http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/east_timor/comment/chomsky.html In 1975, Suharto invaded East Timor, then being taken over by its own population after the collapse of the Portuguese empire. The United States and Australia knew the invasion was coming and effectively authorized it. Australian Ambassador Richard Woolcott, in memos later leaked to the press, recommended the "pragmatic" course of "Kissingerian realism," because it might be possible to make a better deal on Timor's oil reserves with Indonesia than with an independent East Timor. At the time, the Indonesian army relied on the United States for 90 percent of its arms, which were restricted by the terms of the agreement for use only in "self-defense." Pursuing the same doctrine of "Kissingerian realism," Washington simultaneously stepped up the flow of arms while declaring an arms suspension, and the public was kept in the dark.
The UN Security Council ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. Its failure was explained by then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his memoirs, he took pride in having rendered the UN "utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" because "he United States wished things to turn out as they did" and "worked to bring this about." As for how "things turned out," Moynihan comments that, within a few months, 60,000 Timorese had been killed, "almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War."
The massacre continued, peaking in 1978 with the help of new arms provided by the Carter administration. The toll to date is estimated at about 200,000, the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. By 1978, the United States was joined by Britain, France, and others eager to gain what they could from the slaughter. Protest in the West was minuscule. Little was even reported. US press coverage, which had been high in the context of concerns over the fall of the Portuguese empire, declined to practically nothing in 1978.