Death of a Nation

February 14th, 2012 at 8:00pm

On December 7, 1975, Indonesia secretly – but with the complicity of Western powers including the US, UK and Australia – invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered. In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew, including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film.

In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese – roughly one-third of the population – were slaughtered by the Indonesian military in a genocide that has been described as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century. Pilger tells this story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats.