Timorese need help

Timorese need help

Army-sponsored militias are on the rampage in the Indonesian
territory of East Timor. They are stirring up violence against
independence-seeking activists and threatening to foreclose an
early plebiscite by which the Timorese are to choose between
autonomy and independence.

East Timor is the small former Portuguese colony (for three
centuries) that Indonesia invaded in 1975 and repressed
thereafter. The chance to break this pattern of Third World
colonization arose only last year when the military-backed
Soeharto regime was replaced by the administration of B.J.
Habibie. The United Nations opened peace talks that produced an
Indonesian offer, confirmed on Friday, to let the Timorese choose
between a liberal autonomy or independence outright. It was the
least Indonesia could do.

But it was too much for civilian hard-liners in the Cabinet
and for unreconstructed elements in the Indonesian military.
Paramilitaries have run wild. From detention, the acknowledged
leader of Timorese nationalism, "Xanana" Gusmao, has called for
"popular insurrection".

Before all hope of a peaceful negotiated transition in East
Timor is undermined, an international presence needs to be placed
in the territory to oversee the vote. This is made essential by
Indonesia's flagrant neglect of its responsibility to provide law
and order. The United Nations does not seem to be in the right
temper for peace-keeping at the moment. Politically, Asians have
been slow to think regionally about such missions. That puts a
burden on Australia, which has the proximity to ensure interest,
and the resources, including its democratic system, to provide
leadership in assisting a neighbor to be reborn free.

-- The Washington Post