An aberration. Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister & signatory to Timor Sea Treaty
The Howard Government is again on the defensive today over claims that it failed to act on key intelligence related to the involvement of the Indonesian military in violence and killings during the 1999 East Timor ballot. Andrew Plunkett, ABC AM Australian Radio, 9th May 2001
We were actually told from our chain of command to go soft on the massacres and soft on body disposal ... The low-level pawns, the militia, they’ll get tried ... But none of the TNI [Indonesian Military] who organised it all, they’ll walk free. Andrew Plunkett
SBS Reporter: So is Australia holding information today that could lead to the conviction of Indonesian army figures?
Captain Plunkett: Definitely. SBS Dateline 16th May 2001
Three months before Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1975, Gough Whitlam dismissed an Indonesian proposal to send a joint international military force to restore peace to the civil-war-torn colony.
WikiLeaks’ declassified US diplomatic cables questions the perception of Indonesia as a premeditated invader, after Mr Whitlam rejected a proposed joint peacekeeping army involving Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Portugal and New Zealand.
The cables infer the indifference of Mr Whitlam, as prime minister, paved the way for Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor. News.com.au online report 11th April 2013
Twenty years after the invasion, and as a consequence of the Indonesian occupation, the martyred people of East Timor suffered the greatest genocide registered in the XXth century ...
It strikes us to notice how a genocide of such dimension could pass unnoticed by the public world opinion. It was precisely the lack of knowledge of such reality and the information black out that contributed the most to the intolerable proportions of the East Timor drama. Professor Antonio Barbedo de Magalhaes, article East Timor: A People Shattered By Lies and Silence
We would do absolutely nothing. Now that’s a blunt, truthful answer. Gough Whitlam