East Timor Embassy Following the Dili massacre of 12th November 1991, members of the East Timor community in Australia with supporters in Canberra erected a demountable hut outside the main gate of the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra and named it the East Timor Embassy. The building stands in a sound tradition in Canberra following in the footsteps of the Aboriginal Embassy in 1972 and the Southern African Liberation Centre which still stands outside the white South African Embassy in Rhodes Place. In addition to the Embassy, there were 120 crosses in memory of those who died in Dili in the massacre, and a peppercorn tree was planted by the Catholic Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn on December 7th to commemorate the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. The flags of FRETILIN and the UDT also fly by the Embassy and the local Trades and Labour Council set up a picket of the Indonesian Embassy after the massacre. The Indonesians were very angry about the ongoing presence of the embassy and on January 2nd, when the East Timorese community called a press conference at their embassy when George Bush was in the city, Indonesian staff came out of their embassy building and threw bricks and other objects at the protesters outside. An embassy car windscreen was broken in the subsequent fracas. The ambassador continued to bring pressure on the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Gareth Evans, and despite support given to the embassy protest by the local A.C.T. government, police moved the embassy building up the road and ordered the caravan next to it to be removed altogether. Towards the end of January, Senator Evans again bowed to pressure from the Indonesians, and ordered the embassy to move over the road and further away, admitting that he was under unbearable pressure from the Indonesian government on the issue. They were arguing that the East Timor embassy protest contravened the terms of the Vienna Convention by impairing the dignity of their embassy (clause 22.2). The East Timorese community accepted that they would have to move but declined to remove the crosses on the grass verge outside the Indonesian Embassy. The crosses became the subject of a court injunction in January but in the end a judge in Melbourne ordered them to be removed to the other side of the road by the East Timor Embassy, now renamed the East Timor Information Centre. Police moved in on January 26th to finally relocate them. The local support group continues to staff the picket and the embassy with support from the East Timor community in Canberra and Sydney, and the A.C.T. Trades and Labour Council. Apart from the disturbance on January 2nd, the protests have been peaceful, despite efforts by a handful of International Socialists to force a confrontation with police when the Embassy was to be moved on. The East Timorese are very insistent that there should be no violence although one reason that the police gave for ordering a move was that Indonesian staff in their embassy building might take a pot shot at the protest along the lines of the fatal shooting of a policewoman by someone from the Libyan Embassy in London a few years ago. Alternative embassy protests should clearly have their own entry in any updated version of Gene Sharp's magnum opus, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action."1 Contact Australian Coalition for East Timor, GPO Box 2583, Canberra A.C.T. 2601. Peter D. Jones Footnote: 1. The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp - Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1973. Part one: Power and Struggle; Part 2: The methods of nonviolent action; Part 3: The dynamics of nonviolent action.