Causes and Consequences of Australia's
1 Introduction East Timor: an Australian battleground In December 1975, Alarico Fernandes, a Minister in the government of the Democratic Republic of East Timor, broadcast a desperate radio message to Darwin, pleading for international assistance. He reported that Indonesian forces have been landed in Dili by sea… They are flying over Dili dropping out paratroopers… A lot of people have been killed indiscriminately… Women and children are going to be killed by Indonesian forces… we are going to be killed! SOS, we call for your help, this is an urgent call…1 Fernandes’ pleas went unheeded, and perhaps 200,000 of his compatriots would die as a result of the Indonesian occupation. Nearly a quarter of a century later, in September 1999, a distressingly familiar message was delivered by Joao Carrascalao, a representative of the East Timorese independence movement in Australia. He argued that because the East Timorese population had decisively voted for independence from Indonesia, they were now being systematically murdered and that the fascist Indonesian military machine and its civil government collaborators… are well on their way to their target of exterminating 344,580 East Timorese… These people will die, shot, hacked, tortured, raped and starved to death, unless the free, democratic nations of the world confront Indonesia today… please help now. If you don’t, there will be no East Timor tomorrow.2 1 Cited in Jill Jolliffe, East Timor: Nationalism and colonialism, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1978, p. 232. 2 344,580 was the number of ballots cast for independence. Joao Carrascalao, Media release: Indonesia’s ethnic cleansing target: kill 344,580 East Timorese, National Council for Timorese Resistance, 08.09.1999 (accessed 29.05.2006, http://www.labournet.de/internationales/crnt.html).
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