The disruption of a conference on East Timor by an organised mob in Kuala Lumpur last month may have done the troubled country a favour. Peter Carey reports.

Fifteen years ago, when I first became aware of the East Timor issue, you could count the number of academics actively involved in researching the topic on the fingers of one hand. Outside Australia and Portugal, few had much knowledge about what the Indonesians had done in the former Portuguese colony following their December 7 invasion, especially the terrible loss of life - between a quarter and a third of the pre-1975 population of 700,000 died.

In part, this was because of the difficulty of gaining access to the territory: until January 1989 Jakarta refused admittance to all but a handful of foreign visitors (mostly government officials). In part it was because of the collusion of western governments: the lure of Indonesia's natural resources and its lucrative domestic market overshadowed any concern for human rights.

Last month, a group of 200 Malaysian youths, members of the youth wing of the ruling United Malays National Organisation, stormed into a downtown Kuala Lumpur hotel where the second "Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor" (APCET) was being held. The youths tore down banners, hurled chairs and tables and broke up the meeting. "A spark at any moment (and) it could have been a bloodbath . . . It was very frightening because these people were quite irrational," said one foreign participant. Over 100 arrests were made as the delegates were taken into custody by the Malaysian police.

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Given Malaysia's previous support for Indonesia on the East Timor issue, was the extraordinary heavy-handedness of the Malaysian authorities so surprising? With ties between the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamad and president Suharto so close, and the fourth Asia Pacific Economic Conference looming in Manila, could Kuala Lumpur have behaved otherwise?

Just over two years earlier the Philippines government found itself in a similar position and attracted equally adverse publicity when it tried to prevent the first APCET conference from taking place at the University of the Philippines in Manila. At that time too, several foreign participants were deported and East Timor became headline news as Philippine president Ramos attempted to defend his appeasement of Indonesia. But, at least, in this case, the Philippines supreme court eventually overturned the government's banning order and the conference was allowed to go ahead, albeit shorn of many of its foreign delegates. In Kuala Lumpur it took the Malaysian judiciary nearly a week to order the release of the remaining Malaysian conference detainees, while government officials brazened out the international reaction by stressing that public order and Kuala Lumpur's good relations with Indonesia took precedence over the western media outcry. For a country whose prime minister delights in lecturing the West about its "double standards" over human rights and its incomprehension of "Asian values", East Timor was not an issue: far better concentrate on Western iniquities in Bosnia and the Palestinians, at least there were Muslims there.

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Yet, by reacting in this fashion, Malaysia has heightened awareness of the East Timor problem among its own population and prompted public debate. Such an outcome is exactly the aim of the APCET organisers. From now on it hardly matters whether further conferences actually take place: it will be sufficient to announce them, have the foreign delegates turn up, the international media primed, and the local security forces - or as is increasingly the case in Southeast Asia, hired thugs and government-sponsored "youth" - ready to swoop. Then light the blue touch paper and stand back. Instant publicity for East Timor - the more blatant the repression, the more long-lasting the effects in terms of international media coverage.

Before the late 1980s knowledge about the East Timor issue in Southeast Asian universities was minimal. Among Indonesia's regional partners within the Association of South East Asian Nations all the ASEAN states supported Jakarta following the invasion (Singapore initially abstained from the UN General Assembly and Security Council votes condemning it). The situation began to change with the official opening of the territory to foreign tourists in January 1989 and the Santa Cruz massacre of November 12 1991, which claimed the lives of upwards of 200 young East Timorese. This event was captured on film by a British film maker and shown round the world.

It was then that interest began to grow among a handful of Southeast Asian intellectuals, such as the now exiled George Aditjondro of the Satyawacana Christian University in Salatiga, Central Java and activists like Renato Constantino Jr, son of a leading left-wing historian, in the Philippines. Encouraged by East Timorese resistance leaders abroad and western academics, the APCET conference was born in 1993. Following the Nobel peace prize award to East Timor's Catholic bishop, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, and Jose Ramos-Horta, the principal foreign affairs spokesman of the East Timorese resistance, East Timor's eventual freedom no longer seems an impossible dream.

Peter Carey is a fellow and tutor in modern history, Trinity College, Oxford.

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