By Peter Carey[1]

It was mid-October 1975 and I opened the newspaper in my Oxford College, Magdalen. My eye fell on a small map of the border between Timor-Leste and West Timor and an accompanying article which explained how five Western newsmen (two of them British) had gone missing at the small border village of Balibo. I remember thinking: ‘How strange! One could understand the death of a single journalist, but for five to go missing all at once ….?’ My question remained unanswered for the next eight years. It was my first contact with the unfolding tragedy of Timor-Leste as the long shadow of General Suharto’s “New Order” (1966-98) fell over it.

During the intervening period, I had little opportunity or personal wish to dig deeper. Why should I? There was so much going on in my life as an academic historian of colonial Indonesia to risk enquiring too closely. Perhaps I was prey to a subtle form of self-censorship, with an all too plausible inner voice questioning whether I really wanted to jeopardise my access to the Indonesian historical archives, my contacts with Indonesian family and friends and my relations with the Indonesian Embassy in London for the sake of some obscure ex-Portuguese colony. Surely if one studied the map of Indonesia and Timor-Leste closely enough one could see that its very proximity destined the tiny territory to one day become a part of the Republic?

Once, during a research visit to Jakarta in October-November 1976, when I was staying with a friend — Indonesia’s leading historian of the Portuguese period (1511-1641), Ibu “Jo” Paramita Abdurachman (1920-88) — Timor-Leste came up in conversation. Our fellow lodger, a part-Ambonese, part-Dutch young woman, had a German boyfriend who worked for Lufthansa and had contacts with the Indonesian national airline, Garuda. He had occasion to fly into the Timor-Leste capital, Díli. On these visits, he told us, he could still hear the sound of machine-gunning and mortars at the airport. “What is going on?” I asked, “the Indonesians are supposed to have secured the whole territory?” “Apparently not” he replied. And he was right. Even as late as June 1980, when the Indonesians had broken the back of formal Fretilin resistance in the mountains, the remaining guerrillas were still strong enough to mount a raid on the Indonesian State Radio and TV (TVRI) transmitter just outside Dili.

Sometime after my Jakarta encounter, I read a letter in the Indonesian Kompas newspaper written by an unknown first lieutenant by the name of Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo (born 17 October 1951) extolling the self-sacrifice and rigours endured by Indonesian soldiers in the Timor-Leste campaign. Supposedly on hand when the second President of Fretilin, the remarkable Nicolau Lobato (1946-78; in office, 1977-8) had been shot to death in a six-hour gun battle near Turíscai in the Maubisse hills to the south of Díli (31 December 1978). This was same man, now president of Indonesia (2024-29), who carved his name in blood in Timor-Leste and became in his mid-forties the youngest two-star general in the Indonesian army, and a person I later could not bring myself to condemn outright on film when Martyn Gregory and his Independent Television (ITV) made its remarkable documentary on British involvement in the training and equipping of the Indonesian special forces (Kopassus) (June 1997) (documentary by Gregory 1997). He apparently had my book (Carey and Bentley 1995) — along with the video of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) open on his desk at his Batujajar (West Java) special force headquarters when the ITV film crew came to interview him early in 1997, and the crew told me that had taken violent exception because it included the testimony of the young Timor-Leste student leader, Donaciano Gomes (now Captain-Commandant Pedro Klamar Fuik, post-2016 Chief of Staff of F-FDTL, Timor-Leste Armed Forces). This related the tortures which Donaciano claimed Prabowo had personally inflicted on one of his close friends in the aftermath of the pro-independence demonstrations which had followed Pope John Paul II’s papal mass near Díli on 12 October 1989 (Gomes 1995: 106-8).

