I still have tears in my eyes after reading “Eyewitness East Timor” (Nov.-Dec.). As soon as you mentioned the announcement of the vote my whole body chemistry changed and I understood what it means to feel skin crawling. I continue to carry the sorrow of the evacuation.

The whole experience was for me wonderful and terrible. We are all so blessed to have shared in it together from our different perspectives.

I read with great interest John M. Miller’s and Charlie Scheiner’s firsthand accounts of the vote for independence and its aftermath in East Timor. However, I must dissent from their support for armed “peacekeeping” forces there.

Charlie wrote of “re-evaluating long-held pacifist beliefs”; John said his support wasn’t “an abandonment of pacifism, but a recognition that options become limited as violence escalates and genocide is threatened against a defenseless and terrorized people.”

From my limited experience, I hesitate to urge people who have experienced armed conflict to maintain creative nonviolent response. I have the utmost respect and admiration for John and Charlie. But I still wonder about this: Yes, “options become limited as violence escalates,” but they still exist. Do we advocate nonviolent resistance because we think it means that no one dies? That people are not hurt, that no one suffers? I always thought it meant that I am not willing to kill or hurt another in order to achieve a particular end, not that I myself would not be killed or hurt. Means dictate ends, and perhaps we need to consider more thoroughly just what ends we wish to achieve: A police state? A government with guns? These questions may seem superfluous, especially in light of the tremendous pain and suffering experienced by the East Timorese, but if I am exploring and experimenting with nonviolence, I have to examine exactly what that means to each of us. And I think that nonviolent resistance should be embraced more wholeheartedly, and earlier on, by both pacifists and the international community—look at what happened in Kosova/o. Nonviolence is still too often confused with passivity.

Never have I been shot at or lived in an area where a war was going on. I have been physically attacked by people only a few times. But I did visit Bosnia very briefly at the start of the Balkan war cease-fire in 1995. I witnessed the aftermath of bombing, the ancient mosques and churches and homes destroyed; heard the world-weariest voices of people who’d been there since the beginning of the destruction; met young man after young man home from the war without limb, or eye, or soul. I don’t think I have to live through a war to know that I don’t believe in it as a way to solve problems. Nonviolent resistance happens all the time, as it has throughout history; sometimes it is more successful than others. Because I believe that violence can only lead to violence, I cast my lot with the creativity of the nonviolent experiment, rather than the status quo of guns at the ready when all else fails.