Bush's Sheriff...john pilger

[dudeness]

a wonderful australian..please read..


Ten years ago, I filmed secretly in East Timor, a small country in south-east Asia whose brutal occupation was largely unknown to the outside world. The title of the film, Death of a Nation, was hardly an exaggeration. The Suharto military dictatorship in Indonesia, having invaded the Portuguese colony in 1975, caused the death of "at least" 200,000 East Timorese, according to a study by the foreign affairs committee of the Australian parliament. This represented a third of the population; proportionally, it was an act of genocide greater than the Jewish Holocaust. The governments of the United States, Britain and Australia were not only forewarned, but supported and equipped the invaders. Henry Kissinger personally gave General Suharto the go-ahead.



In East Timor, I found a landscape of graves and black crosses that spilled down valleys and crowded the eye, evidence that whole communities had been slaughtered by the Indonesian army. In a handwritten record compiled by a priest, 287 names were listed, including those of entire extended families, from the elderly to infants such as "Domingo Gomes, aged two . . . shot". For me, the most telling and shocking sequence in Death of a Nation had been filmed five years earlier on board an Australian air force plane. A party was in progress; champagne corks popped and there was much false laughter as two fawning men in suits toasted each other. One was Gareth Evans, then Australia's foreign minister. The other was Ali Alatas, his Indonesian equivalent and Suharto's mouthpiece. "This is an historically unique moment," waffled Evans, "that is truly, uniquely historical." Flying over the Timor Sea, they had just signed the Timor Gap Treaty, which allowed Australian and other foreign companies to exploit the seabed belonging to the land of black crosses and to their victims. The ultimate prize, as Evans put it, could be "zillions" of dollars.


more..http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=5252