The rape of East Timor: "Sounds like fun"
Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a
glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was
executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.
The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were
written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was
November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General
Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.
The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded
in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow
generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million,
up to a third were extinguished.
