<nettime> East Timor Digest (list, links, essays, hacks)

[nettimes_digestive_system <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>]

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From: sam@media.com.au

The Community Communications Organisation (www.c2o.org) has set up a
unmoderated listserv to discuss any issues dealing with East Timor. The
aim of the list is for all peoples - primarily from the region - to
articulate, express anything they want to about this very serious issue. 

So, your ideas, views, positions, strategies, tactics, campaigns, local
initatives, boycott inforamtion, rallies, everything - can be put
through this list... Completely unmoderated...

So, here are the details below - to join - send an email to
aus4freetimor-subscribe@lists.c2o.org - and then to post send mail to
aus4freetimor@lists.c2o.org ... the details are again below.

Please forward to other groups ...

Thanks, Sam.

To subscribe to the list, send a message to:
   <aus4freetimor-subscribe@lists.c2o.org>

To remove your address from the list, send a message to:
   <aus4freetimor-unsubscribe@lists.c2o.org>

To post a message to the list
   <aus4freetimor@lists.c2o.org>

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Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 23:00:28 -0400
From: "George(s) Lessard" <media@web.net>
 
ZNet's Timor Links, Additions, Book Subsection & Herman Commentary

Emergency: East Timor Needs Our Activism

Links below available at...

http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Timor/timor_index.htm

Recent Essays on Current Events

Will the U.S. Commit to Timor? -- Scott Burchill
Nairn and Chomsky on Timor (Democracy Now)
Inhumanitarian Nonintervention -- Ed Herman
Jakarta's Godfathers -- John Pilger
Urgent, In-depth Piece About E Timor -- Scott Burchill
Major Timor Coverage from the British Guardian
Australian News Reporting
Urgent Report from Timor -- John Miller
Chomsky: Why Americans Should Care (Mother Jones) 
FAIR Report on East Timor in the Media
East Timor Action Network (ETAN)
International Federation for East Timor
Action in Solidarity with Indonesia & E Timor (ASIET)

Older but Particularly Good Material

Amy Goodman on Timor -- very powerful talk (12/97)
More Goodman Essay (01/98)
Chomsky Background Talk on Timor (1995)
Chomsky: End the Atrocity (1995)
Some Outstanding Internet Resources
East Timor Today -- major site
TimorNet -- a thorough info service
E. Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign
Mother Jones Timor Coverage

View a Map of East Timor (39Kb)
http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Timor/etmap.gif

Some Resources for Activism
Clever Tool for Faxing Officials
FREE!
http://www.freetimor.com/

Excellent Posters (Australian)
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7112/posterd_scuni_021.htm
Leonie Lane a computer graphic lecturer at Southern Cross University 
(Australia) invited two human rights activists, Saskia Kouwenberg and
Russell Anderson, to give a talk to her students about the struggle of
the East Timorese. On the base of this, twenty students designed
posters. What you see on this site is the result of some of their work.
The idea of this home page is to encourage the use of these designs and
provide a site for other designs on East Timor. This Graphics site has a
simple layout and these posters are low resolution for easy downloading.
If you want a higher resolution please click here:
http://www.peg.apc.org/~saskia/ or e-mail rander12@scu.edu.au.

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------

From: "Michael Albert" <sysop@zmag.org>
Subject: ZNet Free Update -- Timor Additions, Book Subsection, and
         Herman Commentary on Timor
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1999 15:44:00 +0100

Hello,

Okay, so we didn't mail for a while, and now you get two quick ones ...
hope that's okay. Consistency, as you know, can be the hobgoblin of
little minds.

And, indeed, just since the last message we have:

(1) Placed a number of articles and links regarding East Timor online to
help people understand what is occurring, and its roots, and to assist
people in finding ways to act. We very much hope you will access these
resources and make use of them as widely as you are able to.

So far they include:

Inhumanitarian Nonintervention - Ed Herman
Jakarta's Godfathers - John Pilger
Urgent Explanatory Article About East Timor - Scott Burchill
Major Timor Coverage from the British Guardian
Australian News Reporting
Urgent Report from Timor
Chomsky: Why Americans Should Care
FAIR Report on East Timor Coverage
Mother Jones East Timor Coverage

East Timor Action Network (ETAN)
Amy Goodman on Timor - very powerful talk (Dec. 1997)
More Goodman (Jan. 1998)
Chomsky Background Talk on Timor (1995)
Chomsky: End the Atrocity (1995)

All these East Timor related essays, talks, and links are accessible
directly from the top page of ZNet --  http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
 -- though we may soon create a page of their own for them.