Five years later, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London, Jeremy Treglown (in post, 1981-90), asked if I would review a book on a place he knew little about by an Australian author, James Dunn (1928-2020). I agreed. The book was Timor: A People Betrayed. Published by the Jacaranda Press in Queensland in 1983, it described the barbarities which had accompanied the Indonesian invasion of 7 December 1975. As I read it, I went into a state of shock. Dunn, who had served as Australian consul in Díli in 1962-64, told of the rape and pillage of an entire society. Perhaps as many as a third of the pre-1975 population of 700,000, he argued, had succumbed to the effects of war, famine and disease. The gruesome murder of the five Western newsmen at Balíbo on 16 October 1975 was now set in context: far from being a “tragic accident” (“caught in crossfire” in the words of the Indonesians), it was part of a ruthless Indonesian campaign aimed at taking over the former Portuguese territory. In this, according to Dunn, it had been massively assisted by the connivance and duplicity of the major Western powers. The exigencies of realpolitik had dictated silence even when the nationals of these selfsame countries were being done to death by the brutal soldiery of a Cold War ally. One of these nationals—the Bristol-born cameraman Brian Peters (1946-75) then working for the TCN-9 Network in Sydney—was, I later discovered, a close relative of a speech therapist, Mr. Tolfree, who had helped cure my debilitating stammer at Winchester College (1961-65). In such ways did the bizarre interleaving of my own personal life and Timor-Leste begin to be manifest.

What could I do? I could not pretend I had not read the book. Yet if I published a long review article would that not mean the end of my career as an Indonesianist? At the very least, my access to the Jakarta archives would surely be compromised. I hesitated. Eventually I settled on a shabby half-measure. I would write the review but publish it under a pseudonym — Patricia Burnett — the two middle monikers of my mother’s maiden name (I had sought and obtained her permission first). With dread in my heart, I delivered my copy to the editor and my piece eventually appeared as the lead article in the TLS of 16 December 1983: “From Decolonisation to Destruction: The Tragedy of East Timor”. An uncomfortable Christmas followed. Every flurry of wind and leaves at my North Oxford door was a paid Indonesian assassin coming to finish me off. The reaction from the embassy in London was strong. The article probably contained more column inches on Timor-Leste than had appeared in the whole of the British press that year. And it pulled no punches. The ambassador, HE Syahabuddin Arifin (in office, 1981-85), was not amused. A formal complaint was apparently made to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. When I visited the TLS offices in early January, an armed policeman of the diplomatic protection unit was in the lobby. This was still a time when public knowledge of Timor-Leste, at least in Britain, was almost non-existent. Jakarta wanted to keep it that way.

Soon afterwards, I had a dream. I was walking down the central canal in Batavia (post-1942, Jakarta) in the days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) (1602-1799). This was a place I knew well: during my 1976-77 research visit to Jakarta, I had spent nearly every day in the Indonesian National Archives (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, ANRI) which was then situated in the magnificent town house of an eighteenth-century governor-general on that very same canal thoroughfare (ex-Molenvliet, now Jalan Hayam Wuruk/Gajahmada). Now in my dream, I saw myself admiring the eighteenth-century architecture when town criers appeared. They demanded that the streets be cleared immediately: “Make way! Make way for the victorious army!” they shouted. Victorious army? Yes, there in the distance marching up from the Pasar Ikan (fishing port) area was a large troop of soldiers with what seemed to be sloped pikes on which were severed heads. “Ah, what do you expect?” I said to myself in my dream,”tthese are Dutch East India Company (VOC) prajurit (troops) returning from some punitive expedition in eastern Indonesia”. I pressed myself against the wall of a house by the canal and waited for them to pass. As the soldiers drew near, however, a strange change came over them. No longer VOC prajurit, they now appeared in the uniforms of the modern Indonesian army—the Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (ABRI). Nor were those pikes which they had sloped on their shoulders but modern US-made M16 carbines with fixed bayonets on which were the reeking trophies of the Timor-Leste war—row upon row of severed heads of slain Fretilin fighters. The blood and gore soaked through their epaulettes and stained their American-style uniforms.

