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After the Massacres

Lessons to be learned from the tragedy of East Timor

In 1975, while he was working as a radio news reporter, Arnold Kohen dedicated himself to the effort to raise international awareness of the plight of East Timor. As he followed Timorese events over the years, he became increasingly aware of the important role played by the Catholic Church in general, and Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo in particular. In 1999, St. Martin’s Press published his biography of Bishop Belo, entitled From the Place of the Dead. Kohen was with Bishop Belo when the Nobel Prize laureate returned to East Timor in October 1999—after having been driven from his home in Dili by the militia groups that ravaged the countryside in the wake of a national referendum on independence. Arnold Kohen spoke to CWR early in December.

How did you first come in contact with Bishop Belo?

Arnold Kohen: I met Bishop Belo nearly seven years ago, in New Orleans, at the US Catholic bishops’ meeting there. But actually I met him through a couple of people. One is his former high school teacher, who is a priest in this country—in Rhode Island—Father Reinaldo Cardoso, who was a missionary in East Timor for twelve years. He is now an American citizen; he is originally from the Azores. I met Bishop Belo through him.

The second way I became acquainted with the bishop is that I had been working on this issue for some time, and I knew Bishop Belo’s predecessor and had a letter of introduction from him. So those were really the two ways that I met the bishop.

But how did you first become involved in the issue of East Timor?

Kohen: When I was interviewed recently for Nightline [the television news program], the reporter who interviewed me, David Marish, started asking me the same thing: “How did you get involved in this?”

As I say in my book, it was very much an action of fate. In 1975, around the time of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, I was working in a radio features program for an FM station in Ithaca, New York called WVBR. But it was very much an accident.

It was around Christmas time, and because I’m Jewish, and my girlfriend had gone home for Christmas, I was just manning the fort, so to speak. I got some information on East Timor, and I said to myself, “This seems to be a really terrible thing, and no one seems to be doing anything about it.” This was in December 1975: when East Timor was first invaded.

So I started to write about the issue, and was in touch with Asian Studies people. It happens that at Cornell University, right there in Ithaca, there are some the best Asian Studies people in the world—Indonesian studies people, in fact. So it was fortuitous that I was able to get training from them at a fairly young age. I didn’t really want to go into the graduate program at Cornell, because at that time there were no jobs in the field at all. And I was a journalist by training.

So over the years I worked at different jobs—with NBC News as a court reporter, in federal courts, and so on—but I stayed in touch with this issue. About 20 years ago I started to collaborate with the US Catholic Conference and to collaborate heavily with the Church in East Timor. So through all this I came to meet Bishop Belo.

With your background—having watched the development of the situation over a period of years—can you explain what caused the frightening spasm of violence in East Timor this year?

Kohen: When I was there a few weeks ago, I was going around with a friend of mine who is a New York Times reporter and the question that he had asked was, “How the heck did all of this happen? Why were the East Timorese being treated this way?” He had talked to people who were missionaries, who in my judgment were pretty sober and pretty reliable, including one American nun from the Los Angeles area. What she said—and there is no reason to doubt it; I have heard it from a lot of people—is that the Javanese, who are the main ethnic group in Indonesia, see themselves as superior to the people from the outer islands. The Timorese are seen to them as primitive people. In fact what Sister Marlene said is that they see the Timorese as dogs. It is a terrible thing to say that, but I think, as you try to grapple with this, you can understand her point.

In my book I tell about how when Bishop Belo took office in 1983, he went over to the Indonesian military commanders and tried to get them to recognize that they were committing atrocities and to do something about it. In other words he tried, the best he could, to work within the system. On occasion he would go up to them, and they would turn their backs on him. And that is the bishop! If the bishop is treated this way, imagine how ordinary people are treated!

Now in terms of the most recent developments that led up to the massacres, an election was scheduled for this year, because the United Nations had never recognized that East Timor was part of Indonesia. Indonesia had been ruling East Timor since the invasion that happened in 1975, and the issue of sovereignty was an unresolved problem. Now what happened was that the Indonesian leader who suggested this election—B. Habibie, who was then president, having taken over from the old strongman Suharto—did not consult with the military before he made this decision. The military never accepted the idea that such an election or such a choice should be put to the Timorese people. And once those military leaders had no alternative but to accept that such an election was going take place, they went around and intimidated people through various forms of terror and outright assassination.

