Word: timorously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...major international war now, a number of minor and civil conflicts are disturbing the peace. British and Icelandic gunboats are standing by to defend disputed cod fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Lebanon and Angola seethe with civil war. Indonesia presses its offensive against the Portuguese colony of East Timor. Argentina is plagued with terrorism. The occasions, technology and stratagems of war continue to multiply; the rudiments of peacemaking, this Christmas as ever, remain elusive...
Just before dawn, seven Indonesian warships knifed into the waters off Dili, a faded coffee port that serves as the capital of the Portuguese colony of East Timor. Minutes later the ships' guns lit up the night sky. Indonesian marines with full packs and battle dress charged ashore from assault boats, while planes arced overhead dropping paratroopers. Within a few hours it was all over but the mopping up-and that apparently was bloody. Ham radio operators 400 miles away in Australia picked up the last faint pleas from a lone transmitter: "Women and children are being shot...
Thus was one more remnant of Portugal's colonial empire lost last week. East Timor is a mountainous patch of jungle and coffee plantations on the eastern half of the 300-mile-long island of Timor; the other half is part of Indonesia. The Indonesian invasion at least resolved a dilemma for East Timor's 650,000 inhabitants, who had been faced with one of three political fates: continued association with Portugal leading to gradual independence, immediate independence or integration with Indonesia. The generals in Jakarta decided on integration, evidently because they feared that if independence were chosen...
Various armed groups had been struggling for post-Independence power in East Timor for six months. In August the Timorese Democratic Union (U.D.T.), a right-wing group favoring Portuguese federation, fought its way to power in Dili, only to be driven out by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), a leftist group that advocated immediate and total independence. Amid what some Western witnesses described as "bloody carnage," which included children being bashed to death against the trunks of trees, Fretilin troops forced the Portuguese colonial governor and his aides to flee to an island 20 miles offshore...
...allies, including the pro-Indonesian Timorese Popular Democratic Association (APODETI), for a counteroffensive. Fretilin forces, described by an Australian reporter as "looking like a Dad's army of hippies," had set the stage for last week's showdown in November, when, already in retreat, they declared East Timor an independent free state...