DUBLIN - A proposal to run a summer course at King's College, London for 50 senior Indonesian army officers has been abandoned after protests by British and Irish East Timor solidarity activists, reports David Shanks.
At a meeting yesterday of the board of the Centre for Defence Studies (CDS) at King's it was decided that it would "not be appropriate to go ahead at present" with the plan to run a course, funded by Indonesia, every year for five years, Professor Lawrence Freedman, the centre's honorary director, said "We wanted to encourage discussion on political change in Indonesia," he said, answering trenchant criticism of this approach as naive and unrealistic.