From the Place of the Dead: The Epic Struggles of Bishop Belo of East Timor

by Arnold S. Kohen, Dalai Lama (Introduction), Paul Moore Jr. (Prologue by)

Overview

Winner of the Christopher Award, From the Place of the Dead is the definitive account of one of the worst human rights tragedies in contemporary history.

East Timor's struggle for independence under Indonesian occupation has dominated international headlines. Now, as UN troops uphold the August 1999 referendum calling for the island nation's self-rule, From the Place of the Dead offers the only up-to-date, comprehensive analysis of the confrontation through the eyes of one of the most extraordinary leaders to emerge from the crisis.

Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996, has been a fearless guardian of the basic human rights of the East Timorese people. Arnold Kohen's intimate knowledge of the political, religious, and social history of the region paints a penetrating portrait of this beleaguered nation and reveals the extent of international complicity in the violence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466827820
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/2000
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A former investigative reporter for NBC News, Arnold S. Kohen has written for The Nation, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Tablet (London), and many other publications. He lives near Washington, D.C.

Tenzin Gyatzo, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and is the temporal and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. The author of The Art of Happiness, among many other books, he is the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile and resides in Dharamsala, India.


Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He lives in exile in Dharamsala, India.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

What Led to This

* * *

To understand the East Timor situation, one must look at the complicity or indifference on the part of Indonesia's allies in the United States, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries from the time of the Indonesian invasion in 1975—especially in the critical time before the initial assault in 1975, and in the four years that followed. These years were a time of horrific human losses that might have been prevented: the historical record suggests that Indonesia might not have invaded East Timor had its main international allies issued timely warnings.

    In a visit they would surely prefer to forget, then President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger were in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on the eve of the invasion on December 6, 1975. Kissinger told the press that the United States "understands Indonesia's position" on the question of East Timor. A key CIA official present in Indonesia at the time viewed the Ford-Kissinger visit as an unusually strong American seal of approval. The same official stated that the United States led Indonesia's military resupply effort in a critical period after the invasion, with devastating consequences for East Timor. This was during a time when the United Nations passed ten resolutions, including a Security Council resolution calling for a withdrawal of Indonesian troops "without delay," and negotiations to end the conflict.

    Thousands of Indonesian paratroops and marines began pouring into Dill by air, land and sea inthe pre-dawn hours of December 7, 1975, after terrifying naval and aerial bombardment of the city. There was valiant resistance by East Timorese military forces, who were vastly outnumbered. They were unprepared for the ferocity of the Indonesian onslaught, which did not spare unarmed civilians.

    The human consequences of the Indonesian invasion could be seen right from Bishop Belo's residence: his predecessor, Monsignor Martinho da Costa Lopes, then vicar general of the Diocese of Dili, worked tirelessly to defend the people from assault. One of those Dom Martinho eventually rescued from imprisonment was Maria de Fatima, bringing her to work in his home.

    Many who tried to reach the bishop's residence when Indonesian troops attacked Dili were not so fortunate as Maria de Fatima.

    "The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were dead bodies in the streets—all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing," said Dom Martinho years later, after he had gone into exile. (He was removed from his position as head of the Diocese of Dili in 1983 by the Vatican, after speaking out fearlessly against Indonesian atrocities.) Women who tried to reach the iron gates near the little chapel where Bishop Belo later prayed were attacked with rifle butts. Isabel Lobato, the wife of Nicolau Lobato, the first leader of East Timor's guerrilla army, had her baby ripped from her arms before she was knocked down, stabbed with bayonets, shot, and thrown into the water, a few hundred feet from the entrance to Bishop Belo's residence. To no avail, Isabel Lobato pleaded for her life, begging the soldiers for mercy.

    A memorandum on a Washington meeting Kissinger held in late 1975 showed the lack of interest in the human impact of the attack on East Timor, although Indonesian forces waged a merciless campaign comparable to the brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II. The memorandum, published in The Nation magazine fifteen years later, underlined the fact that Kissinger's deputies told him that use of American arms for purposes of aggression was illegal under a treaty between the U.S. and Indonesia. He rebuffed their arguments, stating, "Can't we construe [preventing] a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" In fact, East Timor was on the remote periphery of Indonesia, and as a CIA official later put it, there was no evidence that it was ever threatened by Communism.