When I saw Bishop Belo in July of this year, 1999—he came to Los Angeles to attend the Jubilee Justice Conference, which was put on by Cardinal Mahony and 60 Catholic organizations—I frankly was shocked at the bishop’s demeanor. I guess I shouldn’t have been, but still I was shocked. Normally he is extremely buoyant. But now, in private, he really seems as if five years have been cut off from his life. He said that the amount of violence that had taken place in the villages was shocking. And remember, this was before the violence really broke into the news here.

In July Bishop Belo reported that anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people had been assassinated over the previous six to eight months—that is from late last year until mid-July when he came to Los Angeles. He was terribly worried about what was going to happen next. It was his feeling—and if you read my book, you will see that he is a moderate to conservative man, somebody who has always tried to play the reconciling role—that there was no more future for East Timor under Indonesia. He believed that if East Timor was not to become an independent state, they would be doomed, because the level of violence—and again, remember, this was before the massacres began in September—had reached such extreme proportions. It was evident to him that there would be no future if there was a continued Indonesian role.

It was the Indonesians who organized the militias. They organized all sorts of violent campaigns. They were the main actors in all this.

Even before this year, a frightening number of Timorese people had been killed during this past generation. Doesn’t the carnage compare with the slaughter in countries such as Cambodia in the 1970s?

Kohen: What I can tell you is this; between 1975 and 1979 it has been estimated that about 200,000 people have been killed, or even more. Bishop Belo says that the number could be about a quarter of a million; that is about a third of the population.

The church census of 1974 was 688,000 people and that is considered to be the most accurate census. So if over 200,000 people died, that is about a third of the population.

For the most part, these people died as a result of war-related famine. There were certainly many thousands of people who were executed, but there was also an enormous toll from war-related famine. That famine was something that was quite intentional. The Indonesian military had a very hard time subduing the territory, so they started bombing in the countryside to prevent people from growing and harvesting crops, and to postpone the arrival of relief aid until it was too late.

Can you explain why there was so little international outcry, or even awareness of this slaughter? Admittedly, East Timor is far away from the Western world. But Cambodia is far away, too, and we were all reasonably well aware of the Pol Pot massacres.

Kohen: There are a few things at work here. It is a complicated issue. I’ve studied this very carefully. First, the territory of East Timor was shut off to the outside world between 1975 and late 1979. In fact even when it was open slightly in 1979, it was only open to a few reporters. The territory actually didn’t reopen to visitors without prior permission until 1989. So that it made it very difficult for the press to cover the issue. That is point #1.

Point #2 is a big problem. Just yesterday I had a luncheon with some wonderful people who are working with the diplomatic community in the United States. They were all Americans: very senior, very conservative. They spent half the lunch talking about how even now, after everything that has taken place, there is such a strong lobby for Indonesia in this country. East Timor is seen as almost having no consequence.

It was much worse back in the 1970s, I can tell you. I was around then, too, and I came to Washington in the late 1970s and talked to a lot of people. You could get virtually nobody to focus on this issue. There were a handful of congressmen who were interested, but the government didn’t want to know about it. Whether it was under President Ford or under President Carter, the government simply did not want to know about this issue.

Because of this attitude, even when we were dealing with refugees, or with priests and missionaries who were perfectly bona fide witnesses to the events in East Timor, nobody at the State Department wanted to speak with them. I remember one particular priest who had seen a lot of destruction in the countryside, and nobody would talk with him to hear his report.

Is this attitude a reflection of Indonesia’s commercial power?

Kohen: It is not just commercial; it is political. Suharto was seen as a great Cold War ally. But you could not get a peep out of anybody about East Timor.

It was only when the New York Times started writing some good editorials in late 1979 that congressmen started raising a fuss. It was only around that time that you even got any kind of response. But even then, for years and years and years, our government—whether it was under Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan or George Bush—simply did not want to know about this issue. This attitude was continued, in a different form under President Clinton.

I say it was “in a different form” because in 1991 there was a massacre in East Timor, in a church cemetery in Santa Cruz, and it got on television. It wasn’t really broadcast enough to have the full effect, but there was some television footage, which hadn’t existed before. That opened the issue up, so President Clinton could not ignore the issue in the way previous presidents had been able to ignore it because it simply had not been anything of a public issue.

