To Alatas, East Timor is mother of all boredoms

Foreign Minister Ali Alatas is bored with countering critics of Jakarta’s policy towards East Timor.

“East Timor is really the mother of all boredoms for me,” he told legislators recently during a parliamentary commission hearing. “People tend to make an issue out of it even when there is nothing to it.”

“The questions we get are the same and so are our answers. Will there ever be an end to this?”

The former Portugese colony was annexed by Indonesia in 1976.