East Timor
Australian troops pulled out of East Timor this week, after a six-year mission to guard the tiny country’s newly won independence from Indonesia. The 1999 deployment of 5,000 peacekeepers was Australia’s largest military venture since the Vietnam War. Initially, the soldiers protected East Timorese civilians from the pro-Jakarta militias that had been terrorizing them in the run-up to the independence referendum. Later, the troops stayed to help the new country provide security. In what the Australian press called the “literal transformation of swords into plowshares,” the military donated its main base to the East Timorese for use as an agricultural college.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Citizenship: Trump order blocked againFeature After the Supreme Court restricted nationwide injunctions, a federal judge turned to a class action suit to block Trump's order to end birthright citizenship
-
Loyalty tests: The purge at the FBIFeature Kash Patel is conducting polygraph tests on FBI agents to weed out anyone speaking badly about him
-
The all-seeing tech giantFeature Palantir's data-mining tools are used by spies and the military. Are they now being turned on Americans?