    Years later, Bishop Belo, noting that the United States had given its consent for the invasion, observed that "there was no danger whatsoever of a takeover by communists" and that talk of such a takeover "was clearly a pretext." The bishop added that even if this were the case, "Indonesia would still have had no right to invade East Timor."

    It was clear that no sizeable invasion by Indonesia could have been accomplished without American weapons: State Department testimony in 1977 established that "roughly 90 percent" of the military equipment available to the Indonesian Army in the 1975 invasion was American-supplied. These arms were still being used twenty-two years later—a period far longer than the American war in Vietnam, which U.S. troops evacuated the same year Indonesia invaded East Timor.

    American military aid was used in the region of Mount Matebian. The OV-10 "Bronco," made by Rockwell International, was a slow-moving counter-guerrilla plane equipped with infrared detectors, rockets, napalm, and machine guns, specially designed for close combat support against an enemy without effective anti-aircraft capability—in short, an enemy precisely like the Timorese resistance. At the height of the war, in the late 1970s, the OV-10 planes would be seen from Fatumaca, flying their bombing raids on Matebian. They would appear as a kind of deadly monster over the mountains and hillsides, creating an inferno unlike anything East Timor had ever seen. Many thousands were trapped and died there.

    Before the bombing gathered force, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were living in areas controlled by the resistance. The destruction of crops generated by the bombing created one of the most devastating famines in contemporary history. Photos of children depicted a situation as horrifying as that in Biafra, Cambodia, the Sahel, or Bangladesh. A Catholic missionary who served in East Timor's countryside for three years after the invasion later said that one third of the people he saw in rural areas during this period died as a result of the effects of the war, especially the raids by the OV-10s. David Alex was one of the guerrilla leaders who survived the battle of Matebian in the late 1970s.

    Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo was spared direct experience of East Timor's trauma during that crucial period: by December 1975, Belo had left the territory and was teaching in the Portuguese colony of Macau, near Hong Kong, when the Indonesians launched their invasion. He completed his studies in Rome only in 1981. Those six years, the worst period in East Timor's history, marked the territory indelibly and left devastating psychological scars on many of his colleagues in the Church, not to mention profound exhaustion. Being away during that fateful period gave Belo a freshness of perspective and spirit that may not have existed had he remained in East Timor without interruption.

    Bishop Belo missed a time that marked the lives of even the smallest children. The biography of his driver, António, is typical of that of the youngsters who were held on the island of Ataúro: his father was killed in the war in the late 1970s. Because his mother had died when he was born, António was taken in by family members, who cared for him in areas held by the guerrillas in bush country near the southern coast. From there he was deported to Ataúro, along with many others, in a campaign by the Indonesian military to separate the guerrillas from the local population. The notion that small children posed a security threat embodied the paranoia of the Indonesian occupation. In 1985, Belo went to Ataúro to visit the families there. António appeared behind the church by a prison camp to talk with the bishop, pleading with him for help in leaving the island. The bishop arranged for all the children who were finishing the sixth grade on Ataúro to come to Dili to finish their studies. António left Ataúro, and from then on had lived next door to the bishop's house.

    An island visible from Dili, several miles off the coast, Ataúro is the size of New York's Manhattan Island, a geographical comparison East Timor's tiny diplomatic delegation at the United Nations once tried to highlight in a vain attempt to attract press coverage. From the earliest days after the 1975 invasion, there were many prisoners on Ataúro, including Maria de Fatima, with a peak of more than four thousand when António arrived there in 1982.

