It was the public, not politicians, who forced the Australian government to end the betrayal of East Timor.
On October 11, the Guardian published a letter by the Australian high commissioner in London, Philip Flood, objecting to my column about Australia’s complicity in the suffering of the East Timorese. His words shone with moral indignation. His government had been “driven by humanitarian concern for the desperate plight of the East Timorese” and had “acted forthrightly after Indonesia failed to maintain order”. For suggesting otherwise, I was guilty of “denigrating” my homeland.
Could this be the same Philip Flood who was the Australian ambassador to Indonesia at the time of the massacre of hundreds of East Timorese in the Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991? This was the atrocity that was secretly videotaped by a British cameraman, Max Stahl, breaking the long, international silence over East Timor. In my 1994 film, Death Of A Nation, Stahl and I revealed that a second massacre of the wounded had taken place later that day in the Dili morgue and military hospital.
The most vigorous denials of these subsequent murders came from Canberra, where the government of Paul Keating was in the midst of preparing a highly secret “security pact” with
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 2 Nov 1999