Appalled, I decided to take some fresh air at the very same Pasar Ikan area from which the soldiers had marched. During my time in Jakarta, this had been a favourite place of mine with its lines of fine-hewn Bugis prau (sailing schooners) moored along its jetty. Surely here, I thought, I could relax a little? Alas, in my dream this was not to be. All the graves in Timor-Leste had opened and there waiting for me on the jetty, still clad in their winding sheets and the clammy earth of their cemeteries, were the reanimated corpses of Indonesia’s first civilian victims—the one-hundred-and-fifty or so men and women—many of them Chinese—who had been executed by the Indonesians at the harbour wharf in Díli on 8 December 1975, the day after their invasion (Dunn 1983: 283). In my dream, I had to walk down the line of the living dead and hear each of their personal testimonies. They were to tell me especially of the violent manner of their executions, when rough blindfolds had been put around their eyes, their hands bound with wire behind their backs, and a single bullet fired into the back of their heads—the number of dead victims being shouted out by the reluctant crowd as their bodies tumbled into the corpse-choked sea. I heard one man’s testimony and then moved to the second. But the pain was too much. I awoke screaming. It was two o’clock in the morning. It was a premonition, I now realised I had been given the task of chronicling Timor-Leste’s hidden genocide. Willingly or not, I had become a living witness of Timor’s tragedy.

My rational self, self, the young Oxford Prize Fellow, rebelled: why can’t you just get on with your ordinary life? Think of your family and your academic career! Why did you ever have to become involved in Timor-Leste? But there was now no turning back. I began to cast caution to the winds and write under my own name. In February 1987, I published another long review — “A Land Where No-one Laughs” — in the TLS, this time on José Ramos-Horta’s recently published memoirs, Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor (Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press, 1987), and in the same year I arranged for Horta, who would later become President of Timor-Leste (in office, 2007-12; 2022-29), to spend a term (Trinity Term, 26 April-20 June 1987) in Oxford as a Senior Associate Member (SAM) of St. Antony’s. My aim was to try to raise the profile of the Timor-Leste issue both within the University and more widely. Given Oxford’s reputation, I thought that Horta’s presence at St. Antony’s would help the Timorese cause. In this I was greatly assisted by the Warden, Sir Raymond Carr (1919-2015; in office, 1968-87), one of Britain’s leading authorities on Iberian history, and the Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies, Arthur Stockwin (in post, 1982-2003). Both had their own sympathies for Timor-Leste. The former through his research interests and writing on Spanish and Portuguese history, and the latter because he had met Horta in Canberra in 1974-5 while teaching at the Australian National University (ANU).

When I had first heard Horta speak in Oxford in 1984 there had been a pitiful gathering of barely a dozen students. Now, with the greater interest generated by Horta’s presence at St. Antony’s, the Asian Studies Centre, of which I was then Executive Director, held a major seminar. Horta’s talk — “East Timor: Third World Colonialism and International Hypocrisy” (13 May 1987) — raised further hackles at the Indonesian Embassy in London. They refused to send a representative. Instead, a British diplomat, Christian Adams (1939-96), then head of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO’s) South-East Asia Department (in office, 1986-88). whom I had met earlier in the Philippines turned up. Ostensibly there as an impartial observer, he took a strong pro-Jakarta line. He may have even been asked by the Indonesians to speak on their behalf. Certainly, this was what happened following the 12 November 1991 Santa Cruz massacre when the Indonesian Embassy in Washington relied for a time on the US State Department to state its position at press conferences and other public events. In the case of Horta, they need not have bothered. I decided that I would play the devil’s advocate to Horta’s impassioned pro-Third World advocacy by asking the audience to imagine what Britain would have done in similar circumstances, if an accident of history such as shipwrecked sailors from the 1588 Spanish Armada or a royal treaty, had turned the Isle of Man into an Iberian possession. What would have happened four hundred years later had anti-colonial radicals threatened to turn it into a mini-Cuba? “Send in the Royal Marines!” came the voice of the DTI official at the back. “Exactly!” I replied citing the example of the Falklands War (April-June 1982). Horta’s face darkened. “You should be working for Ali Alatas [then Indonesian Ambassador to the UN, 1982-88; later Foreign Minister, 1988-99], at the UN in New York!” he confided later.

