News Release

East Timor and Economic Summit

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KRISTIN SUNDELL
A UN-accredited observer with the International Federation for East Timor and national field organizer with the East Timor Action Network, Sundell recently returned from East Timor. She is in contact with others who are just returning and have witnessed the brutality there.
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AMY GOODMAN and ALLAN NAIRN
Goodman and Nairn have each won numerous journalist awards for their coverage of East Timor. They both survived the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre there. Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!” program, was recently expelled from Indonesia because she is on a blacklist. She is in regular contact with Nairn, believed to be the only U.S. journalist still in East Timor. Nairn has written a new article for The Nation, “U.S. Complicity in Timor,” documenting tacit approval by U.S. officials for Indonesia’s ethnic cleansing of East Timor.
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JEFFREY WINTERS
Associate professor of Political Economy at Northwestern University and author of Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State, Winters is currently in Indonesia.
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MATTHEW JARDINE
Author of East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, Jardine was a UN-accredited observer and just returned from East Timor on September 7. He said: “The APEC summit in New Zealand embodies the very logic by which the U.S. government has sacrificed the East Timorese people for profits in resource-rich Indonesia over the last 24 years.”
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WILLIAM HARTUNG
Senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of U.S. Arms Transfers to Indonesia, Hartung said: “The Clinton administration’s suggestion that it has limited leverage over the Indonesian military is absurd. The U.S. has been a principal source of arms, aid and investment to the Jakarta regime for three decades. President Clinton should use the occasion of the APEC summit to end all arms, aid and investment to Indonesia until it respects the vote and withdraws from East Timor.”
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STEPHEN ZUNES
Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, Zunes said: “More East Timorese have been murdered and ethnically cleansed in the past 10 days than Kosovar Albanians in the months prior to the NATO bombing. Legally, the case for intervention is far stronger: Kosovo was universally recognized as part of Serbia, East Timor is illegally occupied by Indonesia. Bombing Jakarta wouldn’t be necessary. All the U.S. would need to do is stop bailing out Indonesia’s economy and stop blocking the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, which the Australians have already agreed to lead.”