supplied the Indonesian army with 90% of its arms, and "by 1977 Indonesia found itself short of weapons, an indication of the scale of its attack. The Carter Administration accelerated the arms flow. Britain joined in as atrocities peaked in 1978, while France announced that it would sell arms to Indonesia and protect it from any public "embarrassment". Others, too, sought to gain what profit they could from the slaughter and torture of Timorese." This humanitarian catastrophe went virtually unnoticed by the international community. Noam Chomsky attempted to raise consciousness about the crisis at a very early stage. In November 1978 and October 1979, Chomsky delivered statements to the Fourth Committee of the U.N. General Assembly about the East Timor tragedy and the lack of media coverage. In 1999, when it became clear that the majority of Timorese people were poised to vote in favour of their national independence in U.N. sponsored elections, Indonesian armed forces and paramilitary groups reacted by attempting to terrorize the population. At this time Chomsky chose to remind Americans of the three principal reasons why he felt they should care about East Timor: Weeks later, following the independence vote, the Indonesian military drove "hundreds of thousands from their homes and destroying most of the country. For the first time the atrocities were well publicized in the United States." Australian historian Clinton Fernandes, writes that "When Indonesia invaded East Timor with US support in 1975, Chomsky joined other activists in a tireless campaign of international solidarity. His speeches and publications on this topic were prodigious and widely read, but his financial support is less well known. When the US media were refusing to interview Timorese refugees, claiming that they had no access to them, Chomsky personally paid for the airfares of several refugees, bringing them from Lisbon to the US, where he tried to get them into the editorial offices of The New York Times and other outlets. Most of his financial commitment to such causes has – because of his own reticence – gone unnoticed. A Timorese activist says, "we learnt that the Chomsky factor and East Timor were a deadly combination" and "proved to be too powerful for those who tried to defeat us". Standing before The UN Independent Special Commission of Inquiry for Timor-Leste whose major report was released in 2006. Arnold Kohen a U.S activist vitally important to the raising of Western