Last Saturday demonstrators picketed the ASEAN at Forty conference, while it was being addressed by former Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, at the University of Auckland. Alatas was the Foreign Minister for the brutal US backed Suharto dictatorship. He was the regime's key apologist for the genocidal occupation of East Timor, which killed one third of the tiny nation's population. Protesters considered it rather strange that he had been invited to a university when he was from a regime that killed masses of students in Indonesia, East Timor and West Papua.

At a dinner two nights earlier Prime Minister Helen Clark described Alatas as "one of Asia's most respected statesmen, and a good friend of New Zealands for many years." New Zealand, like most other Western capitalist nations, was a huge supporter of the murderous Suharto dictatorship. More