Pride on parade as East Timor marks freedom vote

The Australian ^ | August 31, 2009 | Joe Kelly

[myknowledge]

ON the 10th anniversary of the vote that led to East Timorese independence, President Jose Ramos Horta yesterday invited the fathers of Indonesian soldiers killed in the territory's 25-year civil war to visit their son's graves.

This act of reconciliation came as official ceremonies in Dili were delayed by the late arrival of Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, underlining the continuing importance of the former occupier to the new state.

A decade ago the East Timorese people voted in a UN-administered ballot to achieve independence from Indonesia, ending 24 years of occupation by Indonesian forces and giving birth to Asia's youngest nation.

Yesterday, the capital Dili hosted a series of events to commemorate the historic ballot on August 30, 1999, which returned a 78.5 per cent vote in favour of East Timorese independence. The result triggered an explosion of violence in the territory fuelled by pro-integrationist militias armed and backed by the Indonesian military.

About 1400 people were killed in the ensuing anarchy, and some 250,000 were forced over the border into West Timor before Australia led a multinational UN-mandated force to restore order in September 1999.

[myknowledge]

Democratic Republic of East Timor. 10 years from Independence. East Timor ping.

[upstanding]

A good anniversary to celebrate. I still shudder when recalling some of the images I saw coming out of East Timor.

Christopher Hitchens lays out it much better than I ever could, but one of the things I find most frustrating and damning about the left is its twisted attitudes toward East Timor. Its independence was a cause celebre amongst those we might call "causeheads," primarily, because of claims over CIA responsibility. Yet the elephant in the room that the left never, ever seemed to want to discuss was the fact that the root cause of the horrors was Islam and its inability to accept lands they deems as "formerly Islamic" to be ruled by other religions. I used to enjoy disarming college mush heads when discussing East Timor by arguing that I totally support military intervention to support the Catholic enclave and especially to defeat Islamic imperialism. To a man, they @#$%^ing hated it when I would say that.

Similarly, I recall discussing the Sudan back in the late 90s. Other than a couple of GOP senators, nobody in the US was talking about the genocide. When I would bring it up with the "coffee and chomsky" crowd in college, I was always accused of "only being interested because they're killing Christians who probably deserve it."

Same goes for Tibet. I stand with many leftists in supporting a free Tibet, but the left doesn't see Communism or progressivism as a chief problem. And certainly, they cannot bring themselves to accept that non-Westerners might be driven by racism. One of the funniest and most telling sites I saw in my college days was when some college Republicans joined in a Free Tibet protest and got shouted at for having anti-communist signs.