(2) Put a whole new section online called ZNet Books, still developing,
including titles, descriptions, review links, ways that users can enter
their own comments and titles, and so on ...
http://www.zmag.org/znetbooks/index.htm. We hope you will not only use
this to get book ideas but also give others the benefit of your
assessment of titles you have recently read.

(3) Put a little section of recent forum posts (from the Sustainer Forum
system) and of ZNet Daily Commentaries (from the Sustainer Commentary
program) on the ZNet top page http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm for public
access. These are very nice...


Michael Albert
Z Magazine / ZNet
www.zmag.org

---

And here is one of our daily commentaries, this one for Sept 8 from
Edward Herman -- we mail one of these every late night for the next
morning to our Sustainers (see
http://www.zmag.org/commentaries/donorform.htm ), but are sending this
one to our free updates list as well because of its obvious immediate
relevance. Please feel free to pass it along.

---


Inhumanitarian Nonintervention in East Timor
Edward S. Herman


Coming so soon after the NATO devastation of Yugoslavia in the alleged
interest of humanitarianism and protection of human rights, the
performance of the NATO powers in the East Timor crisis strikingly
confirms the views of those who questioned the moral basis of NATO's
intervention in Kosovo. In the Kosovo case, NATO insisted on bombing
although Yugoslavia had already agreed to a sizable international
presence in Kosovo--but not a NATO occupation of all of Yugoslavia as
was demanded in the Rambouillet ultimatum-- and a "wide-ranging
autonomy" for Kosovo. There was good reason to believe that the already
strong international pressures on Yugoslavia might have resulted in a
non-military resolution of the crisis.

In the case of the current renewed Indonesian violence against the East
Timorese, by contrast, although Indonesia has been occupying East Timor
in violation of standing UN rulings for 24 years and had already killed
a larger fraction of the East Timorese population than Pol Pot had done
in Cambodia, the NATO powers that had so eagerly bombed Yugoslavia have
still not called upon the IMF to suspend its line of credit to
Indonesia, and the Blair government announced on September 7 that
economic sanctions were not even on the agenda. They are allegedly
"ineffective." The Blair moral indignation at human rights violations,
so furious as regards Yugoslavia, is entirely absent in this case, and
the question of using force doesn't even arise for Blair and Clinton.
The Blair government (and Clinton's as well) is relying on our old
friend "quiet diplomacy," which has always been a cover for inaction in
dealing with the murderous behavior of allied and client states.

In the wake of the fall of Suharto in May 1988, the East Timorese and
their supporters had gotten a weakened Indonesian leadership to agree to
a UN-sponsored referendum for independence. The Indonesian regime
quickly changed course, however, and organized, armed, and protected
militia groups that carried out a reign of terror in East Timor which
forced a postponement of the referendum till August 30. The original UN
agreement with Indonesia on the preparation for the voting gave
Indonesia full rights to police the referendum. There was of course no
more basis in a historical record of responsible behavior by Indonesia
justifying this assignment than there would be for giving Milosevic
charge of preparations for an independence vote in Kosovo.

But even as Indonesia's violations of its responsibilities became
clearly evident with escalating militia violence over the course of ten
months prior to the vote, the great powers made no moves to change the
rules or to penalize or threaten Indonesia. Now, in the aftermath of the
referendum, as it has become obvious that the Indonesian army and police
are directly participating in the killing, the Western powers are still
unwilling to take any strong action. UN head Kofi Annan continues to
urge Indonesia to do its duty, which it had failed to do previously and
is now OPENLY failing to do. His feebleness reflects the fact that the
great powers continue to drag their feet. By striking contrast, how
aggressive they were in Kosovo, how readily they found (illegal) avenues
and rationales to act, and how eager they were to use violence!

