East Timor Action Network

Founded in 1991, the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) was the leading American grassroots organization devoted to East Timorese self-determination and human rights in the years preceding Timorese independence. Since the U.N.' supervised vote for independence in 1999 and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in 2002, ETAN has formally broadened its mandate to include the promotion of human rights in Aceh, West Papua, and elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago. The organization officially changed its name to the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network/United States in 2005. ETAN is a member of the International Federation for East Timor, a coalition of non-governmental organizations interested in that nation's decolonization process.

Having been given a green light by U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during a visit to Jakarta just hours earlier, Indonesia invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, on December 7, 1975. In the years of occupation that followed, an estimated 150,000 Timorese died in what a number of scholars have characterized as genocide. The United States remained a firm ally of Indonesia throughout most of this period, providing aid, diplomatic support, and military training to the Suharto regime. In the wake of a 1991 massacre of hundreds of funeral marchers by the Indonesian armed forces at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, ETAN was formed to oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Indonesia, to raise public awareness, and to support the Timorese struggle for independence.

ETAN's efforts assumed a variety of forms. Throughout its existence, the organization has worked with Congress, holding lobby days and advocating and monitoring legislative action on arms transfers and U.S. military training for Indonesia. In an early effort at public education, ETAN tabled at screenings of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, the award-winning 1992 film that alerted many Americans, often for the first time, to the East Timor issue. ETAN chapters also sponsored showings of other relevant films, such as Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy of 1994, and they hosted speakers ranging from international human rights activists to Timorese nationals.

Direct action has been an important component of ETAN's work. The organization has regularly sponsored demonstrations outside the Indonesian embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as Indonesian consulates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Protests have also been held in other American cities. With President Clinton scheduled to meet the Indonesian leader Suharto at the 1993 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit near Seattle, ETAN [Page 503]organized a local candlelight vigil at the conference. The following year, when the APEC summit was held in Bogor, Indonesia, ETAN organized a grassroots effort to encourage President Clinton, who was attending the meeting, to revise U.S. policy toward Indonesia and to publicly support Timorese self-determination.

In a free speech case in 1999, ETAN won the right, which had been denied by city officials, to temporarily rename a portion of the street on which the Indonesian consulate in New York is located. The street sign was originally to say “1991 Santa Cruz Massacre,” but it was christened “East Timor Way” on July 17, the 23rd anniversary of Indonesia's 1976 annexation of East Timor, an incorporation not recognized by the United Nations.

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