David Shanks – A fist fight in the car-park of St Anthony's College, Oxford, over that distant land alerted me to the length of Indonesia's surveillnace shadow.

Dr Jose Ramos Horta was speaking inside his old college. But outisde East Timorese studens attacked an Indonesian agnet who had earlier tried to disrupt Dr Horta's lecture - as others had his address the previous nigth to the Oxford Union. Two men, believed to be from the Indonesian embassy had taunted the Timorese by threatening thier families in occupied Timor. A similar incident occured in Vancouver at the Apec summit last year attended by the Indonesian dictatorship, President Suharto. It confirmed speculation that Indonesian dipolmats do indeed abuse their priveliges in foreign countries by acting as agents provaceteurs. Canadian police arrested two of them and stripped them of their summit credentials.

Indonesians also regularly shadow the other Timorese Nobel winner, Bishop Ximines Carlos Belo moved from his hotel in Dun Laoghaire to a religious house in Dublin after his minder noticed that two Javanese-looking gentlemen, who had been on his plane from London also checked into his hotel.

On the fringe of the Oxford lecture, documents were passed out extolling the virtues of the illegal 1976 "integration" of East Timor with Indonesia, attacking Dr Horta's sense of democratic openess and urging "reconciliation" among the divided Timorese.

Quivering with anger, a young Timorese Oxford student said: "They torture and kill our families and then they have the nerve to come here and talk about reconciliation."