By John Pilger - April 05, 2012

...[N]ot even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as the Indonesian dictator Suharto killed or starved in East Timor...Unlike Muammar al-Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, Suharto died peacefully in 2008...He was never at risk of prosecution by the “international community”. Margaret Thatcher told him, “You are one of our very best and most valuable friends.” The Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating regarded him as a father figure. A group of Australian newspaper editors...flew to Jakarta to pay their tribute to the dictator; there is a picture of one of them bowing.

By John Pilger - August 22, 2009

On 30 August it will be a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence. A "scorched earth" campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States.

Are the Olympics financing murder and rape?

By Peter Symonds | World Socialist Web Site

The death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto on Sunday at the age of 86 has elicited a stream of tributes from world leaders and in the international press. There is something both disturbing and ominous about praise for a man who was responsible for the murder of at least half a million people in the 1965 coup that brought him to power and the deaths of another 200,000 following the 1975 Indonesian annexation of East Timor.

...[C]ritics contend that Washington's enthusiasm for its Indonesian military "partners" has been at the expense of any accountability for military atrocities. On April 26, the U.S.-based East Timor and Indonesia Human Rights Network (ETAN) condemned the participation of Indonesian Major General Noer Muis in a joint U.S.-Indonesia military exercise. ETAN pointed out that General Muis has been indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor.

Everyone’s favourite and forgotten national liberation struggle of the 90’s-East Timor-is about to introduce mandatory military conscription on the decimated island.

The patriotic Australia media, that has unquestionably fallen into line over every part of (Prime Minister) John Howard's Pacific agenda...is now trumpeting the ousting of (East Timor Prime Minister Mari) Alkatiri, a man who has gamely defied Australia's claims over it's oil and gas, many of the paper's foreign editors clearly more in tune with the exhortations of Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade than the sentiments among Timorese.

The Irish Times - Jan 20, 2006

EAST TIMOR: Indonesia killed up to 180,000 East Timorese through massacres, torture and starvation during its 24-year occupation, a report to be handed to the United Nations has found, an Australian daily said yesterday.

Napalm and chemical weapons were used to poison food and water and some victims were burned or buried while still alive, and others sexually mutilated, the Australian newspaper quoted the report as saying.

On September 1, 1965, the US State Department prepared a Special National Intelligence Estimate for Indonesia. Written by the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence organisations of the Departments of State and Defence and the National Security Agency, it assessed the prospects for, and strategic implications of, a communist takeover in Indonesia....It assessed that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was "by far the best organised and most dynamic entity in Indonesia". Only a few months later, the PKI would cease to exist. Its destruction, according to former US ambassador Marshall Green, "was a momentous event in world affairs, and I don't think that the press and the public has ever seen it that way"....This article will discuss aspects of that event.