Unlike the Tiananmen Square massacre, the slaughter of perhaps 200 young Timorese brought no tears from Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

Significantly, Woolcott went on to say: 'Although we know it is not true, the formal position of the Indonesian government is still that there is no Indonesian military intervention in East Timor. If the Minister said or implied in public the Indonesian Government was lying we would invite a hurt and angry reaction.

After the orgy of killing at Lacluta a Timorese asked an Indonesian soldier why he had killed the wife and child of a FRETLIN guerrilla, and the reply was: 'When you clean the field, don't you kill all the snakes, the small and large alike?'

The US representative to the UN, Daniel P. Moynihan, later made the following revealing comment: 'The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.'