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Quarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta
Quarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy | John Birmingham
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In the second Quarterly Essay, John Birmingham takes apart the folly of twenty-five years of Australian policy on East Timor. How did Gough Whitlam and Richard Woolcott in 1975 saddle this country with a policy that was bound to lead to the intervention of 1999? Why were shrewder voices ignored and why did we persist with an unworkable model? Where does this leave us with an Indonesia still dominated by the old power elites? And what was the tragedy like for the people of East Timor? John Birmingham has written a passionate narrative history of the East Timor question which never turns away from the slaughter and sorrow of the people who suffered it. Appeasing Jakarta is an analysis of what happened in 1975 when we condoned Indonesia's intervention and what happened in 1999 when we stood against it ...John Birmingham is deadly in his disdain for the way a defunct paradigm...was clung to like a dogma...but [this] is also an essay about the human cost...written in flowing colours with a strong narrative streak and a swashbuckling power of dispatch... Peter Craven, Introduction It was a policy of wilful blindness, made possible only because we were always somewhere else when the trigger was pulled."" John Birmingham, Appeasing Jakarta John Birminghams books include the cult memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney and the fiction series Weapons of Choice. He is the author of two Quarterly Essays, Appeasing Jakarta: Australias Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy and A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power. He is a regular contributor to the Monthly.
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In 1991, #EastTimor voted for independence from Indonesia, the country that essentially took them over in 1975 when Portugal left. Instead of a smooth democratic process, Indonesia murdered civilians and tried to remove voters for independence. Here, Birmingham illustrates how he sees Australia to have stood by and allowed it to happen. I would have liked a little more background, as this is something I knew nothing about, but this is a really👇🏼

Hooked_on_books interesting read that taught me a lot. Be aware that there are some graphic depictions of murder and death in this one. #ReadingAsia2021 #TimorLeste 4y
Librarybelle Your book model ❤️ 4y
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#Bookhaul! I joined my Christmas and anniversary Powell‘s gift cards and snapped up these lovelies! The tagged is my #TimorLeste book for #ReadingAsia2021. I‘m a little annoyed by the amount of adhesive that stuck to it when I took the sticker off. 😡 Anyone know some tricks to remove that so it doesn‘t stick to all the other books now?

ValerieAndBooks Goo gone, maybe? 4y
Hooked_on_books @ValerieAndBooks Hmm, good thought. I‘ll try that. 4y
britt_brooke Nice haul! 4y
BarbaraBB Timor Leste! Well found. Looking forward to your thoughts 4y
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