A conference on "The Question of Autonomy and Human Rights in East Timor" will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursday, March 6, in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall St. The conference is free and open to the public.
East Timor was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years, before it was annexed by Indonesia in the aftermath of a revolution in Portugal in 1974. Critics of the annexation say it deprived East Timor of its right to self-determination, with the possibility of gaining political status similar to that of the Azores, Macau, Angola and other former possessions of the Portuguese. In addition, in the years since the annexation, there are reports that the people of East Timor have been subjected to human rights abuses and forced population movements by the Indonesians.
At the Yale conference, Vasco Garcia, rector of the University of the Azores and author of four books on East Timor, will propose autonomy for East Timor similar to that of the Azores. Professor Garcia was a member of the European Parliament 1986-94 and remains an honorary member. He has been director of the Center for Strategics and International Relations at the University of the Azores.
With him will be representatives of political parties and the resistance movement from Timor: Joao Carrascalao, president of the Timorese Democrat Union; Armindo Maia, vice president of Dili University, East Timor; Constancio Pinto, representative of the National Council of the Maubere Resistance; and Sugeng Bahagijo, Indonesian activist with Human Rights Watch.
K. David Jackson, professor of Spanish and Portuguese and chair of the Council on Latin American Studies, is the conference coordinator. Other participants from Yale will include Joseph Errington, Patricia Pessar, William Rapp, Paul Dubinksy, graduate student Elizabeth Miranda Sissons and visiting fellow Geoffrey Wiseman.
The conference is jointly sponsored by the department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Schell Center for International Human Rights at the Law School and the International Relations Program of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, in cooperation with Oporto University in Portugal.