Virtual Independence Day for East Timor
by Proinsias O Maolchalain
East Timorese independence became a virtual reality on Tuesday
when writer Joe O'Connor launched the East Timor domain on the
Internet.
Speaking at the launch in the Irish Film Centre in Dublin, Joe
O'Connor said that the day was ``something of a virtual
independence day - a liberation day of the imagination,'' adding
that he hoped the real one would not be far away.
On the internet, each country has its own allocated name space
called a domain. For Ireland the domain is .ie, so UCD's address
is www.ucd.ie while Sinn Féin's is sinnfein.ie. The domain .tp
has been registered by Connect Ireland on behalf of the East
Timorese with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
``Most of you will know something of East Timor, a small country
with, like our own, a history of violence, colonisation and
poverty, which for 22 years this month has been illegally
occupied in the name of so-called democratic annexation,''
O'Connor told those at the launch. ``Since then a brutal regime of
repression has existed, 200,000 people, one third of the entire
population have been killed. Every kind of human rights abuse has
been documented. But the desire of the East Timorese for
self-determination has refused to die away.''
O'Connor rejected those who would scoff at the establishment of
the domain, and would ask what use it served faced with the might
of the Indonesian military establishement aided by the United
States. ``Every free country is at heart a shared idea,'' he said.
Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge played as important a role as
Pearse, Constance Markieviez and Connolly, creative artists whose
most revolutionary act was to imagine Ireland. As Yeats himself
put it ``forging the space where Ireland could grow, where a
people could plant the seeds of freedom and nationhood, long
before that country's freedom was recognised on any map.''
Speaking on behalf of the East Timor community in Ireland, Dino
Gandara Rai thanked Connect Ireland who have established the
domain and emphasised the importance of the internet in
overcoming censorship.
``Since Indonesia invaded my country western journalists have not
been allowed in East Timor. In western countries you believe if
you have evidence, you do not believe if you have no evidence.
There have been UN resolutions but no concrete action,'' he said.
John Pilger, the award winning Australian journalist and
broadcaster, in a message of support for the venture, described
the domain as an ``electorinic safe house'', which he said would be
seen as an historic bench-mark on a people's struggle for
freedom.
The East Timor Campaign can be accessed at http://www.freedom.tp
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