I went to East Timor at the end of 1998 for several reasons, but perhaps my biggest accomplishments were simply to act as a foreign  presence there and to report on what I had seen. Many East Timorese  stopped me on the street just to thank me for coming there, because the presence of foreigners acts as a deterrent against human rights violations.  The Indonesian government is acutely aware that foreign  eyewitness accounts of human rights abuses will further undermine its international support

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