Western press

Mr. Chandramouli's April 13, 1996 letter regarding western bias in the international media finds sympathy with me. It was inevitable in human history that East should meet West, but domination of Asian countries by the West was wrong. Many non- European cultures, including India, had reached a high degree of sophistication before Westerners ever came. The reason Hong Kong is a colony can be summed up in a few words: they came, they saw, they coveted, they profited from selling opium, and they grabbed.

Regarding the international media, I read a Western account of the ferry disaster in Aceh earlier this year that emphasized the search for missing foreigners. In one report, the names and ages of all the rescued Westerners were meticulously listed. The name of the lone Taiwanese recovered was mentioned, but the newspaper's editors didn't give his age. The fact that Indonesian lives were lost was buried somewhere in the article, perhaps because the editors considered Indonesian lives insignificant. This seems to be part of what Mr. Chandramouli meant by Western bias. I would prefer to term it "racial self-importance."

In 1961, Indian army troops successfully took the colonial Portuguese enclaves of Goa and Diu. Western newspaper reports at the time charged: "India has abandoned its traditional policy of neutrality" and lamented "Indian aggression." The Portuguese have now shut up over Goa and Diu.

In Timor the historical crime was that the European powers Holland and Portugal divided up the island between them. I hope that by 1999, when the Portuguese return Macao to the Chinese government, they will realize that all Asian lands will be in Asian hands and will remain so forever.

Or will voices in the Western press still insist that "the old colonial borders are inviolate?" Meaning Western colonial borders, of course, not say, Japan's colonial borders in Korea. Who created those colonial boundaries? Certainly not the colonized.

The Portuguese still claim that they are "the rightful administrators" of East Timor, and the Western press seems to agree. Can a European country still be the rightful administrator of the eastern half of an island in the Indonesian archipelago?

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta