The Price of Freedom in East Timor
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr The Price of Freedom in East Timor Burning, looting, killing, kidnapping, and raping as they withdrew, the Indonesian military left a devastated...
...Congress faced the unpleasant consequences of its great antideficit grandstand play in 1997, when it put caps on spending and said that any increase in one place had to be offset by a cut somewhere else...
...Not tired of Clinton scandal, mind you...
...Just generally weary of Clinton's Presidency...
...That would have postponed expenditures, especially for the poor, and borrowed from the expected surplus in the following year...
...Oh yes they do, if they are experts...
...Yet Nixon campaigned in 1972 on the slogan of "Four More Years," and he was re-elected in a landslide...
...In New York preparations are in full swing for "Times Square 2000, the Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World," a 26-hour extravaganza with a $7 million budget...
...So it is dismaying when government, for reasons of laxity or corruption, fails in its fundamental duty to protect the citizenry...
...A letter to the editor in the New York Times said, "Those who place themselves in the path of peril should be made to pay for their decisions...
...The answer: In greater part the United Nations...
...The myth of allcaring government turned out in Turkey to be...
...There have been recent signs of public weariness with everything from the Y2K problem to the Russian corruption problem...
...The end may be nigh, but not that nigh...
...Nor did the UN take any step to create an international force that could intervene in the event of violence...
...In part, at least, the proliferating media create boredom by overkill, leaving us exhausted and impatient for a change of subject...
...Last May 5, when Indonesia signed a document agreeing to the referendum, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called it "an historic moment...
...For money or for votes, inspectors had turned a blind eye to the sand in the cement and the inferior iron that tempted fate in a region subject to earthquakes...
...A few weeks ago, Republican Presidential front-runner George W. Bush seemed threatened by the question of whether he had ever used cocaine...
...Arms deliveries to Indonesia were suspended, then quietly resumed...
...It hates its one constitutionally mandated job, funding the government, which has turned out to be nothing but pain...
...He was brushed aside, though, by the Armed Forces commander, General Wiranto...
...Some of the secret papers of that era have been declassified...
...What does East Timor, with its population of 800,000 prior to the expulsion, mean in a sprawling chain of 13,000 islands and more than 200 million people...
...Aerial photos showed the older buildings that still stood, and the jerry-built new structures that collapsed...
...One unearthed by Kissinger's biographer, Walter Isaacson, was the summary of a senior staff meeting that Kissinger called on his return to Washington...
...They think it starts in 2000— actually the last year of the old millennium—although it really starts in 2001...
...The UN let that go by...
...But you know how it is when you give advice gratuitously...
...Some people have great difficulty grasping this," Clarke said, but the Western calendar begins with the year one and "the next century and millennium do not begin until January 1, 2001...
...One consequence of the fatigue factor is that it makes long-range forecasting more difficult...
...But that was not the whole story...
...When you see millions and millions of people about to go off half-cocked on the millennium, you have to try to save them...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr The Price of Freedom in East Timor Burning, looting, killing, kidnapping, and raping as they withdrew, the Indonesian military left a devastated East Timor to a United Nations force headed by Australia that was slow to deploy from its beachhead for fear of casualties...
...In her syndicated newspaper column she wrote, "When midnight arrives on January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001 —experts don't quite agree...
...A few years ago the perceived failure of do-good programs led to a phenomenon called "compassion fatigue...
...He reprimanded legal adviser Monroe Leigh for bringing up the matter in a cable that would circulate to other officers...
...Time for the question: Who lost East Timor...
...It's a disgrace to treat the Secretary of State this way...
...Maybe the rules about character are changing...
...A number of religious groups are looking forward to Armageddon or the Second Coming, and a few are going to Israel for the occasion...
...Meanwhile, Western leaders fumble for ways to respond to each new explosive situation...
...Kissinger seemed less concerned about the legal question than about a possible leak...
...You're on your own...
...What possible explanation is there for it...
