My arrival last month, with Mr Tom Hyland of the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign, in Timor's polarised political world, began in Oxford, David Shanks writes. A fist fight in the car-park of St Anthony's College, Oxford, over that distant land alerted me again to the length of Indonesia's surveillance shadow.
Dr Jose Ramos Horta was speaking inside his old college. But outside East Timorese students attacked an Indonesian agent who had earlier tried to disrupt Dr Horta's lecture - as others had his address the previous night to the Oxford Union. Two men, believed to be from the Indonesian embassy in London, had taunted the Timorese by threatening their families in occupied Timor.
A similar incident occurred in Vancouver at the APEC summit last year attended by the Indonesian dictator, President Suharto. It confirmed speculation that Indonesian diplomats do indeed abuse their privileges in foreign countries by acting as agents provocateurs. Canadian police arrested two of them and stripped them of their summit credentials.
Indonesians also regularly shadow the other Timorese Nobel winner, Bishop Ximines Carlos Belo, when he leaves East Timor.
During a visit to Dublin in 1995, Bishop Ximines Carlos Belo moved from his hotel in Dun Laoghaire to a religious house in Dublin after his minder noticed that two Javanese-looking gentlemen, who had been on his plane from London, also checked into his hotel.
On the fringe of the Oxford lecture, documents were passed out extolling the virtues of the illegal 1976 "integration" of East Timor with Indonesia, attacking Dr Horta's sense of democratic openness and urging "reconciliation" among the divided Timorese.
Quivering with anger, a young Timorese Oxford student said: "They torture and kill our families and then they have the nerve to come here and talk about reconciliation."