    Despite the tremendous human losses and the cruel injustice, the world protested little over the occupation of East Timor. The international atmosphere began to shift somewhat only after the November 1991 massacre at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, in which more than 250 people, mainly youngsters, were gunned down by Indonesian troops. The massacre at Santa Cruz unfolded in full view of foreign reporters, including two British journalists who actually filmed and photographed the bloody scene. With its portrayal of the barbarous cruelties committed by Indonesian troops, and of the Timorese youngsters singing hymns of mercy and taking shelter amid the graves, the film of Santa Cruz brought the horrors of East Timor to an international audience of television viewers for the first time.

    But even after this, Indonesia remained a nation of great importance that few were willing to offend. Bishop Belo, whose forceful statements in the aftermath of Santa Cruz nearly led to his removal from office, knew only too well the broad reach of Indonesia's political influence. Still, after Santa Cruz, awareness of the East Timor tragedy had greatly increased, although Belo found it morally reprehensible that some could say that the death of hundreds at Santa Cruz was a necessary sacrifice to draw international notice to a situation that had been ignored.

    By the time it was announced on October 11, 1996, that Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta, the chief spokesman of East Timor's resistance movement, had received the Nobel Peace Prize, the issue of repression in East Timor had come to dominate Indonesia's international image, just as the war in Vietnam had once dogged the United States. A senior German diplomat, for one, complained that his countrymen saw Indonesia as only two things, "Belo and Bali." Bali, a world-famous tourist mecca and cultural cornucopia, was itself the scene of long-overlooked political violence. Unlike Bali, Belo and his country had remained little known until the Nobel Peace Prize. Still, as in Vietnam, a small and supposedly insignificant people had managed to persist against a vastly superior power. In the process, the story of East Timor had become a modem-day version of the epic encounter between David and Goliath. It was not a matter of slaying the giant in the form of a military victory: everyone knew this was impossible. But capturing the world spotlight after many years of seemingly hopeless struggle imbued the story of East Timor with an inspirational quality.

    No one was more crucial to this development than Bishop Belo. He emerged as the only one on his native soil with sufficient standing to make himself heard on the international stage. His refusal to bow to demands that he endorse Indonesian rule over East Timor led to a campaign against him, which continued even after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1989 and again in 1991, he had been the object of death threats engineered by the Indonesian military, allegedly by Prabowo Subianto, President Suharto's ruthless and ambitious son-in-law. The bishop took the threats seriously enough, and so did independent observers. During those years, in conversations with visitors, Belo expressed fear that he might share the fate of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of San Salvador, assassinated while saying Mass in 1980.

    As if threats of this nature were not enough, from 1992 onward rumors circulated constantly that Belo would be removed from his post by Vatican officials anxious to avoid confrontation with the Indonesian government. Trouble with the Holy See was a central subplot in the East Timor drama. The 1986 Robert De Niro film, The Mission, depicting the acquiescence of Vatican diplomats in the destruction of South American Indian missions in the eighteenth century, had become a favorite video of East Timor's native Catholic clergy. Indonesia was using every means of pressure available to assert its control over East Timor, including its contacts in the Vatican, to silence the Catholic Church of East Timor. As late as 1996, Belo was said to be slated for removal. But such rumors were swept into silence when he became the first Roman Catholic bishop ever to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize since the award's founding in 1901.

    These historic facts led to other comparisons that underscore the role Bishop Belo had come to play. The Catholic Church in East Timor under Indonesian rule has been likened to the Catholic Church in nineteenth century Ireland under British rule and Poland under Communism—that is, a Church resisting foreign domination and political repression. As in Ireland and Poland, the Church in East Timor is unified by experiences that have profoundly deepened the faith of its adherents. In a place where simply walking on the street could be deadly, it was the only public arena not controlled by the Indonesian invaders, the only local institution that provided a measure of protection to local people.

