"If you leave us here, we will die" : how genocide was stopped in East Timor /

Robinson (history, UCLA) previously worked for Amnesty International in London. For six months in 1999, he was a UN political affairs officer in East Timor. He has a keen understanding of genocide and a firm grasp of the East Timor case, which evolved as a tiny nationalist movement on a tiny half-island as a tiny population struggled to break away from Indonesia and form a sovereign, independent state. The book is organized around a time line of the unfolding genocidal tragedy. Robinson underlines that neither ethnic nor religious differences--Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, and East Timor, once part of imperial Portugal's Asian backwater, mostly Roman Catholic--but rather, different political agendas fueled the conflict, which pitted those who favored independence for East Timor against proponents of its integration with Indonesia. The book is well written and reads well, and will appeal mostly to scholars and graduate students interested in genocide, political conflict in plural societies, and the creation of new states. A good companion read is Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell (CH, Feb'03, 40-3674). Contains a useful bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections. A. Magid emeritus, SUNY at Albany

In this intimate, informed account, historian Robinson (The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali), examines the tumultuous events surrounding East Timor's 1999 attempt to gain independence from Indonesia. With expertise and an insider's perspective-a principal researcher for Amnesty International in the 1990s, Robinson joined the UN mission overseeing East Timor's independence referendum-the author offers rare insight into the country's internal turmoil. Particularly riveting are Robinson's descriptions of the days preceding the historic vote to separate from Indonesia: "dressed in their Sunday best, some [East Timorese] left home in the middle of the night to reach the polling station by dawn." The importance of that vote, in which "98.6 percent of those who had registered cast ballots," is hard to overstate; just hours after voting ended, however, pro-Indonesian militia groups erupted in a violent backlash that would kill approximately 1,500 civilians and send 400,000 fleeing the country. Despite the overwhelming brutality of the story, and a bleak assessment of actions from the UN and international community (as much a part of the problem as the solution), Robinson manages to cap his detailed report with a hopeful note. (Jan.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.