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Murdered, beaten, raped, tortured, disenfranchised and yet the Timorese are still going strong!  The Human Spirit protects its own.

In late January, 1999, the Southeast Asian Food Security and Fair Trade Council sent a special team to Indonesia to investigate the reality of the heavily publicised rice crisis there.  Our question was 'Is it really a crisis?'  I was one in a two man team to East Timor, the Island State that was violently annexed by Dictatorial Indonesia.  The ever murderous Suharto and his allies (which, by the way, include Canada, the United States, Australia and many other countries who continued to support the regime long after the Indonesian military began a systematic slaughter and rape of the Timorese) had, and now - carrying on after being promoted from understudy to full Despot, Habibie - does see East Timor as a rich source of natural resources in need of exploitation.

The pages that follow document my observations over the ten day trip.

A small background:  I have been a volunteer with CUSO, a Canadian volunteer sending agency, for the past 4+ years.  Since January 1998 I have been stationed with an NGO in Bangkok called Rural Reconstruction Alumni and Friends Association (RRAFA).  They are the Secretariat for the Alternative Agriculture Network (AAN) of Thailand.

A small warning:  some of the pictures also document the murders of Timorese and demonstrate the ugly nature of political pursuit and express the purposelessness of Indonesian existence in Timor.
 
 

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