Western non-intervention in East Timor is obviously rooted in the same
factors that caused the U.S. and Britain (etc.) to support the Suharto
dictatorship for three decades, to give it aid and sell it arms, to
train its military and police, and to accept and even aid its invasion
and occupation of East Timor in the first place. A strongly
anticommunist political ally, Indonesia under Suharto also became an
"investors paradise" loved by the oil, mining, and timber companies and
other transnationals. This regime has made East Timorese offshore oil
readily available to the oil companies. These benefits help explain the
Western willingness to overlook the undemocratic rule, the mass
exterminations during the military takeover of 1965-1966, along with the
genocidal invasion-occupation of East Timor from 1975 onward. And these
benefits help us to understand why, although the West has the power to
pressure Indonesia to comply with humanitarian principles even short of
using force, it fails to use that power.

The media have avoided discussing these earlier genocides while
reporting on the ongoing East Timorese crisis. And while they are now a
bit aroused at the onset of what might be another Rwanda type
slaughter--a second Indonesian genocide in East Timor--they continue to
fail to trace it to the root causes of support of "our kind of guy" (as
a senior Clinton official described Suharto in 1995), or to wax
indignant over the failure of the West to react to monstrous behavior,
or to feature the comparison with Kosovo and the mindboggling hypocrisy
in the claim of a new era of western "humanitarian intervention."


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Date: Thu, 09 Sep 1999 17:19:52 -0400
From: Bob Paquin <paquin@cyberus.ca>
Subject: Re: <nettime> East Timor Digest 

9.9.99

Regarding Ivo's reference to the Indonesian cyber attack on East Timor,
I wrote the following earlier this year, which appeared in Singapore's
Straits Times.

Bob Paquin

Virtual Country Under Cyber-Attack

The Indonesian government is being blamed for a cyber-warfare attack
last week in which the entire East Timor country internet domain was
taken offline.  Having declared virtual sovereignty just over a year ago
with the creation of its own top-level domain .tp, and with the
prospects of actual independence dangled in front of the East Timorese
last week, it appears that the Indonesian government is reluctant to let
go without a fight.  

Connect-Ireland, which hosts the domain in a project initiated by the
Internet Service Provider and the 1996 Nobel Prize winners Ramos Horta
and Bishop Belo, claimed that the attack was launched by the E-Nazi
hacking ring, and was supported by the Indonesian government.  Martin
Maguire, the ISP’s founder and managing director, has lodged a formal
protest with the Indonesian embassy in London.  The Indonesian
government has denied the charges.

Indonesia annexed the former Portuguese colony in December 1975, which
has fought for its independence in a costly guerrilla war to this day. 
Late last week, the Indonesian Information Minister Yunus Yosfiah
announced that the government may consider granting full independence
after the next election on June 7th.

As of Wednesday evening, the East Timor site (www.freedom.tp) remains
inaccessible, and Ireland-Connect’s site (www.connect.ie) only contains
one page entitled “E-Nazis Creating Chaos on the Net”.  The document
describes how the ISP had suffered from an organized series of hacking
attacks over the last year, which culminated in a breech last week in
the East Timor server’s security.  Once inside, the hacking ring,
referred to as E-Nazis, created their own domain, need.tp, which might
have been intended for pro-Indonesian propaganda purposes. 

Connect-Ireland felt that it was left with only one course of action.
Taking what it called the “Nuclear Option”, it pulled the plug on its
entire system to upgrade all their software and hardware during the
downtime.

“These attacks were systematic and took place over the course of a long
period of time, from 18 different locations, and were targeted at the
.tp domain name,” said Maguire in a recent Wired online news report.

The Indonesian government itself has been the target of numerous and
increasing cyber-attacks over the past year.  Several government
websites have falling under electronic onslaughts from East
Timor-supportive human rights activists, or hacktivists, based in
Portugal and the US.  As well, Chinese activists from China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong and beyond, protesting the deliberate targeting of
Chinese-Indonesians during the Indonesian riots last May, have
mailbombed Indonesian government-controlled ISPs, and hacked government
website pages to press their points.

Many governments around the world have begun putting in place strategies
to combat the security threats implied with these developments, and have
established special units to tackle the emergence of such cyber-attacks,
and to prepare for infowar. 

“This was a very high-level attack that had to be planned and
co-ordinated.  It’s going to be the new style of war”, said Maguire in a
BBC News report last week.  “You can see these tactics becoming part of
official government policy and a potential weapon”.  Hacking experts
differ whether Indonesia has included weapons for infowar in its well
stocked military arsenal.  However, if Connect-Ireland’s allegations are
substantiated, this will be the first documented case of cyber-warfare.

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