UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK

Joss Ramos-Horta (East Timor Representative, UN)
This Council must consider Indonesian aggression against East Timor as the main issue of the discussion. (Voice under: The General Assembly in its resolution 3845 and the Security Council have called on the government of Indonesia to withdraw without delay all its forces from the territory. Indonesia's invasion of East Timor was against the United Nations Charter and international law.)

Chomsky (voice over)
When the Indonesians invaded, the UN reacted as it always does, calling for sanctions and condemnation and so on. Various watered-down resolutions were passed but the US was very clearly not going to allow anything to work.

DARKROOM

Elaine Briere
So the Timorese were fleeing into the jungle by the thousands. By late 1977-78 Indonesia set up "receiving centers" for those Timorese who came out of the jungle waving white flags. Those the Indonesians thought were more educated or who were suspected of belonging to Fretilin or other opposition parties were immediately killed. They took women aside and flew them off to Dili in helicopters for use by the Indonesian soldiers. They killed children, and babies. But in those days, their main strategy and their main weapon was starvation.

MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
By 1978 it was approaching really genocidal levels. The church and other sources estimated about two hundred thousand people killed.

The U.S. backed it all the way. The U.S. provided ninety percent of the arms. Right after the invasion arms shipments were stepped up. When the Indonesians actually began to run out of arms in 1978, the Carter administration moved in and increased arms sales. Other western countries did the same. Canada, England, Holland, everybody who could make a buck was in there trying to make sure they could kill more Timorese.

There is no Western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them. Nothing could show it more clearly than this case.

Chomsky
It wasn't that nobody had ever heard of East Timor; crucial to remember that there was plenty of coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere before the invasion.

The reason was that there was concern at the time over the breakup of the Portuguese empire and what that would mean. There was a fear that it would lead to independence or Russian influence or whatever. After the Indonesians invaded the coverage dropped. There was some, but it was strictly from the point of view of the State Department and Indonesian generals. It was never a Timorese refugee.

As the atrocities reached their maximum peak in 1978 when it really was becoming genocidal, coverage dropped to zero in the United States and Canada, the two countries I've looked at closely. Literally dropped to zero.

All this was going on at exactly the same time as the great protest of outrage over Cambodia. The level of atrocities was comparable-in relative terms it was probably considerably higher in Timor.

It turns out that right in Cambodia in the preceding years, 1973-1975, there was also a comparable atrocity for which we were responsible.

MIT STUDIO, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
The major U.S. attack against Cambodia started with the bombings of the early 1970s. They reached a peak in 1973 and continued up to 1975. They were directed against inner Cambodia. Very little is known about them because the media wanted it to be secret. They knew it was going on they just didn't want to know what was happening. The CIA estimates about six hundred thousand killed during that five-year period which is mostly either U.S. bombing or a U.S.-sponsored war. So that's pretty significant killing. Also the conditions in which it left Cambodia were such that high U.S. officials predicted that about a million people would die in the aftermath just from hunger and disease because of the wreckage of the country.

There's also pretty good evidence from U.S. government sources and scholarly sources that the intense bombardment was a significant force-maybe a critical force-in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge, who before that were a pretty marginal element. Well that's just the wrong story.

MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
After 1975, atrocities continued and that became the right story, because now they are being carried out by the bad guys. Well, it was bad enough, in fact current estimates are that -- well, you know, they vary. I mean, the CIA claim fifty to a hundred thousand people killed and maybe another million or so who died one way or another. Michael Vickery is the one person who has given a really close detailed analysis. His figure is maybe seven hundred fifty thousand deaths above the normal. Others, like Ben Kiernan, suggest higher figures but so far without a detailed analysis. Anyway, it was terrible, no doubt about it.

Although the atrocities -- the real atrocities -- were bad enough, they weren't quite good enough for the purposes needed.

Within a few weeks after the Khmer Rouge takeover, The New York Times was already accusing them of genocide. At that point maybe a couple of hundred or maybe a few thousand people had been killed. And from then on it was a drum beat, a chorus of genocide.

The big best-seller on Cambodia, on Pol Pot, is called Murder in a Gentle Land. Up until April 17, 1975, it was a gentle land of peaceful smiling people and after that some horrible holocaust took place.

Very quickly, a figure of two million killed was hit upon. In fact, what was claimed was the Khmer Rouge boast of having murdered two million people. The facts were very dramatic. In the case of atrocities committed by the official enemy, extraordinary show of outrage, exaggeration, no evidence required, faked photographs were fine, anything goes.

MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
Also a vast amount of lying. I mean an amount of lying that would have made Stalin cringe, in fact. It was fraudulent. We know that it was fraudulent by looking at the response to comparable atrocities for which the United States was responsible.

Chomsky
Early seventies Cambodia, Timor, are two very closely paired examples. Well, the media response was quite dramatic.

PANEL DISCUSSION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Massachusetts
At an international conference entitled "Anticommunism and the US: History and Consequences," November 11-13, 1988, sponsored by the Institute of Media Analysis, Inc.

