Richard Holbrooke is heading to Dili as a representative of the UN, but he's carrying the baggage of a shameful past of covering up for Indonesian human rights abuses.

The irony of US Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke's visit to East Timor in the coming week will not be lost on any East Timorese whose memories go back to the 1970s.

Holbrooke is scheduled to arrive in Dili Monday, where he will meet with Timorese leader Xanana Gusmco, and then visit East Timorese refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor. He met this week with another East Timorese political leader, Josi Ramos-Horta, about plans for the UN to take over the temporary administration of the newly independent nation. But Holbrooke may have a tough time convincing the East Timorese that he's suddenly on their side.

Holbrooke was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Ford administration's State Department, an agency largely responsible for the United States' covert aid to Indonesia and its military just before and during that country's invasion of the tiny half-island in 1975. As a State Department official who worked with Holbrooke in the 1970s recently told The New York Times' Anthony Lewis, the department's policy on East Timor "wasn't a policy of benign neglect, it was a policy of malign neglect."

As the department's ranking Pacific Asia official, Holbrooke was then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's right-hand man on matters related to Indonesia. As State Department documents have since revealed, Kissinger knew in advance that Indonesia, fortified with US-suppled weapons, intended to invade East Timor. Not only did the State Department not try to prevent the invasion, it worked after the fact to undermine the United Nations' denunciations of Indonesia for doing so. It was Holbrooke who often took on the task of justifying this policy.

A UN Security Council resolution calling for Indonesia's withdrawal was passed in 1976, with only the US and Japan abstaining. That US abstention was the work of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who at the time coincidentally had the job Holbrooke now holds: US Representative to the United Nations. As he bragged in his memoirs, Moynihan was assigned the task of undermining the UN's efforts to stop Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor: "The US Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [against Indonesia]. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

In later testimony defending US policy in East Timor, Holbrooke repeatedly played down the brutality of the Indonesian occupation. In 1979, Indonesia reported that East Timor's population had shrunk by 10 percent because of "civil war and starvation." Analysts with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International now say the population had shrunk by far more than that, and that the causes were primarily Indonesian military violence against civilians, and starvation caused by the military's use of napalm to deforest the region and poison its farmland. Holbrooke, however, told a Congressional committee that the desperate hunger in East Timor had nothing to do with the Indonesians' invasion, but was the result of years of neglect during Portuguese rule. That the starvation did not reach desperate levels until several years after the Portuguese left the colony evidently did not strike Holbrooke as contradictory. In his June 1980 testimony before the House subcommittee on foreign relations, Holbrooke dismissed Timorese refugees' accounts of ongoing brutal fighting between the Indonesian military and the resistance guerrillas, saying that the guerrillas had "ceased to pose a significant problem" by early 1979. Twenty years later, it's clear that there was never any halt in the battle.

Holbrooke has made a name for himself in recent years as a champion of the downtrodden in Bosnia and Kosovo; but back in 1980, he declared that Indonesia was "perhaps one of the greatest nations in the world."

Now Holbrooke makes his way to Dili as a white-knight representative of the United Nations, which is responsible for freeing East Timor from Indonesia. Whether he can keep a straight face while doing so remains to be seen.