East timor
East timor. do they have a rigEast Timor is half of an island in Indonesia, about 300 miles north of Australia. In the 1500's, Portugal colonized the island of Timor, and its inhabitants today are primarily Catholic. The Dutch colonized much of the area, eventually including the western half of Timor as part of the Dutch East Indies. Before 1975 it was a lush paradise that had remained virtually untouched by the western world. In 1975 Indonesia invaded and annexed the now defenseless East Timor. It was an act based upon greed and corruption that was conceived by several international governments. Since 1975, Indonesia's military dictatorship has conducted a brutal campaign of genocide against the East Timorese, killing 200,000 people, or one third of the population. The question of whether East Timor should have independence has been clear for most of the international community. The ones who argue the issue are the ones who are making money off the blood of innocent victims in a war the East Timorese want nothing to do with. The East Timorese are "caretakers of the land"(Briere) and do not want to die so others can become rich. East Timor was "one of the last true Polynesian civilizations in the world."(Briere)
The invasion by the Indonesians on December 7 1975 was one of the bloodiest slaughters in recent history killing hundreds of thousands. The invasion commenced at dawn with an Air, Sea, and Land attack on the East Timorese. "There are great black crosses etched against the sky -- crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the roads. In East Timor they litter the earth and crowd the eye. Walk into the scrub and they are there, always it seems, on the edges of riverbanks and escarpments, commanding all before them. Look at the dates on most of them, and they reveal the extinction of whole families, wiped out in the space of a year, a month, a day. "R.I.P. Mendonca, Crissmina, 7.6.77 ... Mendonca, Filismina, 7.6.77 ... Mendonca, Adalino, 7.6.77 ... Mendonca, Alisa, 7.6.77 ... Mendonca, Rosa, 7.6.77 ... Mendonca, Anita, 7.6.77." (Pilger 1994) It was not an invasion, but an attack on the peaceful natives of this island in order to get what they had.
The invasion of East Timor was caused for several reasons depending on your sources. If the Indonesian version is to be accepted then it was not an invasion but an assumption of territory that was rightfully belonging to Indonesia. When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch they claimed all former Dutch colonies as their own. The Dutch had colonised west Timor, so the argument is that it is part of Indonesia. The threat, as the Indonesians saw it, was that if they granted sovereignty to one people they will have to do the same for others and then the country starts to disintegrate. If you believe the rest of the world then it was an aggressive attack on a small island in...
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