U.S. media and their ignorance partly blamable for E. Timor's mysery

U.S. media and their ignorance partly blamable for E. Timor's mysery

Jeffrey A. Winters, North Western University, Chicago

While most U.S. papers glossed over American complicity in the
horrors of East Timor with soft-focus references to "tacit
support" for the invasion and subsequent occupation (the
Baltimore Sun even repeated Soeharto's absurd justification of a
possible Communist threat from the tiny half-island), a few were
slightly more honest with the U.S. reading public.

A dispatch by the Associated Press from the festivities in
Dili dared to name names, noting that the Indonesian invasion was
carried out with the "support of then president Gerald Ford and
secretary of state Henry Kissinger -- who visited Jakarta on the
eve of the attack. Successive U.S. administrations backed
Indonesian dictator Soeharto in his crackdown against the
rebels."

The Boston Globe deserves credit for a level of completeness
and accuracy that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA
Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post failed miserably to
provide.

The Globe's editorial coverage of the birth of East Timor
pointed out that the U.S. owed a "particular moral debt" to the
Timorese because the U.S. gave the green light to "a nightmare of
brutality that killed off more than 200,000 East Timorese," a
third of the population.

The good people of Boston could read on to discover that,
"Clinton himself has a certain culpability for failing to prevent
or stop in time the vengeful campaign of murder, rape, and
destruction that Indonesian military officers loosed upon the
East Timorese after the people voted overwhelmingly on Aug., 31,
1999, to be free of Indonesian rule."

The Globe describes the "sorry record of international
indifference" to Timor that parallels how the world stood by as
crimes against humanity unfolded in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica
in 1995. And it is not just the U.S. that bears responsibility in
Timor. The United Nations, accused by hopelessly biased
Indonesian elites of doing too much for the Timorese, in fact did
very little, very late. The UN, writes the Globe, "has its own
share of guilt for not heeding pleas for protection and warnings
of bloodshed that were addressed to it before the 1999 Timorese
vote for independence."

By far the most truthful reporting was by Michael Richardson
in the pages of the International Herald Tribune. Richardson
writes that Kissinger and Ford did not merely tacitly support
Soeharto's international thuggery, but actually "helped to
encourage the Indonesian takeover."

He adds that "although Kissinger long denied it, declassified
U.S. documents released in December 2001 prove that he and Ford,
during a visit to Jakarta on Dec. 6, 1975, gave President
Soeharto of Indonesia a green light to send his military into
East Timor."

Richardson points out that this U.S. executive approval,
referred to in State Department circles as the "big wink,"
contravened a congressional ban on Indonesia's use of American
military equipment for anything but defensive operations.

Kissinger, ever the thinker, applied his considerable
intellect to the messy details of how to paper over this death
deal with political niceties. In the transcript he said that
while Indonesia should appreciate that the use of U.S.-made arms
could create legal problems, "it depends on how we construe it;
whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation."

The secretary of state added to Soeharto: "It is important
that whatever you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to
influence the reaction in America if whatever happens happens
after we return."

Richardson reports that "Washington's initial response to the
invasion of East Timor was to delay new arms sales to Indonesia
pending an administrative review by the State Department,
ostensibly to determine whether Jakarta had violated the
bilateral agreement stipulating that U.S.-supplied arms could
only be used for defensive purposes. But military equipment
already in the pipeline continued to flow, and during the six-
month review period [during which tens of thousands perished],
the United States made four new offers of military equipment
sales to Indonesia. They included maintenance and spare parts for
the Rockwell OV-10 Bronco aircraft, designed specifically for
counterinsurgency operations and used by the Indonesian military
in East Timor."

Kissinger, who in a more just world would be charged for
crimes against humanity for his involvement in "international
terrorism," was furious that staffers at State had documented his
role in Timor.

For the next 23 years, Richardson writes, "from Ford to
Clinton, successive U.S. administrations consistently backed
Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, providing Jakarta with
diplomatic cover as well as billions of dollars in weapons,
military training and economic assistance."

None of this important historical perspective appeared in
domestic U.S. press reports celebrating a long struggle against
impossible odds in East Timor -- a land of less than a million
people, with no external military or economic support, who
refused to succumb to the combined aggression and indifference of
more than half a billion people in Indonesia, the United States,
Britain, and Australia.

The next time Americans naively ask why others around the
globe rejoice in tragedies like Sept. 11, it is worth recalling
the lessons of East Timor. It is not so much that "they" don't
know and understand Americans, but that Americans have too often
failed to hold a flat mirror to themselves.