    The Catholic Church in East Timor quadrupled in size since the Indonesian invasion, and hundreds of thousands of followers of indigenous religions converted en masse. It grew to be the most popular institution in the territory. As its head, Belo became "the foremost leader of the people of East Timor," in the words of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. No less a personage than Pope John Paul II, perhaps paradoxically, given the stance of some in the Holy See, had taken a special interest in the fate of East Timor since his 1989 visit there: John Paul gave his personal support to Bishop Belo long before the Timorese prelate became known to the wider world. The pontiff knew that if he had a choice, Belo would have preferred to stick to religion rather than politics, as various Vatican officials repeatedly admonished him to do. It is not as if Belo has relished or sought trouble with his superiors; in fact, it has pained him deeply, for many years. But the human tragedy in East Timor weighed even more heavily on him, and he, unlike the diplomats or officials at a safe remove in Rome, could not avoid it.

    Belo took up his post as local bishop at the age of thirty-five, when he looked as young as one of his seminary students. Later, on his worst days, he would come to have the image of Saint Sebastian, the early Christian martyr: his face would have a look of unbearable anguish at the sight of his people's suffering. Belo once told the archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, that his years as head of East Timor's Catholic Church are "my Calvary," reference to the place of the crucifixion of Christ. Not every day was bloody, but an air of violence was always present.

    Aside from the incalculable human losses East Timor had experienced, the country was slowly being taken over by Indonesian immigrants, in the same way the nation of Tibet was being colonized by China. About half of Dili's population was now Indonesian. The best opportunities—in the civil service, in farming, in street markets, and virtually any kind of business—were going to newcomers. Local culture was slowly being wiped out. The native population, especially the young people, bitterly resented all of this, and confrontations between unarmed protestors and security forces were only one manifestation of their discontent.

    The schools introduced by the Indonesians increased literacy to the highest levels ever, and vastly increased educational opportunity. But rather than view this as a benevolent gift, many East Timorese saw Indonesian education as another technique to conquer the territory and subjugate them. The schools were seen as depressing places of inferior quality where the East Timorese were treated as lower beings, forced to relinquish their own culture for that of an alien invader. And as Bishop Belo put it, "We have often asked for local teachers to be appointed, but that never happens."

    The Indonesian government never tired of boasting about the many miles of roads they had built in East Timor. Indeed, under the Portuguese, what was now a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Baucau, the first leg of the journey to Fatumaca, had taken twelve hours on an unpaved road that became virtually impassable in the rainy season. Facts like this, trumpeted by the central government in the heavily censored news media at every opportunity, made many Indonesians believe the East Timorese were fairly treated, even pampered. It vexed Bishop Belo to hear this, as though East Timor was merely a construction project.

    As is typical in nations with a controlled press, the other side could never make itself heard. The Indonesian media never actually stated that a war was being fought by its troops in East Timor. Nor had it reported on the number of people in East Timor who died as a result. Similarly, the uses to which the new roads were put had not been broached. On this day in June 1997, as on most every day when he was on the road, Bishop Belo's van was one of the few Timorese vehicles in sight. If the roads benefitted anyone, it was the military and other security forces, which needed them to conduct operations. When Indonesian troops first invaded in 1975, there were few good roads, and in part for this reason—staunch resistance was the main one—it took years to subdue the greater part of the territory.

    Another crucial fact escaped public notice, namely the deposits of oil and natural gas in the sea between East Timor and Australia, an area called the Timor Gap. A treaty had been signed between Australia and Indonesia in 1989 governing commercial exploitation of this zone. By the mid-1990s billions of dollars in investments were being made there. A group of oil workers told a visiting European near the southern town of Suai that East Timor might be the richest area in Southeast Asia outside the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, which itself was one of the richest countries in the world. It is fair to say that East Timor is hardly the miserable, poor, and "unviable" territory that the world had been told from 1974 on, fortunate to be with a nation like Indonesia, which had the capacity to pay for "development." Foreign ministers from Indonesia and Australia were filmed making a champagne toast over the Timor Gap agreement. The world, as then Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans had put it when speaking of the legality, or lack of it, of the Indonesian presence in East Timor, was "a pretty unfair place." As Bishop Belo caustically commented, "Maybe the Indonesians want to remain here because of the oil in the Timor Sea. But then, sometimes I think to myself, let them keep the oil but give us our freedom. But they give us neither the oil nor our freedom"