Karl E. Meyer (editorial writer, The New York Times)
Back in 1980 I taught a course at Tufts University. Well, Chomsky came around to this class. He made a very powerful case that the press underplayed the fact that the Indonesian government annexed this former Portuguese colony in 1975. And that if you compare it for example with Cambodia, where there was an acreage of things, that this was a Communist atrocity whereas the other was not a Communist atrocity. Well, I got quite interested in this and went to talk to the then deputy foreign editor of the Times.

And I said, "You know we've had very poor coverage on this," and he said "You know, you're absolutely right, there are a dozen atrocities around the world that we don't cover; this is one, for various reasons." So I took it up.

MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC

Arnold Kohen (journalist)
I was working as a reporter and writer for a small alternative radio program in upstate New York and we received audiotapes of interviews with Timorese leaders, and we were quite surprised, given the level of American involvement, that there was not more coverage -- indeed, practically any coverage -- of the large-scale Indonesian killing in the mainstream American media. We formed a small group of people to try to monitor this situation and see what we could do over time to alert public opinion to what was actually happening in East Timor.

MIT OFFICE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
There were literally about half a dozen people who simply dedicated themselves with great commitment to getting this story to break through. They reached a couple of people in Congress. They got to me, for example, and I was able to testify at the UN and write some things and they kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. Whatever is known about the subject mainly comes -- essentially comes from their work. There's not much else.

PANELDICUSSION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Karl E. Meyer
I wrote first an editorial called "An Unjust War in East Timor." It had a map and it said exactly what had happened. We then ran a dozen other editorials on it. They were read, they were entered in the congressional record and several congressmen then took up the cause, and then something was done in Congress as a result of this.

MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC

Arnold Kohen
The fact that the editorial page of The New York Times on Christmas Eve published that editorial put our work on a very different level. And it gave a great deal of legitimacy to something that we were trying to advance for a long time, and that was the idea and the reality that a major tragedy was unfolding in East Timor.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Karl E. Meyer
If one takes literally the various theories that Professor Chomsky puts out one would feel that there is a tacit conspiracy between the establishment press and the government in Washington to focus on certain things and ignore certain things. So that if we broke the rules we would instantly get a reaction -- a sharp reaction -- from the overlords in Washington, [who] would say, "Hey what are you doing, speaking up on East Timor? We're trying to keep that quiet." We didn't hear a thing. What we did hear -- and this was quite interesting -- is that there was a guy named Arnold Kohen and he became a one-person lobby.

MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC

Arnold Kohen
Well, you know, I appreciate the nice things that Karl Meyer said about me in his interview but I object to the notion that a one-man lobby was formed or anything like that. I think that if there weren't a large network composed of the American Catholic Bishops Conference, composed of other church groups, composed of human rights groups, composed of simply concerned citizens and others and a network of concern within the news media, I think it would have been impossible to do anything at all at any time and it certainly would have been impossible to sustain things for as long as they have been sustained.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Karl E. Meyer
Professor Chomsky and a lot of people who engage in this kind of press analysis have one thing in common. Most of them have never worked for a newspaper, many of them know very little about how newspapers work.

When Chomsky came around he had with him a file of all the coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other papers of East Timor. And he would go to the meticulous degree that if, for example, the London Times had a piece on East Timor and then it appeared in The New York Times that if a paragraph was cut out he'd compare and he'd say, "Look, this key paragraph, right near the end, which is really what tells the whole story, was left out of The New York Times version of the London Times thing."

MIT OFFICE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
There was a story in the London Times which was pretty accurate. The New York Times revised it radically. They didn't just leave a paragraph out, they revised it and gave it a totally different cast. It was then picked up by Newsweek, giving it The New York Times cast. It ended up being a whitewash, whereas the original was an atrocity story.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PANEL DISCUSSION

Karl E. Meyer
So I said to Chomsky at the time, I said, "Well it may be that you're misinterpreting ignorance, haste, deadline pressure, etc., for some kind of determined effort to suppress an element of the story."

He said, "Well, if it happened once or twice or three times I might agree with you, but if it happens a dozen times, Mr. Meyer, I think there's something else at work."

MIT OFFICE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
And it's not a matter of it happening one time two times , five times, a hundred times, it happened all the time.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Karl E. Meyer
I said, "Professor Chomsky, having been in this business, it happens a dozen times... these are very imperfect institutions."

MIT OFFICE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
When it did give coverage it was from the point of view of -- it was a whitewash of the United States. Now, you know, that's not an error. That's systematic, consistent behavior -- in this case without even any exception.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Karl E. Meyer
This is a much more subtle process than you get in the kind of sledge-hammer rhetoric of the people that make an A to B equation between what the government does, what people think and what newspapers say, that sometimes what the Times does can make enormous difference and other times it has no influence whatsoever.

[...]

MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
I mean this is way beyond just demonstrating the subservience of the media to power. I mean, they have real complicity in genocide in this case. The reason that the atrocities can go on is because nobody knows about them. If anyone knew about them there would be protests and pressures to stop them. So therefore by suppressing the facts, the media are making a major contribution to some of the -- probably the worst act of genocide since the Holocaust .

[...]

MIT, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Chomsky
These are the things to keep in mind. These are not just academic exercises. We're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the eighteenth century or something like that. We're dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in, we as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and are responsible for, and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system.