Book review: A Dirty Little War

"A Dirty Little War" by journalist John Martinkus was launched in Melbourne on Friday 20^th July. The book chronicles, through the first-hand experiences of Martinkus, the final stages in East Timor’s struggle for independence.

A few hours after the book launch in Melbourne, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by police. The incident occurred during G8 Summit protests, in Genoa, Italy. Images released on the world wide web show Giuliani holding a fire extinguisher moments before his death. Authorities claim they were acting in self-defence. However, it is reported that the 20-year-old police conscript who shot the activist could face manslaughter charges.

The G8 Summit is the annual gathering of leaders from USA, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia to discuss the state of the world economy. The Summit allegedly addresses issues such as poverty and the environment but protest groups describe this claim as nothing more than good public relations declaring that previous G8 meetings have made similar statements, but failed to deliver anything of substance.

Genoa was the conclusion of a summer of European protests that started with the European Union Summit in Göteborg, Sweden. Plans for the G8 Summit and the inevitable protests had been building for months, with predictions that over 100,000 people would converge on the Italian port city. Over 15,000 riot police were mobilised while hundreds of small and large protest groups planned various actions.

With the death of Giuliani many protestors are describing Genoa as a major turning point in the movement against corporate globalisation. Mainstream media are also highlighting the significance of what has happened. CNN reports the incident as "the first death during anti-globalisation protests, which have become a regular event at international gatherings since the 1999 clashes at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle."

But of course this is not entirely true. Many people have been killed in protests against corporate globalisation.

In late June, four students were shot dead by police during protests against IMF- and World Bank-driven economic reform in Papua New Guinea. And there have been hundreds more deaths like these during other acts of ‘civil disobedience’. Expressing opposition has long been a dangerous occupation in many regions of the world.

In "A Dirty Little War", John Martinkus gives his personal account of East Timor over three years from January 1997. In the first chapter he writes of being called out to a deserted beach, and goes on to describe what he saw - "a headless body, no hands, no feet, was lying in the water, moving with the tide…In another country this would have been a crime scene".

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 and during its 25-year brutal occupation, over 250,000 people (about one third of the territory’s population) died. The Indonesian regime clearly understood that the rest of the world was not interested in East Timor and continued to violently suppress any uprising against its rule.

Martinkus confirms our suspicions that the Indonesian authorities are the ones responsible for the headless body lying in the water on the deserted beach. "Their point was blunt: support independence and this is what will happen".

"A Dirty Little War", which I have yet to complete reading, documents the final stages of the territory’s independence struggle. As East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao stresses in his forward to the book "Far worse atrocities than those detailed here were carried out against the East Timorese people in the late seventies and eighties. Sadly for us, these were not well documented".

The lack of documentation was not a result of the East Timorese not wanting to express their situation. It was because the governments of the world did not want to hear about what the Indonesian regime was doing to the East Timorese.