Archived Issues
Issue 20 April 2006
Issue 19 Nov 2005
Issue 18 April 2005
Issue 17 Nov 2004
Issue 16 April 2004
Issue 15 Nov 2004
Issue 14 April 2003
Issue 13 Nov 2002
Issue 12 April 2002
Issue 11 Nov 2001
Issue 10 April 2001
Issue 9 Nov 2000

MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Advertising:
E-mail the editor for rates.
MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

Copyright:
You are generally welcome to reproduce material from MASSEY magazine provided you first gain permission from the editor.

“What will happen to us now?”

asked the East Timorese people. “Will anyone come to help us this time?” Their call is answered by the arrival of the UN peacekeepers in the children’s book Mission to East Timor by Glyn Harper.

It is not easy to explain a complicated conflict in a way that makes sense to children, but Harper has. Using simple language, short sentences and well-chosen colour photographs, he lays out the events leading up to the murderous three-week rampage in which Indonesia’s militia henchman sacked the coun-try, making a quarter of the population refugees. The Portuguese withdrawal in 1974, the civil war that followed, Indonesia’s sub-sequent invasion, the silence and inaction of foreign governments during the years of repression, the referendum on indepen-dence: no punches are pulled in Harper’s account of the sequence of events that led to eventual UN intervention.

Harper sets out the roles of New Zealand’s army, navy, air force and medical team after the UN peacekeepers stepped in September 1999. A young member of each force is profiled in their own words. “I flew my helicopter through a bad storm to pick up a soldier from his camp and take him to the army hospital,” says Mark, a helicopter pilot. Anna, a doctor in the New Zealand army, writes about pulling a 10cm long roundworm out of a lady’s nose – a satisfyingly yucky detail, at once guaranteeing children’s attention and saying something about conditions in East Timor .

The trappings of war, let’s admit it, have a certain amount of glamour to them, and some parents may be hesitant about any book that so much as mentions guns and fighting. If you are worried that Mission to East Timor will turn your child into a militarist, don’t be. Sure, there are helicopters and personnel carriers and militia being hunted, but the narrative is at least as much about the setting up of a civil society with clean water supplies, negotiable roads, operating schools, and the rule of law.

Glyn Harper is a lecturer in the Massey Uni-versity Centre for Defence Studies and employed by the New Zealand Army as its official historian for the peacekeeping mission in East Timor.