Sunday, March 9, 2008

Fun Facts!

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which led to Portugal's withdrawal from East Timor as its colonial ruler.

A year earlier, in December 1974, Henry Kissinger of the US government had been asked by an Indonesian government representative whether or not the US would approve the invasion.[6] In March 1975, US Ambassador to Indonesia, David Newsom, recommended a "policy of silence" on the issue and was supported by Kissinger.[7] On October 8, 1975, a member of the National Security Council, Philip Habib, told meeting participants that "It looks like the Indonesians have begun the attack on Timor." Kissinger's response to Habib was, "I'm assuming you're really going to keep your mouth shut on this subject."[8]

On the day before the invasion, US President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger met with Indonesian president Haji Mohammad Suharto. According to declassified documents released by the National Security Archive (NSA), in December of 2001, they gave a green light for the invasion
The U.S. had supported Suharto's regime in Indonesia during the Cold War as it was seen as a bulwark against communism and it continued the practice during the invasion of East Timor. While the U.S. government claimed to have suspended military assistance from December 1975 to June 1976, military aid was actually above what the Department of State proposed and Congress continued to increase it

The U.S. also made four new offers of arms, including supplies and parts for 16 OV-10 Broncos which, according to Cornell University Professor Benedict Anderson, are "specially designed for counter-insurgency actions against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons and wholly useless for defending Indonesia against a foreign enemy", adding that the policy continued under the Carter administration.

The invasion was not given much coverage by the U.S. media. When the subject was covered, the deaths were attributed to the preceding civil war. This caused some to later accuse the media of blatant bias, because coverage of the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was much more common, due to the fact that more people were killed in a shorter period of time.
Estimates of East Timorese killed include 60,000 and 100,000 (mostly civilians) - Source: Indonesian Invasion of East Timor (Wikipedia)
There are unfortunately some "citation needed" but I have seen some documentary footage and I have done some other research, and everything seems to be accurate. If you scroll down that wikipedia page you will see where they got all their sources.

2 comments:

  1. So, I did not write any of that; I copied it from wikipedia, just in future reference, so no one will accuse me of plagiarism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I cleaned it up a little bit, Chris. Generally, it is a good idea to put quotes around information that comes from another source. If you do not know how to do this, I can show you.

    ReplyDelete

Your comments are valued greatly. Please adhere to the decorum on the "First time here?" page. Comments that are in violation of any of the rules will be deleted without notice.

3/11 Update - No Moderation

*Non-anonymous commenting is preferred to avoid mix-ups. Anonymous comments are, at the behest of management, more likely to be deleted than non-anonymous comments.