On May 5, Australian journalist John Pilger was presented with the Order of Timor-Leste by East Timor’s Ambassador to Australia, Abel Gutteras, in recognition of his reporting on East Timor under Indonesia’s brutal occupation.

Pilger was reporting undercover in East Timor, as it was then known, in 1993, nearly 20 years after the 1975 Indonesian invasion that forms the backdrop for my novel Francesca.

Pilger’s response is linked below:

http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-universal-lesson-of-the-courage-of-east-timor