Precedence: bulk
FAIR/Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
September 1, 1999
ACTION ALERT:
U.S. ROLE MISSING FROM EAST TIMOR COVERAGE
The ongoing story of East Timor's referendum on independence has
received a moderate amount of coverage in the mainstream media. But news
outlets have frequently failed to put the Timor story in a full and accurate
context.
For example, in reports from East Timor's capital, the Associated
Press and some other news outlets continue to use the dateline "Dili,
Indonesia," implying that Indonesia has a legitimate claim over East Timor.
This formulation is comparable to a dateline of "Kuwait City, Iraq" in the
months following Iraq's illegal annexation of Kuwait. The Washington Post
(8/31/99) reported that Timorese were voting on "whether to remain a part of
Indonesia."
More importantly, many stories fail to note two crucial facts about
East Timor's nearly 25-year struggle against Indonesian occupation. First,
the Indonesian occupation has been extraordinarily bloody, resulting in the
deaths of more than 200,000 Timorese, out of a pre-invasion population of
approximately 600,000. A recent AP story noted that an "estimated 2,000
Indonesian troops have died fighting separatist guerrillas since Indonesia
invaded East Timor in 1975," but failed to note the massive numbers of
Timorese who have perished.
Others seemed to confuse the deaths caused by the occupation with
those caused by the resistance movement. ABC News' Charles Gibson said that
"It's been an extraordinary violent independence movement there with
hundreds of thousands of people killed" (Good Morning America, 8/31/99).
Secondly, news consumers are not informed that the U.S. backed
Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger visited the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in December
1975, just before the invasion was launched, where they were told of
Suharto's plans to attack the island (Washington Post, 11/9/79).
The following month, a State Department official told a major
Australian newspaper (The Australian, 1/22/76) that "in terms of the
bilateral relations between the U.S. and Indonesia, we are more or less
condoning the incursion into East Timor. The United States wants to keep its
relations with Indonesia close and friendly. We regard Indonesia as a
friendly, non-aligned nation--a nation we do a lot of business with."
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations wrote in his memoirs (A Dangerous Place) that "the Department
of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in
whatever measures it undertook" to reverse the invasion. "This task was
given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success,"
Moynihan reported.
Finally, according to the State Department, 90 percent of the
weapons used in the invasion came from the United States. Two years later,
as the atrocities in East Timor were reaching a peak, President Jimmy Carter
authorized an addition $112 million in weapons sales to Indonesia.***
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ACTION: Please call on local and national news outlets to stop treating East
Timor as a legitimate part of Indonesia. And ask them to include the facts
about the consequences of the Indonesian invasion, as well as the role the
U.S. has played in supporting the illegal occupation.
To contact the Associated Press, write to:
Associated Press
Thomas Kent-- International Editor
(212) 621-1655
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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SiaR WEBSITE: http://apchr.murdoch.edu.au/minihub/siarlist/maillist.html