Now I hasten to add that as graphic and shocking as the Santa Cruz massacre was, it was only on TV in this country, when it comes down to it, for only a few minutes. Now you’re talking to somebody who worked for NBC News in television. So I know what a few minutes can mean: it’s really nothing; it’s a blip on the radar screen.

Still, for the first time, the people who wanted to know about it now knew about it. There were films that you could show people, and you were able to get audiences interested. Church audiences, in particular, were shocked when they saw this footage.

And I have to say there were lovely conservatives, like the former senator from Wyoming, Malcolm Wallop, a Republican, who took this issue up and got the majority of the Senate to sign a letter around the time of the Santa Cruz massacre. I happened to have known him personally, and Senator Wallop told us that there were many conservatives who were extremely upset about what had happened in East Timor when they had seen the footage of the massacre in the cemetery; it just absolutely outraged them.

For religious people, that such a crime could take place at all—let alone in a church cemetery—was really shocking. So I think that this was a certain turning point, and we started to be able to get people interested.

But that by itself was not enough. We did not have the saturation type of coverage that we saw in September 1999. Well, I shouldn’t say that it was saturation coverage even then; it was never really saturation coverage. But let’s say that at least there was heavy coverage in September at the time of the post-election massacres.

Before we talk about those September massacres, let me ask one more preliminary question. Throughout the summer of 1999, there were fairly regular reports—even if they did not get much prominence in the news—that Bishop Belo was asking for international help. He was saying, essentially, that he was frightened. But there was not much response—at least certainly not the response that he wanted. So why were so many international leaders apparently caught by surprise when East Timor exploded?

Kohen: That’s right; there was very little response. This is something that I will regret for the rest of my life—that somehow more couldn’t have been done. I mean, I recognize that I am only one person, but as an individual and a close friend of the bishop’s, it just really distressed me that people did not listen to him earlier.

I know I had one meeting with State Department officials in early February, in a restaurant in Washington. When they invited me they said it would be an off-the-record meeting. I was surprised at the level of awareness that they showed, quite openly, because on previous occasions the State Department officials would try to deny that they really knew what was going on. In this case they were adding to what I told them, which is what Bishop Belo had been telling me—that is, that the militias were being organized by the Indonesian military. They had no trouble in admitting to any of the bishop’s reports about the level of violence. This was in early February. And yet there simply was not the political will to exert the pressure that needed to be put on Indonesia.

Now I, at that meeting, was very impatient with the State Department people, because what they wanted me to do was to go to the bishop and endorse a proposal to send conflict-resolution people from the United States out to East Timor. These were to be private groups. I was very impatient with this suggestion, and at first I thought that I was being impolite. But in retrospect maybe you can be the judge of that.

I said, “Look, unless this administration is committed to putting maximum pressure on the Indonesian military, the idea that you are going to send conflict-resolution people out there is totally ridiculous—because, you know, these are thugs who are running around and being armed by the Indonesian military and being imported into East Timor (because a lot of these people in these militias were not even Timorese). They were thugs. The Jakarta underworld was being emptied and was being sent to Dili.

Again, we read reports throughout the early summer that the militia groups were backed by the Indonesian military. But where was the military finding the manpower? Where did these people come from? Were they Timorese themselves?

Kohen: They were coming from different places. There were a number that were being brought in from the Western side of Timor (which has always been a part of Indonesia), and from other islands in the region. Some were from the main Indonesian island of Java. And there were plenty of Indonesian soldiers in plain clothes, who were fighting among these militias. Still, they were trying to create the impression that this was some popular Timorese movement.

A few weeks ago I was sitting with Bishop Belo at a luncheon for a lovely elderly nun in Dili, and suddenly he started to translate for me. What had happened was that the nuns were talking to each other about what had happened during this crisis, and they were talking about the fact that a lot of the Timorese who were working in these militias were actually poor local boys who had been forced to do this—forced to join the militia groups. They had even been helping the nuns with their daily tasks, and then the military would come along and force these local boys to attack churches; they would force them, on pain of death, to do things like that.

According to United Nations officials whom I know personally, about 60 to 70 hard-core Timorese militia leaders have been identified. So you see, you were not talking about hundreds of local militia leaders, and you certainly were not talking about thousands. You were talking about a few dozen Timorese people who were hard-core leaders.

