John Pilger – It had been a long night of waiting for the Indonesian troop convoy to pass.
Two of us then crossed the border into East Timor clandestinely, through a forest of petrified trees which appeared as silhouetted needles around which skeins of fine white sand drifted, like mist. As the sun rose, there stood the surreal crosses.
They were almost everywhere; great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road, overlooking white slabs.
I carried hand-drawn maps of other, unmarked graves where some of those murdered by Indonesian troops at the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre had been buried; I had no idea that so much of the country was a vast grave, marked by paths that ended abruptly, and fields inexplicably bulldozed, and earth inexplicably covered with tarmac, and villages, which are not so much human entities as memorials.
Kraras is one of them. It is known as the "village of the widows", because 287 people were slaughtered by the Indonesians.
In a meticulous hand that carried on from a faded typewriter ribbon, a priest recorded the name, age, cause of death and date and place of the killing of every victim.
In the last column, he identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each murder. I have the document. Like the ubiquitous crosses, it records the Calvary of 40 families, among them, the dos Anjos family.
In 1987, I interviewed Arthur ("Steve") Stevenson, a former Australian commando who had fought the Japanese in Timor. He told me the story of Celistino dos Anjos, whose ingenuity and couraged had saved his life behind Japanese lines, the kind of man who fought like a lion to prevent the Japanese building airstrips from which they planned to attack Australia – the kind of man to whom leaflets dropped by the Royal Australian Air Force were addressed, as the Australians retreated. "We shall never forget you," the leaflets said.
In 1986, Steve Stevenson received a letter from Celestino's son, Virgilio, who was the same age as his own son. He wrote that his father had survived the Indonesian invasion in 1975, but he went on: "In August 1983, Indonesian forces entered our village, Kraras.
They looted, burned and massacred, with fighter aircraft overhead. On 27/9/83 they made my father and my wife dig their own graves, and they machine gunned them. My wife was pregnant."
The Kraras list is among my most valued possessions. Not only is it evidence of genocide, it is an extraordinary political document that shames Indonesia's Faustian partners in the western democracies, especially Australia.
In my experience, East Timor is the greatest, most enduring crime of the late 20th century. Not only do the horrors committed by the Suharto dynasty lay claim to this distinction – proportionally, not even Pol Pot put to death as many people – but no other recent crime against humanity, from the American devastation of Indochina to Rwanda, offers such a comprehensive charge sheet.
"Descent into violence" has become the most worked media cliche of the past few weeks, as if a collective, almost wilful amnesia prevents us remembering when the descent really began, and who were Indonesia's partners in its crime. On 7 December, 1975, when Air Force One, carrying President Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had climbed out of Indonesian airspace, Indonesian paratroopers dropped on Dili, East Timor's capital, and the bloodbath began.
"[Ford and Kissinger] came and gave Suharto the green light," Phillip Liechty, the CIA desk officer in Jakarta at the time told me. "The invasion was delayed two days so they could get the hell out. We were ordered to give the Indonesians everything they wanted, and US arms were shipped straight to East Timor without Congress knowing. I saw all the hard intelligence; the place was a free fire zone ... and all because we didn't want some little country being neutral or leftist at the UN."
There were other, more pressing reasons. "With the region's richest board of natural resources," wrote Richard Nixon in 1967, "Indonesia is the greatest prize in South-East Asia."
Indonesia is where the British empire rose again. Britain is Indonesia's largest investor in chemicals, paper, electricity and weapons.
Name a major British multinational and you can bet it is "investing" in Indonesia. The list ranges from Shell and BP, to the BOC Group and Marks and Spencer to Unilever and Glaxo Wellcome, to the rapacious Rio Tinto, which has a huge holding in the three-billion-dollar Freeport copper-and-gold mining operation in West Papua.
However, it is the British war industry that has provided the Jakarta gang with its most vital prop since 1978 when Labour's Foreign Secretary David Owen dismissed estimates of East Timorese dead as "exaggerated" and approved the sale of the first Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia.
The Blair Government is Jakarta's biggest arms supplier. While the Indonesian death squads, "cleanse" Dili, Mr Blair has pointedly refused to use Britain's considerable economic and military clout.
In 1994, Labour's spokesman on foreign affairs, Robin Cook, told Parliament that Hawk aircraft had been "observed on bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984". He then denied his own words and, once in Government, allowed his underlings at the Foreign Office to lie that no Hawks were operational in East Timor.
The point is that, between them, Britain and the United States could stop the Indonesians in their tracks if they wanted to. (Australia has dissipated any influence it might have had after years of obsequious dealings with Jakarta.)
Without pressure from their godfathers in Washington and London, the Indonesians are telling the United Nations and the world to go to hell; and the UN is scuttling.
Who can the people of East Timor look to? Public opinion in western countries is a greater phenomenon for change than many realise. Are we going to let the East Timorese people, bravest of the brave, who defied the genocidists and came out to vote for democracy and freedom, fall before our eyes? Are we going to allow those with the power to act, do nothing, and in our name?