'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy'
A Documentary Film By John Pilger
On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly - but with the complicity of the
Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia - invaded the small
nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the
invasion were murdered.
In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and
his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this
film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese - 1/3 of
the population - had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The C.I.A. has
described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century.
Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment
camps and even Fretlin guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles,
including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and
Indonesian diplomats.
Nixon had called Indonesia the "greatest prize in southeast Asia" because of its
oil reserves and other natural resources. Even though Indonesia had no historic
or legal claim to East Timor, it was convenient for diplomats to declare that
East Timor, just gaining its independence from Portugal, would not be a viable
state.
However the lie was given to this argument when Australia and Indonesia signed
the Timor Gap Oil Treaty and carved up the huge oil and gas reserves in the
seabed off East Timor.
None of the politicians from that period - President Ford, Henry Kissinger,
Daniel Moynihan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gough Whitlam - has clean hands.
The Indonesian military used US and British planes to bombard the island, while
the defense ministers proclaimed ignorance.
As Pilger gets an Austrlian diplomat to admit, East Timor was considered
"expendable."
But no one watching the massacre in the Dili cemetery can excuse the
geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide.