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.