given the task of organizing it.
There was also the decision to call a referendum on self-determination under the auspices of the former colonial power, Portugal, still considered by the United Nations to hold at least administrative power in East Timor.
Indonesian fascists opposed these decisions.

However, on 13 October 1991, the first of these initiatives was again postponed indefinitely.
It was to convene a committee composed of Portuguese and Indonesian parliamentarians, but the latter claimed that in the Portuguese delegation there was a member of Fretilin, thus justifying their opposition to the decided investigation.
This was obviously just a false pretext.

Ten days later, on 23 October 1991, probably during a protest demonstration, a young Timorese man named Sebastiao Gomes was killed by the police.

On 12 November, at 8 a.m., more than a hundred young Timorese went to the Santa Cruz cemetery to honour the memory of their comrade. It was actually a religious ceremony.
They went to the church in Moatel to attend a mass, but when they left they headed to the Resende Hotel where a United Nations representative was then staying to investigate cases of torture.
There they allegedly threw stones at the façade of the settlement and chanted slogans in favour of East Timor's independence. They were not carrying any weapons.

The Indonesian police immediately intervened and fired without warning at this group of young people.

The Jakarta government acknowledged that about 50 \enquote{rioters} had been killed.
The daily newspaper \enquote{Le Monde}, dated November 19, 1991, reproducing dispatches from the A.F.P. and Reuter, spoke of \enquote{19 to 200 dead according to the sources}.
The Indonesian Human Rights Association claimed that 80 young people arrested were executed after the incidents on 15 November 1991.

Barely a year later, on November 20, 1992, Gusmao Xanana was captured by the Shelter security forces.
On 2 December, Indonesian television presented an alleged interview with him and made him say \enquote{that he accepted the annexation of East Timor} and \enquote{that he urged his former guerrilla comrades to surrender}.
Had he been the victim of torture or psychological pressure on his family, or was it simply an audiovisual montage?
None of his companions and Timorese patriots believed in this turnaround completely contrary to the known character of the president of Fretilin.
In any case, the Portuguese news agency \enquote{Lusa} published on Monday, January 2, 1995, just over two years later, \enquote{an appeal by the leader of the Timorese resistance, Xanana Gusmao, currently imprisoned, asking that the status of the island be determined by referendum}.

Xanana's arrest was a severe blow to the Timorese Patriot Resistance.

In addition, in 1993, an agreement was signed between Australia and Jakarta to exploit an oil field discovered in the Timor Sea.
With this event the economic motivation for this fascist annexation began to be revealed.

According to an article by Cecilia Gabizon, in \enquote{Liberation} of November 12, 1994, the Portuguese were able to see on television the Indonesian soldiers shooting at close range at a crowd of young Timorese...
\enquote{Between the 100 official deaths and the 500 announced by the committees supporting the cause of the Mauberes (majority ethnic group in Timor), the Portuguese opt instead for the second version and add that the soldiers would have finished the wounded with poison}.

The demonstrations of the young Timorese, who could no longer resort to armed struggle, did not stop.
On December 20, 1994, the daily newspaper \emph{Libération} also stated: \enquote{The former Portuguese colony has experienced a new news with the occupation of the United States Embassy by pro-independence demonstrators during the visit of President Bill Clinton.}

On 25 November 1996, journalists Isabelle Bouc and Pierre Haski announced that José Ramos Horta and Bishop Carlos Belo had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize \enquote{for their action of resistance to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor}.

Finally, very recently, in its edition of November 15, 1997, on page 7, we could read in Libération:
\enquote{Timorese Bishop Ximenes Belo, winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, denounced the \enquote{unprecedented brutality} of the Indonesian military, who opened fire on Friday in the University of Dili...
For its part, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has officially protested against the actions of the police who forcibly seized a seriously wounded student whom the Red Cross was rescuing...
(this) young man, shot in the neck and covered in blood, was pulled from the ICRC vehicle and dragged by the police who took him away on a bus.
Four to six students were injured, with some unconfirmed reports also of one death.} (AFP)

This war of colonialist conquest by a fascist state supported by international capitalism has taken on the character of an almost complete genocide, or ethnocide. 
The Indonesian services themselves acknowledge between 170,000 and 212,000 deaths on the part of the population of East Timor. 
Representatives of the Catholic Church provide more credible estimates, putting the number of victims at between 308,000 and 345,000.
On a population that was to reach at the beginning of the confrontation about 600,000 inhabitants.

But these statistical data relate only to the period from 1975 to December 1981.
Since that time, however, new killings have been perpetrated against the indigenous Timorese population.
There is every reason to estimate in 1998 that two thirds of the people of East Timor have been decimated.
Let us judge, in all objectivity, by comparing what this percentage represents, applied for example to France.
If these crimes had been committed in our country, they would have caused 40 million deaths, which is obviously unimaginable, apart from an atomic war.

And it is here that we can measure the criminal and complicit character of the capitalist world, when we know that no concrete measures have ever been taken to save the people of East Timor from this massacre.

Since the proclamation of East Timor's independence by Fretilin, a number of countries had recognized its sovereignty, including the People's Republic of China, several Asian countries including Vietnam and the African countries formerly colonized by Portugal.

