Nobel prize winner and president of East Timor has been airlifted to an Australian hospital following an assasination attempt connected with an attempted coup.
In the meanwhile, his country is under a curfew.
The accused assassin is an ex General, Alfredo Reinado, who was killed in the attempted assassination, along with one rebel and one of the president’s bodyguards. An hour later, the country’s Prime minister’s motorcade was attacked.
The unrest by disaffected militants has been growing in the last year or two.
Australia will send more troops and police to help that country to stay peaceful.
East Timor was originally taken over by Indonesia in 1976 and suffered many massacres because of an insurgency fighting for independence. During that time, over 100 000 were killed in massacres by suspected Indonesian incited nationalists.
There is an active connection of (majority Christian) East Timor to the war on terror.
One, the Bali bombing that killed hundreds, including almost a hundred Australians, was in retaliation for the UN sponsored Australian troops who were sent in to stop the massacres.
Two: one early suicide bombing of the UN in Baghdad was not about the US, but against the UN diplomat who also had been active in obtaining independence for East Timor.
The continuing unrest and the now attempted coup should remind people that after wars, there tends to be disagreements that those used to violence will quickly resort to violence again.
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. Her website is Finest Kind CLinic and Fishmarket.
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1 user commented in " Curfew in East Timor following assasination attempt "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHigh-quality this report isn’t. I’m losing track of the factual errors in this post.
Whether the assasination attempts were the result of a failed coupfailed coup or something else remain to be seen.
The renegade military man who tried to kill East Timor’s president was a major not a general. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975.
Most of the 100,000 to 200,000 killed as a result of that illegal invasion were killed or in the early years of the occupation in the late 1970s. The perpetrators were Indonesia’s security forces acting on orders of their government led by the recently deceased dictator Suharto. The brutality of the Indonesian occupation had nothing to do with the fact that Indonesia is majority muslim or that the East Timorese are majority Catholic. It was a result of the refusal of the Timorese to accept subjugation. Indonesia’s military has been as brutal with muslims in Aceh and elsewwhere who similarly refused to submit.
A small portion (about 1500 were murdered in the year of Timor’s independence referendum, which the UN brokered with Indonesia and conducted - not allowed).
The height of the unrest in post-independence E Timor occurred a year and a half ago. It has not been growing, but most of the issue from that time remain unresolved.
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