Cynthia Peters

"They

forced us all out of the house and one of them held a gun to my head. `I am

going to kill you. You are a child of FALINTIL.’ `No,’ I told the soldier, `I

am a child.’"

—

an 11-year old East Timorese girl

Visiting

East Timor after the August 30 vote for independence and the torrent of violence

and destruction that followed, Pamela Sexton, of East Timor Action Network (ETAN)

and Grassroots International, had the opportunity to talk with this young girl.

She told the story of witnessing her aunt’s rape and murder, and of having the

same soldiers threaten to kill her. Her reply speaks volumes about the courage

of even the very young in East Timor.

During

24 years of brutal repression at the hands of the Indonesian military, the East

Timorese never gave up hope. Despite the daily fear and brutality, and knowing

the high price they would mostly likely pay, 78% of the voters in the August 30

balloting chose independence. In the violence that followed, when pro-Indonesia

soldiers and paramilitairies burned 80 percent of the country’s buildings to the

ground and forcibly exiled or killed a large portion of the population, the East

Timorese decorated their gutted towns and villages with grafitti that cursed the

Indonesian military and celebrated their newly won independence.

Internationally,

East Timor has received critical support from solidarity groups, a small but

stable independent media presence, and concerned individuals. In the United

States, activists fashioned the East Timor Action Network out of meetings and

demonstrations held after the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in which the Indonesian

military killed 271 unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. Journalists Amy Goodman

and Allan Nairn witnessed and survived that massacre, and helped bring the word

back to the United States. Nairn’s testimony before Congress and their combined

effort to speak to grassroots organizations helped raise public awareness about

the long history of U.S.-backed repression in East Timor.

As

the ETAN web site reports, "At first without knowledge of each other,

people from New York to Providence to San Francisco to Los Angeles began to

organize in their communities to get the word out about the most recent and most

blatant massacre in East Timor. . . When we held our first demonstration on

Human Rights Day (December 10, 1991) at the Indonesian Mission to the United

Nations in New York City, we had no intention of starting an ongoing movement.

But when we found each other through the internet and existing networks, and

began to pressure our representatives in Congress, we realized that we were not

alone."

Several

dozen people formed the East Timor Action Network at the end of 1991, defining

their mission as pressuring the U.S. government to end its complicity with the

Indonesian annexation of East Timor and pressing for genuine self-determination

for the East Timorese.

Toward

that end, ETAN nurtured a grassroots movement that led to the cancellation of

several weapons deals with Indonesia, including sales of F-5 and F-16 warplanes,

small arms, riot control equipment, armored vehicles and helicopter-mounted

equipment, as well as a Congressional cutoff of International Military and

Education Training (IMET). Since November 1997, ETAN succeeded in getting

Congress to enact laws that effectively prohibited the use of U.S.-supplied

weapons in East Timor. Most recently, in November 1999, ETAN spearheaded an

effort to codify Clinton’s cutoff of military aid by pressing for passage of a

bill with provisions that military aid to Indonesia could not be resumed unless

certain conditions are met.

According

to Allan Nairn, who is currently working on a book about the Indonesian and U.S.

militaries, U.S. weapons sales cancellations had a "chilling" effect

on the Indonesian military, forcing them to tone down their violent tactics.

Meanwhile, grassroots protests in Indonesia forced long-time dictator Suharto to

resign in 1998 (in part, because of the Asian economic crisis). The burgeoning

democracy movement throughout Indonesia had room to express itself, and quickly

moved in to fill the spaces left by a fallen dictator, a slightly subdued

military, and an economic crisis that rocked the region.

It

was this constellation of forces that led to the August 30 referendum, which

gave the East Timorese the opportunity to speak definitively in favor of

independence.

The

road to East Timor’s independence is a long and complicated one. It features a

people’s courage, international solidarity, grassroots pressure for democracy,

and evolving economic and political forces. In the U.S., most of us (with some

notable exceptions) do not put our lives at risk when we choose to fight for

social change. We do take other risks, however, such as isolation and a lifetime

of uphill battles. The few dozen people who started ETAN (and the dedicated

activists that worked on the issue before then) were courageous. They were

taking on a struggle against Goliath (U.S. foreign policy and the Indonesian

military) in support of David (a tiny country of not even a million people that

rarely made it into U.S. newspapers, and which most Americans had never heard

of).

And

David won – though he has been made to pay a terrible price. East Timor faces

many challenges as it attempts to rebuild a country reduced to rubble by the

U.S.-backed Indonesian military, and to free more than 100,000 East Timorese who

are being held against their will in Indonesia. It’s time for U.S. activists to

rethink their work. Certainly, there is much that remains to be done to support

East Timor. But there is also the ongoing work of stanching the U.S. pipeline of

weapons, training and support to the Indonesian military, uncovering U.S. and

other corporate interests in the region, exposing the workings of international

monetary institutions, and supporting regional democracy movements. With the

energy produced by anti-WTO demonstrations, the growing anti-sweatshop movement,

and the strength of ETAN and other peace and justice groups, we are at an

important juncture. The other "Davids" – the indigenous people of

Irian Jaya, the Acehnese secessionist movement, the Indonesian workers in Nike

factories guarded by the military – would benefit from a strong solidarity

movement in the United States that not only lobbied Congress on weapons sales,

but built ties to U.S. unions and other community organizations.

ETAN

may retain its single-issue focus on East Timor – perhaps properly so.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of room for other activists to step forward in

solidarity with the many Indonesians whose land and lives are being stolen in

the name of corporate interests while U.S.-made weapons are leveled at them.

ETAN’s

founders, and the thousands who have worked on East Timor over the years, knew

the difficulty of their mission, but they forged on anyway, educating hundreds

of thousands on the topic, lobbying Congress, helping to create the political

space for books, articles, and videos to be made that chronicle East Timor’s

story and expose big power complicity, and creating an infrastructure of

knowledgeable activists with a deeper understanding of U.S. foreign policy and

the mainstream media’s role in reinforcing the status quo.

U.S.

activists did not have to display the same courage that the 11-year old girl did

when she responded to the soldier pointing a gun to her head. But U.S. activists

displayed courage nonetheless. They did what was right despite the long odds of

success and the seemingly insurmountable forces arrayed against them. They

patiently built their movement not knowing how it would turn out.

To

paraphrase Eduardo Galeano in the December Z, we need not think of ourselves as

heroes for fighting for justice, but nor are we fools.