ON OCTOBER 5th next, the trial begins in London of a young man called Chris Cole who faces charges of both military and industrial espionage.

Last year, Cole, who describes himself as "a Christian activist" broke into the Stevenage workshop of British Aerospace and smashed up one of the electronic cones which are used in the making of radar-guiding equipment for Hawk Fighter and attack aircraft. At the time, the British government had just entered into an agreement to supply twenty-four of these aircraft to Indonesia.

Perfectly designed for counter-insurgency deployment, the Hawks will almost certainly be used by the Indonesians as part of their ongoing military campaign to crush the people of East Timor into submission.

Since they first invaded this tiny island in 1975, Indonesia's Suharto regime has been responsible for the deaths of 200,000 East Timorese - this out of a total population of 650,000. Despite such carnage, however, resistance among the East Timorese to their oppressors continues implacably to this day.

When Chris Cole's case comes up for trial, his solicitors plan to mount a defence based on an 1853 British statute which states that if a crime is committed in order to prevent a greater crime, this can be taken as a major factor of mitigation. Cole will argue that his act of vandalism in the British Aerospace plant was motivated by a desire to save the lives of innocent East Timorese and to at least delay the continuing process of genocide.

Collective memory

On his behalf, a slew of specialists ranging from academics to human rights experts will give evidence outlining the history of Indonesia's occupation of the island. Apart from anything else, it is hoped that the case will bring to public attention the high degree of western complicity in what has been happening to East Timor for the past eighteen years.

Among those who will testify is Doctor Peter Carey, a professor in Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, who specialises in the history of Southeast Asia. For well over a decade now, Carey has been to the forefront of the British campaign to highlight the plight of East Timor.

During that time, he has been denounced as an "enemy of the State" by Indonesian radio. Also, on one particularly sinister occasion, he was invited to the Indonesian Embassy in London and politely "reminded" that his wife, who is herself Indonesian, still has family in the country and that "it would be highly unfortunate if anything were to happen to them."

A month ago, Carey and his thirteen-year-old son, William, travelled to Ireland and undertook a sponsored walk from Cork to Galway city via the Beara Peninsula in order to raise money for prisoners of conscience in East Timor. He chose Ireland as the location for the walk in order to raise Irish awareness about this issue but also "to invite reflections on what happens when a small island is oppressed by a much larger neighbour - reflections which will draw out specific parallels with Ireland's own history."

During the three-week trek which elicited almost a thousand pounds in spontaneous donations and a further thousand in formal sponsorship, Carey was struck by what he says was a level of response to the East Timor issue which was much higher in Ireland than in the U.K.

"Ireland has a history of colonial repression," he adds. "It's a small island moored alongside a much larger neighbour which has exploited it and occupied it. There are direct parallels with what East Timor has experienced, except the experience in East Timor has been telescoped into just eighteen years.

"One third of East Timor's population has died. It had a massive famine in the late 1970s. Its religion, its heritage, its cultural roots have all been affected by the Indonesian occupation and the situation has gotten worse, not better, over time. I think there is something in the Irish collective memory which is able to respond to that type of situation. I think it's entirely appropriate that that should happen."

political scandal

As a campaigner, what especially concerns Carey and others like him is the desire of support, both tacit and active, which Western governments have given to the Indonesian occupation. Throughout the cold war, Indonesia was one of the West's best friends in Asia and a blind eye was routinely turned to atrocities carried out by the Suharto regime.

Even today, U.S. and European governments continue to do business with this dictatorship. Britain alone does an estimated annual £363 million worth of trade with Indonesia. After the signing of the Hawk deal, Britain has now also become its largest arms supplier.

"Someone ought to write a book like Tolstoy's study on the victims of Yalta on the victims of the cold war," says Carey. "Somalia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, all these countries have been victims of the cold war but none has suffered as intensely as East Timor. Indonesia was to the forefront of holding the ring against communism in Southeast Asia, so the West just patted the country's head, no matter what it did.

"East Timor was invaded in the very year that Vietnam captured the South, the Khmer Rouge took Phenom Penh and it was obviously an issue that nobody wanted to talk about.

"The West has been completely complicit in what has happened in East Timor. Even now that the cold war is over, the West continues to be complicit by it silence and by the air of legitimacy and respectability it allows Indonesia to have.

"What we are talking about here is one of the great political scandals of the century."