Sir, - As one who was in East Timor in 1975 I should like to respond to Mrs Hendrati Munthe's outrageous attempt to discredit the Timorese leader, Jose Ramos Horta, by accusing him of, among other things, responsibility for the massacre of his own people in 1975.
Firstly, there was no such incident as a Fretilin massacre of East Timorese villagers", but let us look a little more closely at the event to which Mrs Munthe refers. There was, in August 1975, a brief, three-week, armed conflict between Fretilin and the more conservative UDT, a conflict that was engineered by the Indonesian military, two leading Indonesian generals having informed the UDT leaders that unless they took action against the "communist" Fretilin, Indonesia would intervene. The resultant clumsy UDT coup failed and within a month Fretilin was in control of the colony. There was some bitter fighting, with the total casualties amounting to about 1,500 people, according to the ICR mission. But the real massacre was to begin with Indonesia's invasion a few months later, East Timor population being decimated in the following four years as a brutal militia set out to, crush all opposition to integration.
Secondly, Horta in fact played no role in the civil war, because he was not in Timor when it broke out, and was unable to return until the fighting was over. in any case Horta was not one of the key Fretilin leaders at that time. Thirdly, as for the quality of East Timor's democracy, Mrs Munthe is again talking nonsense. Of course there was no constitution or elections during the three months when Fretilin virtually ruled East Timor, for obvious reasons. The Fretilin leaders initially asked the Portuguese to return and continue the decolonisation programme, which itself was designed to produce a democratic state. It was Indonesia's military intervention, and the failure of the outside world to respond to Fretilin's appeals for help, that provoked the Timorese leaders into declaring their independence.
As the leader of a humanitarian aid mission I was able to witness this period of Timor's history. Fretilin's brief rule in East Timor was in fact surprisingly democratic, and human rights protection was in better shape that in neighbouring Indonesia. Certainly there were no "re-education camps". But this experiment with democracy was extinguished when the Indonesian military seized the territory, and it was they who imposed a systematic terror on the Timorese. Mrs Munthe's presentation is a massive distortion of the tragic story of this remote territory, whose people have been forced into a new and harsher form of colonialism., Their struggle against oppression is an unequal one, a struggle in which Horta is a Timorese David against the Indonesian Goliath. To those of us who care about human, rights his campaign is a compelling one. - Yours etc.,
Columnist on Foreign Affairs and Human Rights, Percy Davis Drive, Moruya, NSW 2537 Australia.