East Timor, Australia and Regional Order

Download or read book East Timor, Australia and Regional Order written by James Cotton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-05-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the exceptional nature of the East Timor intervention of 1999, and deals with the background to the trusteeship role of the UN in building the new polity. All of these developments had an important impact on regional order, not least testing the ASEAN norm of 'non-interference'. Australian complicity in the Indonesian occupation of East Timor was a major factor in the persistence of Indonesian rule in the territory which was maintained for twenty-five years despite international censure and which required an unremitting campaign against the independence movement. This work reviews the reasons for that history of complicity, and explains the extraordinary change of policy that led ultimately to the occupation of the territory by the Australian-led INTERFET coalition.