Edward Herman
Seth
Mydans’s October 31 piece on the Indonesian departure from East Timor, "A
Calamitous Era Plays Out Quietly For East Timorese," with its admission
that 200,000 had died in Indonesia’s 24 year failed pacification effort,
including its final "rampage of destruction," might impress some
people as an illustration of objective journalism. But they would be badly
misled. Even in this fond farewell, Times bias rears its ugly head. The original
Indonesian invasion of 1975 is rationalized as "occupying a vacuum left
when Portugal abandoned this land," instead of "took advantage of an
opportunity to commit violence against a newly independent people, knowing that
their Great Power allies would not intervene." Mydans also manages to find
an East Timorese who flatters the Indonesian occupation: "they tried to
make it into a showplace, and now they’ve trashed it…"
But
the key to reading Mydans and the Times (and most of the rest of the mainstream
media) is to focus on how they frame issues and on their strategic silences. The
Times had 29 articles and one editorial on East Timor and 17 article and one
editorial on Indonesia itself during the month of October. In these writings the
Times frames the issue, not around the extent and character of the terror, the
plight of the victims, or the identification of the responsible criminals and
how they may be brought to justice, but rather the fact that the East Timorese
have obtained their independence, that the Indonesians have quietly left, and
that Indonesia itself is in the midst of throwing off the incubus of
dictatorship.
Although
their principal reporter Mydans repeatedly acknowledged in these articles that
several hundred thousand East Timorese had been driven into West Timor by
militias and an Indonesian army that had demonstrated truly murderous
tendencies, not a single Times article reported on or raised any question about
what was happening to those people. Were they being starved or killed? What if
anything was being done to help them or to press the Indonesians to stop abusing
them? Not a word in the Times. This can be explained, I believe, by the fact
that, in contrast with the Kosovo Albanians, the East Timorese are unworthy
victims; that is, they are victims of the U. S. or one of its clients states,
and in such cases–we may mention also Lebanese victims of an Israeli iron fist,
or Iraqi children dying under the regime of sanctions–the paper shows no
investigative zeal in looking into the details of human suffering.
A
second feature of Times apologetics is the avoidance of discussion of Indonesian
responsibility, criminality, and possible reparations or war crimes trials. With
great skill the paper’s reporters do acknowledge that East Timor was
deliberately ravaged and people killed, although they display no interest in
determining just how many were killed. They frankly admit that the Indonesian
army was behind the militias and carried out many of the destructive actions
directly, although they came late to discovering and featuring such matters. But
in contrast with their treatment of misdeeds in enemy states, once again they
can’t locate responsibility at the top in a client state that their government
has supported and continues to support. It is "rogue" elements that
are responsible; head of the army Wiranto remains a "moderate" by this
rule of biased analysis and reporting.
Amusingly,
in late September the Times had an article on U.S. plans to bring Saddam Hussein
to trial for genocide (Sept. 24), and during October it reported on a U.S.
effort to unblock Khmer Rouge trials (Oct. 20), but there isn’t the slightest
hint in the 29 news article and single editorial that there is an issue of
criminality in the murderous Indonesian assault on East Timor. There is also no
suggestion that Indonesia should pay reparations for what was admittedly a
monstrous set of crimes of pure vengeance.
A
third feature of Times apologetics is of course the removal of the United States
from any stigma of responsibility for the East Timor disaster. There was not a
single word of news, analysis, or criticism of the U.S. failure to intervene
with the leaders of its client state to stop the militias in the pre-referendum
months, or to take any serious action even after the post-August 30 devastation
and slaughter were well under way. There is no contrasting of the violent
intervention in Yugoslavia and the hypocrisy of the pretended concern with
ethnic cleansing there and the failure to act in its own sphere of influence in
the face of a second burst of Indonesia terror in East Timor. There is no
suggestion that the United States has any debt to pay the East Timorese for its
collusion with Indonesia now and its responsibility for the invasion and 24 year
occupation and slaughter via its diplomatic, economic and arms support. These
matters are strictly off the agenda.
A
final feature of Times apologetics is in its handling of events in Indonesia
proper. There was an election in Indonesia in October, and just as the paper
allowed the "demonstration elections" in El Salvador in the 1980s to
distract attention from the reality of death squads in operation and the
continuity of army rule, so here the Times allows the coming into nominal rule
of civilians to deflect attention from the murderous Indonesian actions in East
Timor, the failure to bring anybody to justice for serious crimes there, as well
as the failure of the elections to substantially weaken the power base of the
army. So readers of the paper will get the impression that despite that sad
little deviation in East Timor, for which responsibility is kept vague,
Indonesia has turned the corner and is another "fledgling
democracy"–conveniently still under IMF and army surveillance and
management–with whom we can proudly align ourselves as we advance in the New
World Order.