Special to The Japan Times When Bella Galhos packed up her Indonesian military youth-corps uniform and shipped it off to the Indonesian government from Canada, she was saying goodbye to a dangerous double life and was beginning her crusade to inform people about a genocide that has largely been hidden from the world's view for 24 years.
Since fleeing East Timor in 1994, Galhos has been speaking to audiences in North America, Europe and Australia about the horrors her country has suffered since it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975, when she was three years old. She has also lobbied officials in the United States and Canada to end their governments' complicity in what has been called the worst genocide, per capita, since the European Holocaust.
About 200,000 East Timorese -- one-third of the pre-invasion population -- have died as a result of Indonesia's illegal occupation of the former Portugese colony, which began less than 24 hours after an official state visit to Jakarta by then U.S. President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.