The Foreign Minister of Dili's government, José Ramos Horta, had left on December 4, 1975, to tour the world in order to obtain diplomatic support in case the Indonesian fascists launched a military aggression against his country with a view to annexing it.

Events soon caught up with him and, in the aftermath of the invasion of the Abri and the attack on Dili, he only had to accept an invitation from the UN Security Council dated December 15 to come and present his government's point of view.
The international body, after also listening to the representatives of Indonesia and Portugal, voted unanimously on 22 December 1975 for a resolution (number 384) \enquote{calling for the immediate withdrawal of the Indonesian armed forces from East Timor} 
and \enquote{calling on the Portuguese Government, as the administering Power, to cooperate fully with the United Nations in order to enable the people of East Timor to exercise freely their right to self-determination}.
The Security Council text contained other stipulations and decisions, all in line with the demands made by the young Timorese Government.
A special representative was to be sent to the country and the UN Secretary-General was responsible for monitoring the implementation of the unanimously adopted resolution.

The Government of Jakarta opposed the decisions of the Security Council on pretexts, each more fallacious than the last.
The fascist aggression continued and only the fierce Falintil Resistance slowed its progress.

It was not until 24 April 1976 that the Security Council, again seized by several Third World countries, reiterated the injunctions to Indonesia to withdraw from East Timor and once again recognized the right of the people of that country to self-determination.
The deliberations in question took place thousands of kilometres away and were only worth the paper and ink that recorded them.
Moreover, the United States and Japan began to unmask themselves in this matter by refusing to vote for the new declaration.

In 1988 and 1991, new decisions brought together majorities of Western official bodies.
The European Parliament, on a proposal from Portugal, passed a resolution condemning Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. But this was only a formula without follow-up.

The obvious failure of all these proclamations is to be blamed on the international bodies, the United Nations, the Security Council, the United Nations Decolonization Committee and the European Parliament, which were careful not to decide on any military intervention or other embargo against the aggressor in order to restore the legality of East Timor.
The United States, a superpower claiming the role of planetary policeman, constantly supported, hypocritically or directly, the government of the country where it had an accomplice in power, Indonesia led by General Suharto.

During a visit to Paris after the serious events in Dili in November 1991, José Ramos Hortas, representative of the National Committee of the Timorese Resistance, was legitimately harsh on the international community.
\enquote{Our tragedy is to be a small country, he says, lost in a corner of Southeast Asia.}
He gave a press conference at the \enquote{France-Liberté} Foundation, in the presence of Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the President of the Republic, to recall the latest proposals of Fretilin (who no longer claimed to be Marxist):

\begin{quote}
\enquote{Unconditional negotiations with Indonesia under the aegis of the UN.}

He demanded \enquote{that all EEC members join Portugal in demanding a new meeting of the Security Council}, and that \enquote{the countries selling arms to Indonesia (Britain in particular) decide on an immediate embargo.}
\end{quote}

His last two words were \enquote{Help us!}

In the last lines of his book rich in essential documentation \enquote{East Timor, the forgotten genocide — Right of a people and reasons of State}, Gabriel Defert wrote in 1992:
\enquote{As long as compliance with a text depends exclusively on the interests at stake, it will certainly be possible to continue to claim that Iraq should not consider Kuwait as part of its territory while Indonesia can easily appropriate East Timor, but it will be difficult to grant legitimacy other than that of force to international arbitrations} (cf. p. 289).
And Bill Clinton will be able to threaten Iraq with a \enquote{strategic strike}, even nuclear, as he does every day in these months of January and February 1998.

Without anyone being able to accuse of anti-Semitism the condemnation of the policy of Netanyahu, the current head of state of Israel, toward the Palestinians, can it not also be held as characterized by the systematic rejection of UN decisions without the Western countries deciding against him the slightest sanction, the slightest embargo?

So there is a double standard. For countries that do not submit to the hegemonic will of the American superpower and its accomplices, for small peoples, for the poor, capitalism, like colonialism, has long since become hell on earth.

In conclusion, the 350,000 to 400,000 victims exterminated in East Timor since 1975 unequivocally attest that the \enquote{Book of Capitalism} is indeed a \enquote{black book}.

\rauthor{Jacques Jurquet}

\section{Bibliography}

~~~\, Gabriel DEFERT, \emph{Timor Est - Le génocide oublié - Droit d’un peuple et raisons d’États} (East Timor - The forgotten genocide - Rights of a people and reasons of States), L’Harmattan, novembre 1992, 323 p. 

\emph{Libération}, différentes éditions des années 1991 à 1998.

\emph{L’Humanité-rouge}, années 1975 et 1976 — peut être consultée à la Bibliothèque Nationale ou à la Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine à Nanterre. Cf. notamment n° 509 du 15 juin 1976 et communiqué de solidarité du Parti communiste d’Indonésie (PKI).

\emph{Le Monde}, evening daily, Cf. editions of 13, 14 et 19 november 1991 especially.

\emph{Amnesty International}, Londres 1977 especially.

Revue Prolétariat(Proletariat review) n° 12, 1er Trimester 1976, p. 56 et following- Bibliothèque Nationale et BDIC de Nanterre.

A brochure by Mary Mac Killop, Institute of East Timorese Studies- PO Box 299-STMARYS NSW2760 — Australia.