We have just received and are publishing on our site, this leaflet distributed to the Sydney postal workers strike by a group of Sydney Left Communists.

When independence was declared by East Timor in 1975 it was recognised by Portugal. However the neighbouring Indonesian state had other ideas and invaded the island. In a war that lasted until 1999 up to 250,000 East Timorese died. The 1980 census figure was only 550,000. People died in the conflict, through atrocities committed by Indonesian troops, and as a result of famine, just one of the results of the destruction of 70% of the economic infrastructure.

Thank-you for your critical comments on the ICC article 'How Australian imperialism benefits from the Bali massacre', from World Revolution. This letter responds to your criticisms, point-by-point. Please pardon the length of this letter; the questions you ask actually touch on matters of immense importance to the working class. For this reason, it was necessary to respond in some length - and to therefore take some time responding to you.

Late last year, the 520 workers at the Chef Cookers (domestic stoves) factory in Brunswick, in Melbourne, Australia, were told that the factory would be closed soon. Only one month before, the union covering these workers had "negotiated" a limitation in provisions for redundancy packages. This right wing union, the Australian Workers' Union, is notorious for its reactionary role. It has long been militantly pro-capitalist and, for at least a century, been a major source of racism and virulent Australian nationalism in the "labour movement". The State Government, currently run by the Australian Labor Party, parades as a sort of Aussie version of Tony Blair's "Third Way". In November last year, in fact, this government invoked draconian Essential Services legislation that the previous Liberal/National Party Coalition Government had not dared use, to help bludgeon power workers to end their wildcat strike (see World Revolution 240). Neither of these forces - neither the AWU nor the State ALP - was therefore able to pose as a militant opponent of the planned factory closure, when it was announced.

Rwanda, the Congo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir, Kosovo and now East Timor. As the world watches, yet another carefully pre-planned mass slaughter is enacted, even before the blood is dry at the site of the last one. Thousands -perhaps tens of thousands- have been butchered. This time, however, it is not happening 'far away', but right on Australia's doorstep, and in a place where Australian capitalism has long, intimate connections.

After Kosovo, East Timor; after East Timor, Chechnya. Barely has the blood from one massacre dried than it is flowing again somewhere else on the planet. At the same time, the African continent is in agony: the endemic wars in Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and other countries, have been joined by new massacres in Burundi and a confrontation between Rwanda and its Ugandan "allies", just as the war gets under way again in Angola. We are far indeed from the prophecies of President Bush, exactly ten years ago after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, predicting "a new world order of peace and prosperity". The only peace that has made any progress is the peace of the grave.