Eyal Press – Never underestimate the power of partisanship to alter the consciousness of America's pundits and policymakers. In the final months of 1996, soon after the Clinton-Riady-Lippo scandal broke, rightwingers throughout the media and political establishment suddenly became champions of human rights for the people of East Timor, whose plight had until then gone unnoticed in both official Washington and among the punditocracy. For some, this meant breaking twenty years of silence on the subject; for others, it required a dose of amnesia to block out their own complicity.
Former Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist William Safire may have experienced the greatest epiphany. On October 7, 1996, in his first-ever Times column on the subject, Safire described East Timor as "a human-rights hellhole," this in the context of discussing Webster Hubbell's visit to the island and the Clinton Administration's financial ties to James and Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group.
"The Riadys gained much face in Indonesia in 1993, helping the Clinton Administration lose interest in labor abuses in East Timor," Safire fumed. Having, like so many others, ignored the issue for more than two decades, the normally well-versed Safire got the facts wrong. The "labor abuses" condoned by the Clinton Administration had been taking place in Indonesia, not East Timor (the latter is a prison-island that barely has a labor market). Safire also referred to "Indonesia's East Timor"–an unfortunate use of the possessive by the master linguist and wordsmith, who may not be aware that Indonesia's annexation of the island is illegal and still not recognized by the United Nations.
In the weeks that followed, Safire turned again and again to the human-rights situation in Indonesia, penning columns on October 14, October 17, and November 28, and pointing once more to "labor abuses in East Timor."
For all his indignation, the pundit has yet to connect East Timor's deplorable condition to his friend and one-time colleague Henry Kissinger, who back in 1975 gave Indonesia U.S. permission to invade East Timor, and continues to nurture a relationship with the Suharto dictatorship, earning hundreds of thousands as a consultant to U.S. corporations with interests in the country. He also regularly visits Indonesia.
Another sudden convert to East Timor's cause was that consummate friend of democracy, Oliver North. On his own radio program and on a CNN panel hosted by Larry King, North scolded the Clinton Administration for arranging arms shipments to an abusive Third World junta behind the American public's back. North told CNN it was wrong for Clinton to be "taking money from Indonesians, selling F- 16 jets to a country that has human-rights abuses writ large all over their record." North neglected to mention that his hero and former employer, Ronald Reagan, supplied Suharto in the same manner when he was in office (not to mention a certain Ayatollah).
Even Crossfire co-host Robert Novak managed to work up some indignation over abuses by the Suharto regime in East Timor. Unlike North or Safire, though, Novak could not hide his distaste for the task: "Bill," he chortled to his liberal CNN counterpart, Bill Press, "as a good liberal I am sure you're very upset about this brutal Indonesian regime's slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in East Timor."
No newspaper editorial board has taken up East Timor's cause more avidly since the Clinton scandal broke than the Moonie-run Washington Times. The paper has published nearly a dozen op-eds and unsigned editorials in recent months excoriating Clinton for taking Lippo's money and turning his back on human-rights abuses in East Timor. Things were not always this way.
In November of 1994, in an editorial on Clinton's foreign policy, the paper scoffed at the notion that, after Rwanda and Haiti, the President would "next week" be preoccupied with "East Timor, which may be a nasty place to live these days, but is not exactly a vital U.S. interest." (To its credit, however, the paper's news section did run an informative, detailed story on East Timor in the summer of 1996, months before the Clinton fundraising scandal erupted.)
On NBC's Meet the Press, meanwhile, East Timor's cause was embraced by Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour. "Now that all these millions have gone through [from Lippo to Clinton]," Barbour railed, "Mickey Kantor stops the investigation on human-rights abuses in East Timor, which has been taken over, invaded, and captured by Indonesia, and a third of the population, 95 percent Roman Catholic... has been exterminated." Not bad for a quick review of the demographics, only Barbour had evidently been reading Safire: Mickey Kantor halted an investigation of human-rights abuses in Indonesia, not East Timor. Barbour said, "There was a quid pro quo, and the quo is billions, F-16 fighters for Indonesia... billion dollars of contracts for the cronies of all of these people... genocide in East Timor." Barbour didn't add that it was a Republican President, Gerald Ford, along with Henry Kissinger, who gave the go-ahead to the invasion.
During the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole began discovering East Timor, too. Dole campaign manager Scott Reed even issued press releases instructing the media to scrutinize Clinton's "ties to the military junta that has slaughtered hundreds of thousands in East Timor." It was an act of true desperation, in that it begged the question of what Dole himself had ever done for the East Timorese.
In fact, quite a bit. In 1994, the Senator helped kill legislation barring the use of any U.S.-supplied weapons in East Timor. Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, had helped craft the provision Dole killed. "Senator Dole not only did nothing to help us, he actively weighed in against the people of East Timor when the votes were being counted," Feingold said. Undaunted, a Dole campaign official in Orange County picked up the phone and rang the East Timor Action Network to see if its members might want tickets to an upcoming Clinton event. The Dole campaign said it had good seats right in front of the cameras, ideal for signs and banners. The group turned down the offer.
Newt Gingrich, for his part, held a press conference and declared that "everything the Administration has said about... Indonesia is now suspect." Gingrich duly called for a suspension of the planned sale of F-16 fighter planes to Indonesia, and, to his credit, invited Nobel Peace Prize recipients Jose Ramos-Horta and Bishop Belo to testify before Congress. But this marked a sudden change of heart for Gingrich, too. He was at the height of his power as House Speaker when Republicans pushed through a restoration of U.S. military-training assistance to the Indonesian regime.
On the left, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have been writing about East Timor for two decades. But in the mainstream media, with the exception of Anthony Lewis, there has been next to nothing.
Even today, more than six months into the Indonesian financing scandal, the media have neglected the story. Here are some of the issues they've missed: the Ford-Kissinger role in the atrocities in East Timor; the U.S. corporate connection to Suharto; the impact of U.S. arms sales to the regime; the role of U.S. companies extracting oil in the Timor Gap belonging to East Timor; the massive political crackdown being carried out by the Indonesian government; the jailing of independent labor leaders such as Muchtar Pakpahan; and the stepped-up repression in East Timor since the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta.