Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, the question of East Timor has been something that I have been following for many years. We have held hearings, and I want to thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the chairman of our Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, and despite all of these things, now all of a sudden it seems that East Timor is coming to bear. The fact of the matter is, Mr. Speaker, East Timor was a former Portuguese colony, and when Portugal left this colony, the Indonesian military came and simply occupied it; and the saddest affair of all, Mr. Speaker, is the fact that 200,000 East Timorese were sacrificed, they were massacred, in 1974 when they took over this portion of the island; and the sad part about it, too, Mr. Speaker, is that we cannot afford to talk only about East Timor and ignore West Papua New Guinea, because both of these were former.”