I soon realised that the Indonesians were not taken in by this piece of sandiwara (play-acting). Instead, they took an unusual step to try to ensure my silence. On 3 August 1990, I was attending a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Since Horta’s visit three years earlier, I had recommended the publication of John Taylor’s The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor, 1974-1989 (Taylor 1990) to the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford and had contributed a preface where the destruction wrought in the former Portuguese territory had been compared to Pol Pot’s Cambodia (1975-79). Across the aisle from my seat in the SOAS auditorium, I noticed the Indonesian information attaché gesticulating vigorously. “I need to talk to you urgently, but not here, it is too public. Can you come over to the embassy for tea?” I agreed. “Now this is strictly off-the-record, elder sister to younger brother. A friendly piece of advice if you don’t mind?” The attaché’s mellifluous words hung in the air. “I have to say how … hmm … how very disappointed I was to go into Dillons the other day and read your preface to Taylor’s book. How can you, a friend of Indonesia, say such terrible things about our army? You know they are not true!” Brushing aside my hastily mumbled demurrers, she went straight to the point. “Now I hope you remember you are married to an Indonesian [my wife was in fact a distant cousin of Mrs Suharto]. What would your Indonesian relatives—your father-in-law in particular [she did not know that he had died the previous year, 1989]—say if you fell into disrepute?” So that was it: under the guise of friendship, an unspecified threat to my family connections with Indonesia.

I later read that David Watts (1943-2016), the Times Lisbon correspondent (1975-85), had received a warning from the Foreign Office and Commonwealth Office (FCO) after he had filed an article in February 1977 headlined “Indonesia Accused of Mass Murder in East Timor”. He apparently been summoned by the FCO’s South-East Asia Department and asked to explain his “interest” in Timor-Leste. “It was obvious”, he said later, “that I was being warned off the story. It had the opposite effect” (Pilger 1994: 305). I felt the same way. In fact, the attaché’s words made me feel angry. How dare she threaten me in this way! Who were these people who boasted of their high Javanese culture, yet behaved like bullyboys? It was to be the last official contact I had with the embassy for the best part of a decade. Indeed, when my persona grata status was restored in March 1999, its duration was to be brief: the post-30 August independence vote violence intervened and I felt compelled to take up my pen again to condemn the role of the Indonesian army.[2] Since that time the embassy removed me completely from their mailing lists.

Even while I was having my run-in with the embassy, I was making arrangements in Oxford for a one-day conference on Timor-Leste (“East Timor: Fifteen Years On”, 15 December 1990) hosted by the Refugee Studies Programme and St. Antony’s Asian Studies Centre. Funds were tight, but Christian Aid, Oxfam and the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR) all contributed. We were even able to draw on a grant that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) had given the Asian Studies Centre to support Southeast Asian Studies in Oxford, arranged by a former British Ambassador to Manila, Sir Robin McLaren. Although the intention of the FCO mandarins had never been to endorse anything as radical as a conference on Timor-Leste—how could they when Britain was then busy arming the Suharto regime to the teeth with Hawk ground-attack aircraft—I could now boast that the meeting was being partly paid for by Her Majesty’s Government!

Once again, the Indonesian Embassy people did not show. Instead, they arranged for the entire proceedings to be tape-recorded through the presence of an Indonesian member of the BBC World Service’s Indonesia Section. I also received a letter from a senior Indonesian official, Hassan Wirajuda (born 1948), the future Indonesian Foreign Minister (in office, 2001-09), then working at the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (part of the UN Commission for Human Rights, UNCHR) in Geneva (in office, 1987-93), who had spent a year at Worcester College in the mid-1980s as a visiting diplomat. He warned me that I should not bring the “good name” of his old University into disrepute by holding such a conference. By now I was becoming inured to such pressure.

The conference went ahead as planned. There were some emotional moments as one of the East Timorese present, Donaciano Gomes (born 1968), now Commodore Pedro Klamar Fuik (see above), read his testimony of torture and abuse at the hands of the Indonesian military following the 12 October 1989 papal visit (Gomes in Carey and Carter Bentley 1995: 106-8). The other East Timorese speaker, the ex-Falintil (Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste/Armed Forces for the National Liberation of Timor-Leste) Red Brigade commander, Mauk Moruk (a.k.a. Paulino Gama, 1955-2015), was, I later learnt, in the pay of the Indonesians: Junus Effendi (“Fany”) Habibie (1938-2012), the younger brother of the future Indonesian President, Ir. Bachruddin Jusuf (B.J.) Habibie (in office, 1998-99), and himself soon to be appointed Indonesian ambassador in London (1993-97), apparently financed Moruk’s International Timorese Secretariat for Human Rights in Europe. But if he was hoping that he would act the Indonesian stooge he was sorely mistaken. Moruk’s subsequently published testimony was a ringing condemnation of the brutalities of the Indonesian invasion (Gama in Carey and Carter Bentley 1995: 97-105).

