Tom Lantos: “Mr. Speaker, I rise in joining to celebrate this event. It is a wonderful event to see people determine what they want…”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise in joining to celebrate this event. It is a wonderful event to see people determine what they want to be and have the opportunity to become independent. But there is a cautionary tale here. There are not very many of us in this House who were here when the Indonesians marched in and took East Timor. And we did not do anything then. We let that happen because we felt that our relationship with Mr. Sukharno or whomever was such an important thing that we were not going to tell them that we did not approve of what they were doing to the East Timorese. Only because of human rights activists in this country has that issue been alive at all. They are to be commended. Sometimes they think that they are not heard, they think no one is paying attention, but in fact we have come to the point where in fact Congress actually supported the East Timorese in becoming independent. It happened because grassroots people had a desire to make this wrongness right, or right this wrong, and they did it by talking to their Members of Congress.”