Now in the case of some of these fellows, they came from extremely unfortunate backgrounds. You would have to really look back into the Holocaust to really find similar situations. What I mean is that some people whose parents had been killed by the Indonesian military were then brought up by army officers. There had been people like this in concentration camps—people who would become so psychologically twisted and dependent on the military that they were in a kind of moral no-man’s land.

Bishop Belo actually tried to talk to the local militia leaders, to effect some sort of reconciliation. But he was never able to get through to them. Either they wouldn’t show up to meetings, or the day before he was supposed to say Mass for them, they would commit such terrible atrocities that he couldn’t possibly show up. This was a by-product of the earlier tragedies. A friend of mine, who is now working for the UN team, who is a long-term Indonesian specialist, told me, “Well this is what the Indonesia occupation of East Timor has wrought— creating a group of monsters.”

Ordinarily, when a colony makes a bid for independence, the people who oppose that effort are more likely to be the “haves”—the people who are already in power, or already economically comfortable—while those who press for independence are more likely to be the “have nots.”

Kohen: Yes.

Has that been the case in East Timor?

Kohen: Yes, to a large extent it is. It is even more complicated than that.

Once while we were in East Timor a few years ago, my wife ran into someone she knew well from the old days. (I haven’t mentioned my wife; she is a German, who had lived in East Timor for a few years before the invasion, working as a teacher. She knows the bishop well, and knows people in the Church, and speaks local languages.) Well, she ran into an old friend, a Timorese man who was related to the family of the Indonesian-appointed governor. This friend was a totally non-political person—somebody who really just wanted to provide for his family and stay out of trouble. But he confided in my wife because he knew her well from the old days. He told her that the whole political scene was so completely corrupt, so full of coercion, it was really like a Nazi concentration camp.

You had a situation where even the people who actually benefited from Indonesian rule, did not necessarily approve of what took place recently.

So are you suggesting that even among the people who held power in Timor, there was not much support for Indonesian rule?

Kohen: Let’s put it this way. Let’s say that it really is true that in the referendum this past summer, 21.5 percent of the population voted to stay with Indonesia. Let’s even cut out the coercion factor—although I think a lot of those people voted that way because they were forced to. But let’s say that at least 5 or 7 or even 10 percent voted to stay as part of Indonesia. Well, their country was being burned down, too. Most of these people have had to flee. They have not been able to stay there, because how do you stay in a place after most of it has been destroyed? So what kind of respect has the Indonesian military shown for the very people who have been working hand-in-hand with them over the years? It really is something that is almost beyond the imagination.

So it really is complicated. I don’t even think that one should simply say the “haves” were opposed to independence. East Timor was in a situation where there was a certain sector of people who were being given a lot of money and privileges by the Indonesian regime. But as for the ones who actually had made good money over the years, these people got out of there months before this recent carnage. They were able to flee to Bali, or to Portugal, or to other Indonesian cities that are no more primitive than Los Angeles—that is, to the real built-up parts of Indonesia. And they had enough money to get away. They were even able to ship their cars out of there.

The ones who didn’t get away were the small-time thugs who had recently been hired.

Now in East Timor you have Bishop Belo, who is conservative theologically—he is as much of a traditionalist as anyone you are going to find. But he is a humanitarian as well, and his main goal in life has been to preserve the lives of his people, and particularly to preserve the youth of East Timor. He was ready to do anything that would work to preserve the lives of people. If there was anything that seemed likely to save lives, he would endorse it; and if it was not going to save lives, he would condemn it. He tried in every possible way to work with the Indonesian military. But he did not succeed, because their goal was dominance. In pure and simple terms, their goal was not equity or reconciliation, but outright conquest.

Nevertheless, the election did take place, and the vote for independence was overwhelming. Then the massacres began. Was this an effort to annul the results of the vote?

Kohen: Yes, it was; absolutely. And I will tell you why, and how I know.

When I visited there recently, Bishop Belo was able to tell me something, and I don’t think he had ever before told anyone this in an interview, so this is exclusive. He told me what happened on the day that they had attacked his house. He walked out, because he realized that if he stayed in the house they would probably kill him. So he walked into the street and demanded to be taken to the chief of police. And when he went to the chief of police, the chief said to him that he had to do something about the crowds around the bishop’s house. Every time there was a demonstration or some type of disturbance the people would come to the church, to the bishop’s house, for protection. The police chief said, “We had to teach these people a lesson.”

