The Indonesian army: a homicidal rabble

6 April 2007

By giving it their de facto and de jure blessing, the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and (yes) Howard governments were all complicit in the Indonesian invasion/occupation - in which the murderous rabble known as the Indonesian defence forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Timorese civilians.

We owe East Timor not only any security help they might want - after all, if they had been allowed to establish an independent state in 1975 they would presumably be stable by now - but reparations.

The East Timorese saved hundreds of Australian diggers' lives in WW2. We dropped leaflets at war's end saying 'We will never forget you.' We broke that commitment. Let's not break this one.