TWENTY-FOUR years ago the Australian and Indonesian ambassadors flew over East Timor and signed a treaty, sharing out that country's mineral resources. Below them, the Indonesians, in a brutal and illegal occupation, massacred 200,000 East Timorese.

Britain and the USA backed the aggression and Britain is still supplying Hawk Jets and other means of repression. The UN did pass a resolution condemning it, but that was as far as it went.

Now, with hundreds more deaths - including 200 demonstrators in 1991 - great play has been made of the recent referendum for East Timorese to decide if they want independence. The UK media presents the current troubles as a civil war and cries crocodile tears, and we are expected to believe that the murderous militia and military standing by and allowing the genocide are somehow divorced from the government which committed the original atrocities. Meanwhile, the UN presence has been totally inadequate and is suffering humiliation as representatives leave to save their own lives.

Apparently we have to ask Indonesia's permission to send in an adequate force! Yet this is no sovereign state but an occupying power - unlike Yugoslavia, which we bombed.

In a final act of nauseating hypocrisy, Robin Cook is reported to have invited Indonesia to this week's obscene international arms fair at Chertsey and London's Dockyard where they can purchase the latest weapons of repression.

This is NOT a civil war with this country as innocent bystanders. The atrocities are merely a continuation of the brutal occupation which we have condoned for 24 years and the referendum, conducted without adequate protection, has simply provided sitting targets.

Readers should write to their MP, to Robin Cook and to that moral crusader Tony Blair. Tell them sanctions only punish the innocent, as 500,000 deaths in Iraq have shown. Demand adequate UN action before Nato usurps that role for their own greedy ends.

JIM HOMEWOOD,

Carr Avenue,

Prestwich.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.