And then the police—right in front of Bishop Belo—phoned their superiors in the Indonesian capitol and told them that they had succeeded in routing thousands of people who had taken refuge in the bishop’s compound.

Now this did not sound like the kind of behavior of people who were prepared to leave East Timor at that stage. It sounded like people who were pretending that an election had never even taken place.

So I think that there was a definite plan to annul the election. The only way it was stopped is that finally the US intervened.

I have to say I give much of the credit for that intervention to Judge William Clark. I know he is a very modest man, and he would probably say that he didn’t do much. But he was one of the people, I think, who really was instrumental in quietly building the support that was needed to make sure that the United States did something. He may deny it, but I have the impression that he went to his Republican friends, and he told them that this was an issue of concern to Catholics. And I think the same message went to the Clinton Administration, and I think they decided that they had to do something; otherwise they were going to pay a big political price.

There was finally some real outrage. I mean I was told by a friend, who has worked for the US bishops for the last 30 years, that the letter that the US bishops sent to the Clinton Administration on this issue was the toughest letter he had seen from the bishops in his 30 years working there. There was outrage at what they had done, and at what the Indonesians were trying to do. Here all these people come out with good will to vote for independence, and not only is the result not respected, but they burned down the place!

Now you have returned to East Timor since the elections, and since the massacres.

Kohen: Yes; I went back with Bishop Belo in October when he returned and I was there for two weeks.

What has happened to all the people who had reportedly headed into the mountains for safety? Have they come out of hiding?

Kohen: They are not all out of the mountains yet. It is a very scary situation at this point, simply because there seem to be tens of thousands of people who are missing, people who are unaccounted for.

Some people have been taken to other Indonesian islands; we really don’t know where they are. There are still 150,000 people in West Timor, on the other side of the island. Not every one of them wants to come back. There are some who have worked with these militias, and so on and worked as Indonesian civil servants, and may not want to come back. But I think the overall majority do want to come back, but they are not allowed to.

We still don’t know how many people have been killed. I think the stories that have appeared thus far have not taken into account the fact that it is going to take a long time to ascertain where all these people have gone. Relief agencies, when I was there, told me that it would take a year to account for everyone.

Now the militia violence has been stopped, but the people of East Timor still have to confront a situation in which their homes, their workplaces, their hospitals, their schools—nearly everything, in many places, has been destroyed. Isn’t the situation ripe for the spread of contagious diseases?

Kohen: Well, the situation is ripe for any number of things. One good thing that is going on, at least, is that there is a lot more medical personnel in East Timor than there used to be. You have a fair number of doctors from different countries participating in the relief efforts. But still there is an incredible need to rebuild.

And until now, at least, I don’t think this American administration has made enough of a commitment to help with the rebuilding process. Look: what we are talking about is a country that was destroyed, in good part, because of the indifference of this administration. I mean, let’s face it; had Washington acted a few weeks or a few months earlier, and really, really put the heat on the Indonesian government, things might have been very different.

It wasn’t that people didn’t know what was happening. I saw a wire-service photo of a church that was shot up in April. There was blood all over the place. I can tell you that at that time, people high up in the American Catholic hierarchy contacted the Clinton Administration and pleaded with them to do something. But the response out of the State Department was: “Well, if we restore military aid to Indonesia, maybe we will have more influence there.” The message that the Indonesian military leaders were getting from Washington was, evidently, that they were not going to pay any great price for what they are doing in East Timor.

So this is really the chickens coming home to roost. If really tough pressure had been brought to bear on Indonesia, something could have happened. In fact, we have something like a controlled experiment to prove this point. When pressure finally was put on the Indonesian military, they did indeed get out of East Timor.

They could have destroyed the whole country, and continued to kill. And I think they would have, if the UN troops hadn’t come in. So we just have to focus. In other words, it could have been even worse. Australian troops on the ground told me that the militias certainly seemed to be prepared to empty the population of the entire place and continue the killing and burning until nothing was left at all. But at a certain point they stopped.

There certainly are still problems in West Timor. It is dreadful that all of these people are being held there, we don’t know how many have been moved to other islands. There are still a lot in danger; it still is an extremely serious problem. But the Indonesian military, at least, is out of East Timor.

And are the militias out of business?

Kohen: No, not entirely. In East Timor, I think they are out of business; I don’t think that there is any militia activity in East Timor. But I think in West Timor these militias still exist. In fact I don’t think that; I know it.

