• The U.S. armed the Indonesian military
  in its invasion of East Timor, where it massacred
  200,000 inhabitants, or one-third of its population
  in 1975. The U.N. has never formally recognized
  Indonesia's annexation of East Timor.

In the aftermath of an overwhelming August 30th vote by the people of East Timor to declare their independence from Indonesia, intense violence engulfed this small nation of 800,000. Militia groups, backed by the Indonesian Army, terrorized civilians and burned cities in a slaughter estimated to have claimed up to 10,000 lives. Several hundred thousand Timorese have fled their homes and are now hiding in the mountains, or are forced into exile in Indonesian-controlled West Timor. Although the government of Indonesian president B.J. Habibie has agreed to the deployment of an Australian-led U.N. peacekeeping force, the violence continues.

For more than 30 years, the US. has maintained close ties with the Indonesian military, supporting and arming Jakarta as it invaded East Timor in 1975 and carried out a genocide there which killed 200,000 people, approximately one-third of its population. Even as the world press was reporting the violence that preceded and followed the August U.N.-supervised referendum in East Timor, little was mentioned in the U.S. media about the United States' historic role in backing Indonesia's brutal military.

Between the Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Seth Ackerman, media analyst with the New York City-based group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who examines what the U.S. press corps has left out of their coverage of the latest carnage in East Timor.

Seth Ackerman: The East Timor story is something difficult to understand unless you understand the the United States's role. In the American media's recent coverage of East Timor, there is usually a sentence or paragraph of background which says that Indonesia invaded the island in 1975, but doesn't give any indication of the crucial U.S. role in which there was massive amounts of support, both diplomatic and direct military aid. And it's kind of a shocking commentary on what the priorities of what American journalists are.

If you look at what the U.S. actually did to support that invasion, it's not something you'd have to go digging for. Henry Kissinger and President Ford visited Jakarta and met with Suharto, the leader of Indonesia at the time that Indonesia invaded East Timor, literally hours before the invasion was launched. A state department official told an Australian newspaper one month after the invasion that the United States was basically condoning the incursion -- those were his words. And, of course, massive amounts of military aid to the Indonesian military were used in putting down the resistance to the invasion. And that counterinsurgency cost an incredible amount of Timorese lives.  Two hundred thousand people were killed out of a small population of maybe 600,000 people. So you have one of these quasi-genocidal conditions, one of the most major episodes of mass killing in post-World War II world history, with the constant support of the United States.

Of course, this very, very important role the United States played in this incredibly bloody and brutal episode of history are gone. East Timor's now finally become a fairly big story, or at least a middling size story, and it's almost impossible to find even a reference to the fact that the United States was supporting this invasion.

Between the Lines: I wonder if you would talk about the quality of the investigative reporting that's been done regarding the complicity of the Indonesian military in the carnage that took place in East Timor at the hands of the Indonesian army-trained and supplied militia groups.

Seth Ackerman: There's Allan Nairn, an absolutely first-rate investigative journalist who's traveled and reported from East Timor several times over the years. In fact his life was repeatedly threatened by the Indonesian military and more recently by the Timorese pro-Jakarta militias, which are backed and coordinated by the military. He was the last Western journalist to leave East Timor. He has released some pretty impressive documentation showing the links between the Indonesian military and the militias, which previously had been often referred to in the media and by officials as militias that are kind of just acting autonomously -- pro-Jakarta, pro-Indonesia Timorese who had "happened" to organize themselves into militias.

He showed that these militias are essentially proxies of the Indonesian military, which very closely coordinates their activity. And I believe Nairn got a hold of some tapes of intercepted radio transmissions between Indonesian military officials and militia, where military officials were basically telling the militias what to do, where to go, who to kill, where to distribute supplies and so on. Very incriminating evidence. So far, I haven't seen any pick up of Allan Nairn's work in the mainstream media.

There could be some, but certainly, the New York Times has absolutely failed to pick that up. It's really only Allan Nairn who cares very deeply about East Timor; he has for many years; few have been willing to risk their lives to cover a story "no one cares about." It's only Nairn who has been personally threatened by the Indonesian military, who got into East Timor without using his real name, who's been told by diplomats that the militias were looking for him in Dili. Only Allan Nairn has remained in Timor to do some reporting. In that, he's pretty unique among American journalists.

Allan Nairn was the last U.S. journalists to report from East Timor during the carnage. He was arrested by the Indonesian military in mid September and deported to Singapore.  He has recently testified before Congress about his investigation into the coordination between militia groups, the Indonesian military and U.S. military support for Jakarta.

To find out how you can act locally on this issue, call the New York-based media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) at (212) 633-6700, or visit their Web site at www.fair.org.  For information on grassroots organizing on East Timor, call East Timor Action Network's Washington D.C. office: (202) 544-6176 , or the outreach coordinator at  (718) 596-7668. ETAN's web site is www.etan.org.