Tags: Australia, East Timor, Military, news,
Its interesting to see last night’s post on foreign forces being sent to East Timor quoted as a typical sympathetic post in the blogosphere. It wasn’t intended as such but i talk it how its given i guess. At work i had a heated discussion with someone at work about why Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Portugal are sending troops. Their view was that it was East Timor’s problem and East Timor should fix it. I take a different view, that a neighbour is in trouble and as a good neighbour we should try to fix it. If our neighbours house was on fire, you wouldn’t quibble over the price of your garden hose, you would give the neighbour a hand with your hose and sort out a price afterwards. This is no different. East Timor is on fire, we need to lend them a hand to put the fire out.
This turned out to be an unfortuate analogy with a woman and her 5 children burnt as their house was torched by an angry mob and unarmed East Timorese police gunned down by East Timor army members. I’m satisfied that the mission is just and necessary, they need to be stopped now.
1 Comment Received
May 27th, 2006 @12:00 am
I quoted you as, er, a ‘typical sympathetic post’ because yours was one of the few articulate comments I could find in Technorati
Your colleague is wrong to say that East Timor should sort this out themselves — the reason they asked for foreign aid is that they can’t! — but needing foreign troops for what seems (to me) a relatively straightforward case of civil unrest does raise some worrying questions.
I agree with you entirely that we should be helping East Timor out. But I think the crux of the concerns of many people, myself included, is that we should have focussed on other forms of help, like improving education and promoting stable government, so that they are able to deal with their own problems. It worries me that East Timor is no less poverty-stricken now than it was in 1999, for instance …
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