    Leaving aside the delicate issue of oil, the words and attitudes of the Indonesians toward East Timor were strikingly similar to those of the colonialists early in this century. Some Indonesians—even the highly educated—referred to the people of East Timor as "monkeys." What the East Timorese thought or felt seemed to matter little. A callous disregard for human life resulted from such attitudes, just as descriptions of Vietnamese as "gooks" had preceded the 1968 massacre at My Lai. Bishop Belo knew this from personal experience. In his first days as head of the Church in 1983, the bishop tried to reason politely with the Indonesian military commander about the atrocities his forces were committing. The commander turned his back and walked away.

    Thus, while Portuguese colonialism had had its obvious cruelties, and Portuguese colonists had had their own feelings of supremacy, the Indonesian occupation was regarded as infinitely more repressive and intrusive. Whatever Portugal had neglected to do, and that was a great deal, could not begin to compare with the massive loss of life, dislocation, and destruction of local cultures that had taken place after they left—so much so that more than twenty years after their departure, there was widespread nostalgia for the Portuguese past. It is not too much to say that the Portuguese word saudades—an untranslatable word, roughly equivalent to "yearning" or "longing for" someone or something—applied to the feelings of many, if not most, East Timorese for their former overlords.

    These thoughts were regarded as heretical by the Indonesian government and its security forces. And there was a price to be paid—by almost anyone—who asked too many questions about Indonesia's stewardship of East Timor: it was not only guerrillas who were seen as the enemy by the military. The father of Ignacio, one of the orphans under the care of Bishop Belo, had worked for the Indonesians. But one night in 1986, after he talked about corruption in the local government, he was taken away, killed, and buried on a beach by Indonesian troops. His remains were found only years later.

    History of this kind was invisible to most visitors who came to East Timor. After the international outcry over the Santa Cruz massacre, security forces restricted their roughest activities to places where independent witnesses could not see them. Few Timorese would risk contact with foreigners, much less engage in extended conversations.

    In fact, for much of the time since Indonesia launched its invasion, one needed special permission to visit East Timor, and this was impossible for most foreigners (and Indonesians) to obtain from 1976 through early 1989, when the territory was opened to tourists. But even then, tourists were not that many, and visitors were closely watched by a pervasive Indonesian security apparatus. During the years of the greatest bloodshed, from 1975 to 1979, there were almost no independent witnesses present, and it was a simple matter for Indonesian authorities and their foreign supporters to deny reports of atrocities. Nicolau Lobato, the head of the military wing of East Timor's independence movement, which had fielded thousands of troops in a desperate attempt to resist the invasion, was killed on the last day of 1978 with scarcely a word of protest from abroad. At the same time, numerous East Timorese captured by Indonesian forces were brutally executed, many after being promised an amnesty by President Suharto. This, too, elicited no international condemnation.

    The Timorese guerrillas managed to regroup in the 1980s under the leadership of Jose Alexandre Gusmão, known as Xanana, who eluded capture until late 1992, when he was taken in Dili. Xanana was given a life sentence in prison (later commuted to twenty years) after a show trial. Nonetheless, there was enough international interest in East Timor by this time to make it impossible for the Indonesian army to execute Xanana, as they had done with Nicolau Lobato and many of his compatriots, and in prison, Xanana attained a stature akin to that of the South African leader Nelson Mandela during his own years of captivity. Indeed, one independent observer confided in 1995 that he himself was told by an Indonesian military commander that without the power of international public opinion, Indonesian forces could simply kill all the young protesters in East Timor. World protest after the events at Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991 made it impossible to take such extreme actions. Still, there were limits on how far Indonesia's international allies were prepared to go in their protests to Jakarta, and killings in East Timor never ceased entirely.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from From the Place of the Dead by Arnold S. Kohen. Copyright © 1999 by Arnold S. Kohen. Excerpted by permission.

