shadowmayor (420 posts)
4. East Timor
The bloodbath rolled into East Timor with the backing of Kissinger and Ford (first) and the genocide began under Reagan with approval from Wolfowitz (he was our man in Jakarta). War criminals all, haters gotta hate, and war criminals gotta keep killing darker skinned people around the world.
East Timor was a Portuguese colony that Portugal abandoned. Various factions vied to fill that vacuum, including a Communist guerrilla force. Not wanting a Communist force that could cause trouble in the western part of Timor (which was and is Indonesian territory), Indonesian invaded, in 1975. It is true that Pres. Ford and Sec State Kissinger were aware of Suharto's plans to "invade" the eastern part of Timor and promised not to interfere. They "asked" that it be done quickly, but the ensuing war lasted for some 24 years. Evidently, much of the slaughter and starvation occurred between 1975 and 1981 (Wikipedia article about East Timor). Remind me ... who was President from January, 1977 through January 1981? Hint: it wasn't Ronald Reagan. Paul Wolfowitz was US Ambassador to Indonesia,
but from 1986 through 1989, during Reagan's second term.I know ya'll can do the Math, but 24 years from 1975 means the war in East Timor ended in 1999. Do I need to point out who was POTUS from January, 1993 through January, 2001? Who in some 6 years played little or no role in the war's end, a referendum agreed to by the UN, Portugal, and Indonesia (after Suharto's resignation).
I won't say "shadowmayor" is a complete fail, including the words "and" and "the", but it's riddled with lack of context, serious and relevant omissions (Carter's entire Presidency was ignored, as was ~6 years of WJC!), and false factoids. Then there's the context I omitted, the mass slaughter and starvation under Communist rule - Lenin, Stalin, and Mao - and the atrocities of Pol Pot, which were concurrent with the early years of the war in East Timor. However brutally it was carried out, Suharto's decision to "invade" and fight a war was not made in an atmosphere of blood lust or greed for power.