Media after Santa Cruz: "Peace mission turned back but focused attention on massacre"

"Peace mission turned back but focused attention on massacre", Peterborough Examiner, undated 1992 clipping. The article discusses the Lusitania Expresso peace ship that tried to sail to Timor-Leste in 1992 through the eyes of Genevieve Appleton, then a Canadian undergraduate student.

ETAN/Canada statement at 1992 UN Decolonization committee

In 1992, the East Timor Alert Network was represented at the UN Decolonization Committee by Li-lien Gibbons, whose brother Kamal Bamadhaj was among those killed at the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.

ETAN/Canada statement at 1994 UN Decolonization Committee meetings

In 1994, the East Timor Alert Network statement to the United Nations Decolonization Committee was delivered by Sharon Scharfe and included a focus on the rights of Timorese women.

 

ETAN/Canada statement at UN Decolonization Committee 1995

The East Timor Alert Network statement at the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization in 1995. Also presenting that year for Parliamentarians for East Timor Canada was Warren Allmand MP.

The 1997 UN Decolonization Committee meetings: ETAN/Canada presenation by Isabel Galhos

For many years, a central forum for Timorese activism was the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization. Timor-Leste (East Timor) was listed on the committee's agenda as a Non-Self Governing Territory, under Portuguese rule. After the Indonesian invasion, it remained on the agenda, providing a crucial annual opportunity for Timorese activists and their supporters to speak about self-determination for Timor-Leste at the UN in New York. 

After the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize went to Bishop Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos Horta, the Decolonization committee's annual hearings began to receive more attention. ETAN/Canada had been presenting at the sessions for some years, but along with other groups ramped up its profile at the Decolonization Commitee in 1997. ETAN's presentation was made by Isabel Galhos, then a Timorese refugee (one of three in Canada) living in Ottawa. 

East Timor Update #1-6, 1991

East Timor Update was the main East Timor Alert Network publication. ETAN published 50 issues of this brief from 1991 to 1997. Each issue ran as the inside back page of The ACTivist, newspaper of the ACT for Disarmament coalition in Toronto.

Numbering was irregular at first. The first three Updates were un-numbered; after #4 a three-page supplement ran in The ACTivist re-using material from A Call for Justice (1985); #6 was a front-page special in The ACTivist covering events in November 1991 before and after the Santa Cruz massacre.

Update #1 is to the right; #2-6 after the jump.

The first ETAN newsletter, 1988

The East Timor Alert Network was not the first solidarity group in Canada. With the encouragement of the Canada Asia Working Group of the Canadian churches (now part of KAIROS Canada) it formed in 1987 alongside the existing Indonesia East Timor Programme.

ETAN's first newsletter was a cover sheet with enclosed pamphlet and clippings from This Magazine and the TAPOL Bulletin. As the materials indicate, the first issue tackled by the Network was Canadian Ambassador Jack Whittleton's decision to visit East Timor along with then-Indonesian Foreign Minister Mochtar Kusumaatmadja..

ETAN fact sheets 1996

Starting with this post, materials produced by the East Timor ALert Network from its founding in the mid-1980s up to 2000 will be published here. 

The East Timor Alert Network/Canada produced a series of fact sheets in 1995, updated in 1996 and circualted through ETAN chapters. The scans posted below and after the jump are the second versions in most cases, written in ETAN's Toronto office and updated and re laid out at ETAN/Ottawa. These versions are from the ETAN/Vancouver office.