This was the first major meeting in Oxford on Timor-Leste and the proceedings were subsequently published ensuring a much wider international audience (Carey and Carter Bentley 1995). As a reviewer in the prestigious US-based Journal of Asian Studies put it in their August 1996 number:

Once again, the hand of fate seemed to be at work in that the chairman of the international publishing house, Cassell, John Stothard (born 1948), which eventually brought out the book, along with another which I had done with the British photographer of the 12 November 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, Steve Cox (born 1962) (Cox and Carey 1995), turned out to have been in my undergraduate history year group at Trinity (1966-69).

Following the official opening of Timor-Leste by the Indonesian authorities in December 1988, new possibilities arose for reporting the conflict. Early in the summer of 1991, I was approached by Peter Gordon (1946-2019), a documentary filmmaker with Yorkshire TV, to suggest someone fluent in Indonesian who might go into Timor with his film-crew. I recommended an Australian researcher with strong Indonesian interests who had just finished a stint at the Refugee Studies Programme in Oxford. This was Kirsty Sword (born 1966)—later Kirsty Sword Gusmão, the future First Lady of Timor-Leste (2002-7)—who subsequently proved invaluable in ensuring the success of Peter’s film project. The resulting award-winning Yorkshire TV documentary, In Cold Blood: The Massacre of East Timor, which was broadcast on 7 January 1992, was a turning point in Timor-Leste reportage, winning it the 1992 Amnesty International UK Media Award. Photojournalist, Max Stahl’s, dramatic video footage shot amongst the graves of the Santa Cruz cemetery in the first terrifying minutes of the 12 November 1991 massacre was its highlight. Clips from that footage had already been shown on TV news programmes around the world. Amongst those watching was the US Secretary of State, James Baker III (born 1930; in office, 1989-92), whose spokesperson subsequently described it as “gruesome” and “something we have condemned to the Indonesian authorities” (State Department Regular Briefer: Margaret Tutwiler, 11:58 a.m., Friday, 22 November 1991). Half a world away in Ireland, another person who also saw the Yorkshire TV documentary was an unemployed Dublin bus driver, Tom Hyland (born 1952), whose contribution to the cause of Timor-Leste’s independence subsequently proved more significant than that of any US Secretary of State (see HYland’s chapter and documentary, Tynan 1999).

In May 1993, at the prompting of the London-based Indonesian Human Rights Campaign (Tapol), I wrote to him asking for his help in a 250-mile walk my eldest son and myself were about to undertake in Western Ireland to publicise and raise money for the Timor-Leste cause. I received Tom’s letter on East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign (ETISC) headed notepaper. “I think I can help you” was his message. My spirits lifted. And help he certainly did: when we arrived in Cork off the night ferry from Swansea in late July 1993, he was there to meet us, having set up interviews with Raidió Teilefis Éireann (RTÉ) and local radio stations with lilting names like Bandon Sound and Radio Killarney. Travelling west up the Lee valley and over the Sheehy mountains to Glengarriff, we were stopped by drivers who had heard about us on their car radios. It was a telling example of the skill with which Tom and his fellow ETISC workers had spread the message of their campaign to the remotest communities of Western Ireland. Later, in 1996, when I bought a ruined farm property in rural East Clare, I discovered that my next-door neighbour, an elderly bachelor farmer, Jack Stevens (died 2002), who had hardly left the county, knew an amazing amount about Timor-Leste even down to the details of the way in which the Balíbo five had met their deaths.

