APODETI and UDT leaders. Attempts by the United Nations Secretary General's Special Representative, Vittorio Winspeare Guicciardi to visit Fretilin-held areas from Darwin, Australia were obstructed by the Indonesian military, which blockaded East Timor. On 31 May 1976, a 'People's Assembly' in Dili, selected by Indonesian intelligence, unanimously endorsed an 'Act of Integration', and on 17 July, East Timor officially became the 27th province of the Republic of Indonesia. The occupation of East Timor remained a public issue in many nations, Portugal in particular, and the UN never recognised either the regime installed by the Indonesians or the subsequent annexation. Justification The Indonesian government presented its annexation of East Timor as a matter of anticolonial unity. A 1977 booklet from the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs, entitled Decolonization in East Timor, paid tribute to the "sacred right of self-determination" and recognised APODETI as the true representatives of the East Timorese majority. It claimed that FRETILIN's popularity was the result of a "policy of threats, blackmail and terror". Later, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas reiterated this position in his 2006 memoir The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor. The island's original division into east and west, Indonesia argued after the invasion, was "the result of colonial oppression" enforced by the Portuguese and Dutch imperial powers. Thus, according to the Indonesian government, its annexation of the 27th province was merely another step in the unification of the archipelago which had begun in the 1940s. Foreign involvement There was little resistance from the international community to Indonesia's invasion. Although Portugal was undergoing an energetic decolonization process, Portugal failed to involve the United Nations. Australian involvement Indonesia invaded East Timor during the political crisis and social unrest in Australia following the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor party government. Previously secret files of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, released in September 2000, showed that comments by the Whitlam Labor party government may have encouraged the Suharto regime to invade East Timor. Gough Whitlam had been a vocal anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist but saw imperialism and colonialism almost entirely as European phenomena and had supported China, despite its imperialism and was supportive of Indonesian imperialism to undo Dutch, Portuguese and British colonialism. Despite the unpopularity of the events in East Timor within segments of the Australian public, the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments allegedly co-operated with the Indonesian military and President