Louis Thanks for forwarding the Pilger article. I have great respect for John Pilger and all that he has done in campaigning not only for East Timor, but on behalf of the Australian aborigines and Cambodians, among many others. If only there were more like him. He may be correct about the motives governing the Western (primarily Australian) response to the situation there. However, there is another case which would suggest that because of the increasingly belligerent anti-Westernism among elements of the ruling clique (ironic as that is, given the West's role in propping them up, even now), East Timor provides a useful pretext whereby a segment of "Indonesian" territory remains under Western influence. The West can also claim to lend moral support to other oppressed minorities in Indonesia's presently fractious state, East Timor being the precedent for further intervention, should the "need" arise. Given Indonesia's former status as bulwark against the communist north, there is clearly a "security issue" arising from such instability. There is also the East Timor Gap Treaty assigning oil exploration and extraction rights to protect. Whether or not East Timor ends up like another Haiti, or just simply yet another pawn in the great game of global capitalism, there is also the indisputable fact of the wanton slaughter of its population by the occupiers, and the illegality of that occupation. East Timor was a newly independent, sovereign state when invaded. The invasion violated all relevant aspects of the UN Charter. The UN should have been there in 1975. I support the UN's presence there now, and it is up to people like us to ensure that those countries sponsoring the intervention are pressured into a following a genuinely humanitarian course of action rather than a cynical exercise in dividing spoils. (Just getting my government to stop delivering fighter aircraft is proving difficult.) This I would consider as agreeing with your recommendation that the "radical movement should do everything in its power to assist East Timorese self-determination." Concrete slogans alone are of little help to the East Timorese. But I do believe that partly motivating Western support for this UN initiative is the wider exposure of both the atrocities and Western complicity in these. Our governments are more sensitive now, than ever before during the last 24 years, to charges of appeasement, complicity, culpability, duplicity, racism, etc. Witness Robin Cook's pathetic performance, mentioned by Pilger. And it is a blessing, however unintended, that the US is so up to its neck in the detritus arising from this matter that it has not taken "leadership", which would have immediately discredited the entire exercise, given the undoubtedly inadequate handling of the situation that would follow. Pilger is absolutely correct to expose the less than humanitarian rationale behind our governments' actions. That such motives exist is little excuse for not saving the lives of helpless people - after all, their suffering and slaughter is what makes us angry, isn't it? Or is death to be their only liberation? Michael
