Indonesia The new rules of the world

Award-winning journalist, John Pilger, investigates the realities of globalization by taking a close look at Indonesia. In order to examine the true effects of globalization, Pilger turns the spotlight on Indonesia, a country described by the World Bank as a model pupil until its globalized economy collapsed in 1998. The film examines the use of sweatshop factories by famous brand names, and asks some penetrating questions. Who are the real beneficiaries of the globalized economy? Who really rules the world now? Is it governments or a handful of huge companies? The Ford Motor Company alone is bigger than the economy of South Africa. Enormously rich men, like Bill Gates, have a wealth greater than all of Africa. Pilger goes behind the hype of the new global economy and reveals that the divisions between the rich and poor have never been greater -- two thirds of the world's children live in poverty -- and the gulf is widening like never before. The film looks at the new rulers of the world -- the great multinationals and the governments and institutions that back them -- the IMF and the World Bank. Under IMF rules, millions of people throughout the world lose their jobs and livelihood. The reality behind much of modern shopping and the famous brands is a sweatshop economy, which is being duplicated in country after country.

East Timor - Death of a nation

This was how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's described Czechoslovakia when the Nazis invaded Prague in the 1930s. The same can be said of East Timor. Timor is located at the easternmost end of the Indonesian archipelago and lies 300 miles north of Australia in the South Pacific Ocean. The western part of the island, formerly a Dutch colony, became part of Indonesia upon independence in 1945. East Timor, a Portuguese colony since the sixteenth century, remained under Portuguese rule and decolonisation began only after the revolution in Portugal of 1974. A power struggle between political parties within East Timor erupted into civil war in the summer of 1975. In September of that year, Indonesian troops invaded East Timor, supposedly to thwart this 'Communist uprising'. In 1998, John Pilger and David Munro entered East Timor where 23 years earlier, a team of journalists, including Australian Greg Shackleton, were murdered by the Indonesian army for daring to question the validity of the invasion. Pilger uncovers the shocking complicity of the US and Great Britain governments in the ensuing genocide - the same governments who were willing to go to war with Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait, but who stood aside as Indonesia broke the exact same UN regulations to rape and pillage East Timor using Western arms.