-------------------------original message follows---------------------------
>Date: Sun, 24 Nov 91 16:31:44 EST
[from] Loren Ryter <ST701831@BROWNVM>
Subject: Media Treatment of the Slaughter in East Timor
News from Nowhere: The Unheard of Massacre in East Timor
(c) November 21, 1991 by Loren Ryter
Secretary of State James Baker returned from his surrogate
trip to East Asia last month failing to produce a Chinese
pledge on human rights. Earlier the same week, another part
of Asia witnessed even worse news for human rights: a
brutal massacre in East Timor which in terms of relative
population was fifty times as devastating as even the
highest estimates of the death toll in Tiananmen Square.
Baker's diplomatic impotence in resolving an issue which the
U.S. has been treading lightly over since the 1989 democracy
crackdown, gained front page attention in the New York
Times. The massacre in East Timor, in which Indonesian
soldiers opened fire on a crowd of over 3,000 mourners of
all ages, killing as many as 180 and wounding dozens more,
was relegated to a short column on a back page in the same
authoritative American newspaper. The New York Times, after
reporting in another short back page article the next day
that an Indonesian general had expressed regret and promised
to conduct an investigation into the incident, dropped the
matter entirely. Apology accepted, case closed.
Chalk it up to a freak accident on a tiny little island no
one's ever heard of and you'd be wrong on all three points.
Firstly, East Timor is about as large as the "tiny" Kuwait
we heard so much about earlier this year. Secondly, this
massacre is only the latest in a series of massacres over
the sixteen years since Indonesia invaded its neighbor in
1975, initiating a genocidal campaign of brutal
extermination, forced relocation, and willful destruction of
crops which had left over two hundred thousand people
(easily one third of the pre-invasion population) dead by
execution or starvation in the first five years alone.
Thirdly, many people in very important postitions have heard
quite a lot about East Timor, and it is all they can do to
make sure no one else hears a thing. As Noam Chomsky
writes, "the story is so revealing that it cannot be known,
and indeed is not known except in tiny circles." In order
to try to expand these circles, it is necessary to take a
few large steps backward before discussing the most recent
slaughters.
Indonesia, home of vast mineral and oil wealth and defender
of important sea lanes, has long been the linchpin of post-
war (read cold war) U.S. economic and strategic policy in
Southeast Asia. Especially since 1965, when the CIA and the
U.S. Embassy in Jakarta helped engineer a military coup
which put the staunchly anti-communist Suharto into power
and resulted in the executions of as many as half a million
people suspected of being communists, the US has had a
stalwart ally in the region and has continued to shower its
friend with huge amounts of military and economic aid.
After Portugal gave up her three century claim to the
eastern half of the island of Timor in 1974 and East Timor
began to move toward independence, Indonesian Minister for
Foreign Affairs Adam Malik assured a leader of the nascent
nationalist party, Fretilin, that it adheres to the
principles of the right of every nation to independence, and
that Indonesia has "no intention to increase or to expand
[its] territory, or to occupy other territories...." Not
surprisingly, when Indonesia, which soon thereafter began to
see the Timorese nationalists as Timorese communists,
decided finally to annex the "Cuba on its doorstep," the US
expressed no opinion in the matter. The fact that both
President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew
out of Jakarta after a state visit the day before the
invasion, well after Indonesian border incursions had begun,
proves acquiescence at the very least. According to the
Australian Ambassador, Kissinger had instructed the U.S.
embassy "to cut down its reporting on Timor."
The American mainstream press has dutifully followed
Kissinger's advice for the past 16 years (the New York Times
has run an average of about one piece per year on East Timor
over the past decade), much to the chagrin of the people of
East Timor who are increasingly depending on world and U.S.
public opinion to free them from the brutal Indonesian
occupation. It is a cruel irony that, as it turns out, even
their martyrdom has not bought their plight international
notice. The Timorese national resistance, which has
survived air raids and mass encirclement campaigns
involving tens of thousands of troops and conscripted
Timorese, has focused its strategy in recent years on
gaining more widespread world attention.
The East Timorese believed that a 12-day visit scheduled to
begin November 4th by a Portuguese parliamentary mission,
the culmination of seven years of negotiations mediated by
the UN Secretary-General, would be their gateway to the
world, and it was to this mission that they tied their
fates. Never mind that previous foreign delegations and
even a Papal visit in 1989, which had sparked nonviolent
protests, warranted only a brief fizzle in the world press.
Never mind that everyone knew that the military would take
extreme measures to squelch any possibility of public
dissent. The East Timorese people feel a strong affinity
with the Portuguese, and some ethnic groups had even
creatively incorporated Portuguese colonial rule into their
cosmology. In Mambai mythology, for example, the Mambai's
Portuguese younger brothers, the custodians of the political
realm, had already abandoned them once and come back after
[ The message from Trish breaks off at this point. --Gary ]