In the midst of all the horror of September, there were a number of media reports which, fortunately, were not accurate. For example, at one point we heard that Bishop Belo had been killed. And you have written about attending the birthday party of a Timorese nun—a few weeks after hearing that she was dead.

Kohen: There were quite a few stories like that. We had thought at one point that maybe 20 to 30 clergymen had been killed, and that most churches had been actually physically destroyed. To be honest with you, to this day, I have no idea who spread these reports. But the only thing that I can say, is that a lot of them were false.

And another piece of good news is that the second largest town in East Timor, Baucau—which is a beautiful place, where Bishop Belo was born—was virtually untouched by the violence. I went there to spend a few days with the bishops. It was a pleasure to go to that place.

And again, there was good news in the sense that they could have destroyed everything.

Do you see hope for the people in East Timor today?

Kohen: I see hope in the fact that the people are free. Now—unless there is a new invasion, and I think we have to be vigilant, and we have to keep up the pressure on the Indonesians—the military is not there any more. For that people are rejoicing.

When I was out in the streets I saw people just smiling as they walked along. One day I was walking through the bishop’s yard and saw his cook, who had gone through so much tragedy in her life, and I saw her walking along with a big smile on her face. That said it all, really. This is someone who is very religious, who helps him with the Mass every morning. Her expression just said it all. The people now feel that they are free of a terrible burden.

I think, little by little, the situation is going to improve. And I think the Church has an extremely important role to play. This is a Church whose educational system managed to produce people like Bishop Belo and Bishop Nascimento [Basilio do Nascimento of Baucau] and many others. The Catholic educational system, I think, is going to look to expand now. They are going to need help from places like the United States, but I think there is an opportunity to educate a free generation in both religion and academics.

This is something that had seemed like an impossible dream, even just earlier this year; it would have been impossible even to consider that such a thing would take place—that the people could have such a type of Church-run school system. But now young people have the opportunity to grow up in freedom and tranquillity. So I think that even with all the destruction, there is now a chance to rebuild. What is needed is help from abroad and help from churches.

Could the tragedy that struck East Timor strike again somewhere else? For weeks we have been reading about a similar sort of militia violence on another Indonesian island, Aceh. Could something similar happen there?

Kohen: That is a worry; it is a big worry. I think that at this stage it would be very difficult for the Indonesian military to do the same thing because of the international pressure. On the other hand, Aceh is an integral part of Indonesia, and a huge part of the oil and natural gas that Indonesia depends on comes from Aceh, so I think the military certainly would be prepared to fight.

Hopefully, what will happen—what should happen—is that the new Indonesian government will be able to mediate a peaceful solution in Aceh. Had the Timorese people been treated properly, it would never have come to this.

What we have, in this situation in Indonesia, is an extremely authoritarian military establishment that cannot countenance any challenge to their dominance. Unfortunately they have had unquestioning support from abroad for the most part. That is the sad part.

One has to realize that these military officers don’t operate in a vacuum. If they get genuine pressure from abroad they are going to take that pressure into consideration as they operate and as they deal with the people. But if they feel that they can simply do anything they want, that is what they are going to do. Consequently, we Americans have enormous power.

You know, when I gave Judge Clark a little briefing on what had taken place in recent months, he said: “Yes, they turned it off just like turning off a light, didn’t they?” In other words, what the Indonesian military had been doing in East Timor wasn’t some uncontrolled activity. This was a highly orchestrated set of actions, and it was centrally coordinated. Once they realized that this would cost them in a major way—that they could potentially lose billions of dollars of loans—it all stopped.

This is an important factor. You know, this was not a situation like the one in Cambodia, with the Khmer Rouge, where we had no control really over what they were doing, because we didn’t have direct ties with those people. With the Indonesian military, and with other military establishments like it, when we Americans have intimate political relations with them, we could be a force for good, by pressing them to respect the rights of their people, to respect the churches, and so forth. To the extent that we do that, we are going to see some results. And to the extent that we don’t do it, we are going to see the kind of carnage that we saw in East Timor in August and September.

So I think what we have here is not just a bleak message, but a message of hope. I think that one should not take away a negative message from what has happened there. It is bleak only to the extent that we say that this is the worst thing that could take place, when good people do nothing. With the help of many good people we can at least begin to reverse this. I think that we could see a better future if we move in the right direction now.

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