...Then Americans will start caring again about what their politicians are doing for them, and to them...
...California has a building code intended to help occupants escape from collapsing buildings...
...Independence leader and Nobel laureate José Romos-Horta commented, "I don't see how people around the world can trust the United Nations again...
...has a different sort of problem with the depredations of nature...
...Touching the huge Social Security surplus remains a political no-no, but there was pressure to invade the fund anyway...
...In the Russian federation, there are regional leaders pondering the advantages of getting Moscow off their backs...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton, that newcomer to politics, has hedged on the question...
...The United Nations had on hand 300 civilian police and 50 unarmed liaison officers...
...There is no mystery about either the type or the quality of construction that is required in an earthquake-prone region...
...Or, as Yeats said: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity...
...On a visit to Jakarta in December 1975, President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were informed by Indonesia's ruler, General Suharto, that the next day he would launch an invasion of the little half of an island that had only nine days before won its freedom from Portugal...
...It drew many critical responses...
...The fatigue factor is creeping into all sorts of discussions...
...The assault on East Timor had turned out to be more brutal than expected, and the Legal Office of the State Department, in a cable to the Secretary, raised the issue of whether tacit permission to use American arms was a violation of U.S...
...The year of the surplus has produced its special traumas...
...As the earthquake toll there climbed past 2,000, a government spokesman said, with exquisite understatement, that many newer buildings "may not have met strict specifications...
...Why can't the tyrants let go of the relatively small slivers of territory seeking freedom—and thereby avoid sanctions, sometimes even bombings, by those who find their actions outrageous...
...During the first three days after the referendum, hundreds were killed and 200,000 were driven from their homes, many of them forced to become virtual hostages in Indonesian West Timor...
...Traumas of Surplus Congress loves investigations like Waco, Chinese espionage and Russian corruption, which bring publicity without pain...
...The flood plain in North Carolina is called that for a good reason...
...A Christmas shutdown cost the Republicans heavily in 1996 and was not likely to happen again...
...The only consequence is to put yourself on record," he said...
...Many thousands have been slain since and today Dili, the capital of East Timor, is little more than a heap of ashes...
...The U.S...
...Betraying the Citizenry Life is a gamble at best, and we rely on government—from traffic rules to pollution controls—to minimize the risk...
...Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a well-qualified authority...
...The Y2K problem that may end up costing computer users some $500 billion to fix is something else...
...As Senator Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky...
...Another creative idea was to stop the calendar the way the House sometimes stops the clock to complete action within the allocated time...
...Unemployment and inflation kept rising, the country was torn by the Vietnam War, and the Congress was in Democratic hands...
...The laying waste of East Timor was 24 years in the making, and it started with a green light from the United States...
...As Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution put it, "The media turn momentous events into triviality or soap opera...
...For a while Clinton fatigue seemed to be competing with impeachment fatigue...
...According to a Washington Postpoll, Vice President Al Gore's candidacy suffered because 53 per cent of the voters were "just plain tired" of President Clinton...
...a myth...
...The Indonesian Army, being an anti-Communist ally, was armed with American-supplied weapons and their use against the Timorese may have violated United States law...
...so is desperation...
...Kissinger retorted, "The Israelis, when they go into Lebanon, when is the last time we protested that...
...If Kissinger has had any second thoughts about the green light he gave for the operation, he is not sharing them...
...Today we are witnessing a new factor in politics—the fatigue factor...
...And thank God say some, that President Bill Clinton vetoed the $800 billion tax cut or the situation would be even worse...
...But worst off are countries like Turkey and Taiwan —where government, sapped by corruption, betrayed its citizens...
...So, having tied itself into fiscal knots with arbitrary spending limits, the Congressional leadership found itself compelled to pass a stopgap spending bill and then negotiate with President Clinton for a way out of the mess...
...Americans who can afford to build do not like being told where they can build...
...As William Butler Yeats wrote: "Things fall apart...
...I don't like to keep repeating myself...
