Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers

East Timor is at last, and at terrible human cost, firmly on the road to independence. The significance of its passage to freedom-for its people, for Asia, and for the world-is manifold. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of East Timor's travail and its triumph in its international context.

East Timor's independence constitutes one of the final and most poignant moments in a long and bitter history of European colonization and decolonization. For the people of East Timor, independence from Portugal in 1975 was only the beginning of a new struggle against Indonesian invaders—a struggle that took the lives of 200,000 East Timorese—and one that is by no means over.

The case of East Timor, both during and after the Cold War, provides a litmus test for issues of international responsibility, posing questions of double standards in unusually clear-cut form. It reveals the active support by the United States and other powers for the military forces of Indonesia throughout the years of that nation's invasion and repression of East Timor, until 1998 when the collapse of the Indonesian dictatorship ushered in a new phase in the East Timorese struggle.

Contributions by: Peter Bartu, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Geoffrey C. Gunn, Peter Hayes, Wade Huntley, Gerry Van Klinken, Helene Van Klinken, Arnold S. Kohen, Allan Nairn, Sarah Niner, Constâncio Pinto, Geoffrey Robinson, João Mariano Saldanha, Charles Scheiner, Mark Selden, Stephen R. Shalom, and Richard Tanter.