Asia & the Pacific

Soldiers armed with live and rubber bullets attacked the peaceful pro-democracy Red Shirt protests in the centre of Bangkok on April 10. At least 12 people, including a Japanese Reuters reporter, have been shot dead.

Ben Peterson is an activist with the socialist youth organisation Resistance and the Socialist Alliance who spent four-and-half-months in Nepal last year.

John Martinkus HT Lee died on July 26. I only knew HT for the last six years of his life, but the circumstances of our meeting in the final days before the 1999 independence ballot in East Timor meant that we formed a strong friendship. HT

"There will be no surrender. We will fight to the last drop of blood", says DAVID ALEX, one of the most wanted men in East Timor. At war for 20 years, Alex has killed more Indonesian soldiers than he cares to remember. He is regional commander of the

By John Martinkus and Daniel Pedersen EAST TIMOR — When five shots penetrated the body of the commandant of subdistrict Vermasse as he was on his way to work on July 27, it triggered — by afternoon — a violent and repressive response from

A decade ago, on July 10, 1985, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace environmental protest flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. Portuguese-born photographer Fernando Pereira died. New Zealand journalist David Robie writes on the legacy of the nuclear terrorism.

In May, young people carrying a banner "United Front Against Golf Course Development" demonstrated outside the offices of the minister for youth and sport in Jakarta, leading to a heated polemic in the newspapers. A private

Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and his Indonesian counterpart, Ali Alatas, met in Denpasar last week to celebrate the Indonesian parliament's ratification of the so-called "Timor Gap Treaty". Both men, in their roles of daylight train robbers, met in a secluded island to divide the spoils of their robbery.