Death of a nation

This was how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's described Czechoslovakia when the Nazis invaded Prague in the 1930s. The same can be said of East Timor. Timor is located at the easternmost end of the Indonesian archipelago and lies 300 miles north of Australia in the South Pacific Ocean. The western part of the island, formerly a Dutch colony, became part of Indonesia upon independence in 1945. East Timor, a Portuguese colony since the sixteenth century, remained under Portuguese rule and decolonisation began only after the revolution in Portugal of 1974. A power struggle between political parties within East Timor erupted into civil war in the summer of 1975. In September of that year, Indonesian troops invaded East Timor, supposedly to thwart this 'Communist uprising'. In 1998, John Pilger and David Munro entered East Timor where 23 years earlier, a team of journalists, including Australian Greg Shackleton, were murdered by the Indonesian army for daring to question the validity of the invasion. Pilger uncovers the shocking complicity of the US and Great Britain governments in the ensuing genocide - the same governments who were willing to go to war with Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait, but who stood aside as Indonesia broke the exact same UN regulations to rape and pillage East Timor using Western arms.