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Link to Death of a Nation - East Timor documentary
Documentary Description
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.