Table of Contents

Chronology	ix
Author's Note	xiii
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction by the Dalai Lama	xix
Preface: Defender of His People	1
One: What Led to This	12
Two: Forebears	25
Three: The Early Years	47
Four: Disintegration	70
Five: Return to the Funeral Pyre	102
Six: Bishop	130
Seven: Santa Cruz and Beyond	160
Eight: "If I Have to Go to Hell, I'll Go to Hell"	188
Nine: Nobel	220
Ten: Perseverance	254
Epilogue	277
Notes	300
Selected Bibliography	314
Index	319

Editorial Reviews

Kohen's absorbing biography of Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Filipe Belo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his human rights work in East Timor, should draw public attention to the tragedy of the island territory and former Portuguese colony, which was brutally invaded in 1975 by Indonesia and has been occupied by it ever since. A former NBC News reporter who has written for the Nation, Kohen traveled with Bishop Belo in the lush but impoverished and terrorized East Timor countryside between 1993 and 1997. He shows that Belo's crusade for East Timor's independence has deep personal roots. In 1948, at the age of three, Belo lost his father, who died as a result of severe wartime beatings inflicted by the Japanese. In 1981, Belo's brother, uncles and cousins were used as "human shields," forced to march in front of Indonesian troops to flush out guerrillas. Kohen attributes Belo's fierce sense of identity and stubbornness (he persevered despite death threats in a land where so many other activists have been killed) to his membership in one of East Timor's oldest ethnic groups, the Makassae. He exposes Vatican arm-twisting intended to bully Belo into silence and details the bishop's frustrating relations with the Clinton administration, which has mostly remained silent about East Timor. Kohen reports that East Timor is gradually being taken over by Indonesian immigrants in much the same way Tibet has been colonized by China--hence the Dalai Lama's eloquent introduction, supporting a people "trying to keep their own culture and identity alive." (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Leader for peace in a tortured country, Bishop Belo of East Timor became the first Catholic bishop to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. Foremost among leaders of his homeland, he has worked to end the suffering of his people. This sympathetic biography portrays the bishop and his country in the years before and during the Indonesian occupation, which has brought death and despair to so many. It reveals American support for Indonesia during this period and examines the Vatican's complicated role. Investigative reporter Kohen traces the bishop's life from his village origins through his priesthood to his national and international role as his people's chief pastor. Like Oscar Romero, assassinated while celebrating mass in El Salvador; Desmond Tutu; and Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, Belo provides an unforgettable example of how a person of faith can change the world. The book includes an introduction by the Dalai Lama and a foreword by former Episcopal bishop of New York Paul Moore. For public and academic libraries.--John R. Leech, New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A timely, politically charged biography of Bishop Carlos X. Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996 for his efforts to end the oppression of the people of East Timor at the hands of the Indonesian military. Kohen, a former investigative reporter with NBC News, canonizes Belo for his struggle to minimize the human impact of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, but his saintly portrait of a great humanitarian rising to the call of the suffering masses seems less intriguing than his extremely acute political analysis of the ongoing crisis. Of particular interest is the involvement of the US throughout the 28-year history of the conflict. From Kissinger's nod to the Suharto government when he declared that the US "understands Indonesia's position," on the eve of the invasion in 1975, to the deployment of American-made OV-10 Bronco counterguerrilla planes during the '70s, to the millions of dollars of questionable campaign contributions received by the Clinton administration, the Indonesian invasion has been facilitated by the US government. Not until the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of 1991, captured live by the international media (more than 250 youngsters gunned down by Indonesian troops), did any serious international attention focus on the occupation. Noam Chomsky and others have written extensively about the failure of the Western media to cover human-rights violations in East Timor, and Kohen's graphic description of youthful protestors being shot down with American-made M-16 rifles renders the reasons for such a news blackout quite clear—stories about "emerging markets" trump those about human-rights violations every time. The collapse of the Indonesianeconomy and the end of Suharto's dictatorship have made that country increasingly dependent on the West. Kohen issues an important call for members of the financial First World to take advantage of their influence by bringing pressure on the Indonesian government to end its brutal policies in East Timor.

Kirkus Reviews