Patrick Kennedy: “I would like to say that we accept the Bereuter amendment. We do not condone violence on any side. I would like to…”

“I would like to say that we accept the Bereuter amendment. We do not condone violence on any side. I would like to follow up with a few comments with respect to the points made by the gentleman from Nebraska. That is, having visited East Timor myself this last year, I had an opportunity to sit down with Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Belo and spoke with him for a considerable length of time and do have a sense of how these violent occurrences are precipitated. I might add that Bishop Belo himself has said to me that there is a situation where the government is hiring East Timorese to instigate and act as catalysts for violent uprisings, because what it does is give the excuse for the Indonesian military to then crack down on whomever they want to crack down on. I just want to add that because I have spoken to our own Department of State and some of their officials there, and there is an acknowledgment that the Indonesian government is training such, I guess, double agents, although I do not think they are agents in the cold war sense, but they are East Timorese that are on the payroll of the Indonesian Government that front for this terrorist group in East Timor and thereby justify the reprisals that the Indonesian Government then uses as an excuse to put down these uprisings in the first place.”