During the 1990s, the strength of the international solidarity movement for Timor-Leste grew hugely. What had once been an almost totally unknown issue, at least outside Portugal and Australia, now began to make headlines. The October 1996 Nobel Peace Prize award to Bishop Carlos Belo and José Ramos-Horta was a high point. It seemed amazing to me, having known Horta in Oxford just nine years earlier during his often-lonely days as Timor-Leste’s roving ambassador, that he should now be honoured in this fashion. But I was also delighted because I knew that the recognition accorded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee would help the East Timorese achieve the independence for which they had sacrificed so much. Little did I know then that the Suharto regime itself had a bare eighteen months to run and that when the East Timorese were eventually allowed to exercise their legitimate right of self-determination the Indonesians would bring their occupation to an end in such a bloody fashion. The following year (March-April 1997) I had a chance to pay a clandestine visit Timor-Leste with my sixteen-year-old son and to spend some time with Bishop Belo. The account of our unexpected experiences was later published as “Surviving the Occupation: A Personal Journey through East Timor” (Hainsworth and McCloskey 2000:17-30). My son, Will (born 17 July 1980), also took up his pen to write on the Timor issue and his article was included in a special number of the Canadian journal, the Brock Review (Carey 1998/99).

Nearly forty years have now elapsed since my first TLS article appeared which caused me so much soul-searching back in December 1983. This marked the moment when I became personally aware of the scale of the suffering inflicted by the Indonesians on the East Timorese. But I would be dishonest to pretend that I already knew then that the East Timorese would one day win their independence. In my heart of hearts I fervently hoped this might be so, but I feared that the attitude of the Western powers to the Suharto regime — the general was then a staunch Cold War ally — and the dictates of realpolitik would mean that the best the East Timorese could possibly expect would be some form of self-rule or special region (daerah istimewa) status. It was only with the opening of the territory in December 1988 and the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that new political prospects really opened up for Timor-Leste. And then it took an event as bloody as the 12 November 1991 Santa Cruz massacre — and the courage of those few Western photographers and filmmakers present — to alert an indifferent world to what was really going on. Afterwards — like the 1919 Amritsar massacre in British-ruled India and the 1960 Sharpeville shootings in apartheid South Africa — a process was set in train which would eventually result in the moral and physical collapse of the oppressor regime.

Since the early 1980s, my view of the Timor-Leste issue and my own sense of personal responsibility as an historian of the Indonesian occupation has undergone a profound change. Initially, I saw my role as being rather like a witness to the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. Just as Hitler planned for the extermination camps to be destroyed once they had completed their ghastly work with the ashes of the six-million victims being buried under forests of quick-growing pines, so the Suharto regime clearly hoped that it could get away with its own genocide in Timor-Leste by a sustained campaign of denial and misinformation. Once the first generation of the East Timorese resistance had been eliminated, Jakarta counted on winning over the second and third generations through a mixture of repression and “Indonesianisation”, namely, the suppression of Timor-Leste’s ethnic and cultural heritage, the swamping of the territory with inner island Indonesian trans-migrants and the use of the state education system to inculcate Indonesian “values” (whatever they might be). I thus saw my task as a professional historian as attempting to counter Jakarta’s distortions with my writings aimed at opening a small window on what was going on inside occupied Timor-Leste. Little did I think then then that anything I said or wrote would change the fact of the Indonesian occupation. Instead, I saw my task as bearing witness to a monstrous crime. It was only much later, in the aftermath of the November 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, perhaps even as late as October 1996 when Belo and Horta won the Nobel, that I had any inkling that what I was publishing might have any influence on helping the East Timorese win their independence. Even then it hardly occurred to me that it would be the Indonesian colonial power itself which would ultimately stare into the abyss.

Looking ahead, in the midst of so much uncertainty, it is clear that there are more chapters to be written of this tragic tale: Indonesia’s post-1998 democratic transition has yet to fulfil its early promise, but the unitary republic has remained intact and independent Timor-Leste has adjusted to living under the shadow of aan increasingly illiberal/authoritarian and religiously intolerant Indonesia. Meanwhile, the international order has been upended by President Vladimir Putin’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s attack on Iran (13 June 2025). In this dangerous world, we realise that anything can happen. But the likelihood—as the Malays say—is that senjata makan tuwan (a weapon will boomerang on its owner) and the Indonesians will find that everything they have visited on the East Timorese will be paid back in kind as a form of third-world colonial karma. Only when they have drained the cup of defeat to the dregs will a truly new order be born in Indonesia, only then will Timor-Leste really enjoy the freedom it has won at the cost of so much suffering.