We Weren't Always This Ethical, You Know

Now, here's a shock: the Foreign Office has not always told the truth. Declassified documents from before Jack Straw's appointment, or even Robin Cook's, have revealed that British diplomats in Indonesia and London lied about their knowledge of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. They also lied about their knowledge of atrocities committed by the Indonesians, "particularly the killing of three Australian and two British newsmen".

A couple of hundred thousand nonentities who also perished are not considered worthy of mention by Britain's leading liberal newspaper, although the Guardian does provide a link to this site, which has links to the declassified documents themselves and which also seems to have been written by a human being rather than by John Aglionby.

"East Timor's annexation by Jakarta was never recognised by the UN," Aglionby concludes blithely, "and it won its independence in 1999," at about the time the Vicar of Downing Street and friends were piling on the moral agony, and the high explosives, over Kosovo. Britain supplied the Hawk fighter aircraft with which the Indonesian government did its best to terrorise the Timorese into voting against independence, in a high-motivation persuasion campaign which cost perhaps three to five thousand lives, though fortunately none of them belonged to British or Australian journalists.