In East Timor, the US (and Britain) continued their support of the Indonesian aggresors, who had already wiped out about 1/3 of the population with their crucial help. That continued right throught he atrocities of 1999 with thousands murdered even before the early September assault that drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country - while the Clinton Administration kept to its position that "it is the responsibility of the government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that responsibility away from them".

That was September 8, well after the worst of the September atrocities had been reported. By then Clinton was coming under enormous pressure to do something to mitigate the atrocities, mainly from Australia but also from home. A few days later, the clinton administration indicated to the Indonesian generals that the game was over. They instantly reversed course.

They had been strongly insisting that they would never withdraw from East Timor, and they were in fadct setting up defenses in Indonesian West Timor (using British jets, which Britain continued to send) to repel a possible intervention force. When Clinton gave the word, they reversed course 180 degrees and announced that they would withdraw. The course of events revelas very graphically the latent power that was always available to Washington, that could have been used to prevent 25 years of virtual genocide culminating in the new wave of atrocities from early 1999. Instead, successive US administrations, joined by Britain and other in 1978 when atrocities were peaking, preferred to lend crucial support, military and diplomatic, to the killers - to "our kind of guy" as the Clinton administration described the murderous President Suharto. These facts, clear and dramatic, identify starkly the prime locus of responsibility for these terrible crimes of 25 years - in fact, continuing in miserable refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.