Posted on 12/08/2023 3:06:59 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1975, the wife of East Timor’s Prime Minister was publicly executed on the docks of her conquered country’s capital.
By the happenstances of colonial expansion, East Timor, a 15,000-square kilometer half-island in the Lesser Sundas, chanced to have the Portuguese flag planted on its soil instead of (as characterized the rest of its surrounding Indonesian archipelago) the Dutch.
Because of this, Timor-Leste did not walk the same path trod by Indonesia: it did not share in Indonesia’s 1945 revolution breaking away from the Netherlands, nor in the 1965 coup d’etat that put the Suharto military dictatorship in charge of that country.....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Sounds like a nasty pace. Why was she executed?
She was executed because the Indonesian government wanted to eliminate all opposition to their takeover of East Timor.
Because she was a leftist nationalist and opposed to Indonesia taking over her homeland.
East Timor was a complicated fight. East Timor was very culturally distinct from the rest of the region. Catholic and heavily influenced by Portuguese culture. The nationalist “counterculture” there was heavily influenced by what was going on in Portugal, which at the time was leftist verging on communism.
The Indonesians were an intensely imperialistic lot, and were in the middle of a long series of great purges of their own leftists. In Indonesian terms the massacre they conducted in East Timor was SOP.
It’s at the bottom of my list of “places I’ve visited and want to go back”. I didn’t get to SCUBA dive, and maybe that would change my opinion of the place.
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