The publisher’s blurb that accompanied my review copy of Joseph Nevins’s book makes two prominent assertions. One is that the United Nations has given Indonesia a six-month deadline to prosecute war crimes committed in East Timor in 1999. The other is that Paul Wolfowitz, a former US ambassador to Indonesia and an architect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, was complicit in East Timor atrocities. I suppose such attention-grabbers are needed to sell books in today’s over-saturated literary markets, but these two do little justice to the broad sweep and value of Nevins’s latest work. (Under the pen name Matthew Jardine, he has written two others on East Timor, and is something of an activist on the subject.)

As Richard Woolcott puts it in his autobiography The Hot Seat (2003), East Timor has suffered four tragedies: Portuguese colonial neglect; Japanese occupation; Indonesia’s invasion; and death and destruction in September 1999 after the UN vote on autonomy. Nevins extrapolates the last two of these into a broader picture involving other actors: how corrosive double standards, and a growing abuse of language and loss of memory about past sins by the US and its allies, including Australia, have denied the East Timorese justice.