...Over all this hovered the specter of gridlock and government shutdown...
...The result we know...
...In Third World countries like Bangladesh, recurrently swept by typhoons and floods, government cannot afford the luxury of devising a protective strategy...
...Scandal fatigue," said NBC's Pete Williams...
...But government-subsidized insurance has paid people to rebuild again and again...
...A week later, without any definitive answers, the question seemed to wither...
...Well, the fear is that a dangerous precedent may be set...
...I heard one Congressman musing about whether the whole budget could be declared an emergency, then laughing and saying, "Nah, that wouldn't fly...
...By the time of the August 30 balloting, some 10,000 militia members and large numbers of Indonesian regular troops were in East Timor, ready to strike if the Timorese, as expected, opted for independence...
...In Turkey, where the government was traditionally called "Father State," confidence was shattered by the August 17 earthquake that took a toll of 16,000 lives —a number undoubtedly increased by shoddy construction during a building boom...
...The result was a shortage of about $30 billion to cover higher defense outlays and other increases...
...Next, Taiwan...
...Nobody but the Timorese, who had been resisting subjugation for well over two decades...
...In Indonesia, President ?. ? Habibie actually appeared ready to quit East Timor after the referendum overwhelmingly favoring independence...
...As it led the East Timorese down the path to an independence referendum, it had every reason to foresee what would follow...
...Forward funding," it was called...
...Three years ago, I wrote that many people are confused about the new millennium...
...Leigh pointed out, "The Indonesians were violating an agreement with us...
...But Jakarta crossed out the provisions for disarming terrorizing anti-independence militias and confining Indonesia's supporting soldiers to their barracks...
...Necessity is the mother of invention...
...Suharto first brought up the matter at the airport as Ford and he were leaving, Kissinger said, and his reaction was that this was merely a stage of decolonization like India's absorption of the Portuguese enclave of Goa...
...the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
...In fact, caviar, champagne and bartender shortages on December 31 are predicted nationwide...
...Like Chechnya and Dagestan—whose insurrectionists have apparently carried their war for independence to Moscow with terroristic bombings of apartment houses—East Timor is part of the disintegration that has become the hallmark of the post-Cold War world...
...Or maybe the next logical step will be fatigue fatigue...
...Both Turkey and Taiwan have officially adopted the California regulations, but no code is better than its enforcement...
...a lot of people don't listen...
...I'm exhausted myself...
...I told you to stop it (the arms sales) quietly...
...There may be problems with the developers...
...And who would have imagined that only two years after Princess Diana was killed in Paris the public would seem weary of idolizing her...
...Now a shamefaced international community has a bleeding Timor as its ward for a long time to come...
...Boredom by Overkill President Richard M. Nixon's first term was not a wonderful time for him...
...Kissinger confirmed as much when I asked him about what happened...
...What a difference a quarter-century and media saturation make...
...From Sumatra to Irian Jaya (formerly Dutch New Guinea) there are some 200 ethnic groups dreaming of being freed from the tyranny of the Javanese...
...The end of the fiscal year, September 30, found most of the budget hanging fire...
...Nobody "in their wildest dreams' could have anticipated this, said Kofi Annan...
...The projected extra $ 14 billion for fiscal 2000 was eaten up very early...
...One More Time I'll tell you one more time, and that's it...
...observed, "One thing Republicans and Democrats agree on virtually unanimously is that we have impeachment fatigue...
...He was so appalled at all the hoopla about a premature millennium that he issued a statement to counter the widespread mistake...
...Indeed what do Chechnya and Dagestan mean to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin's regime at a time when his country faces overlapping crises of insolvency and corruption...
...Emergencies are exempt from the caps, so wholly predictable expenditures, like the census, were declared emergencies...
...For the United States, whose affluence gives it a great margin for error, coming to terms with the elemental forces of nature is a policy question, to be decided by Federal and state governments...
...In areas of frequent hurricanes and floods, Americans continue to build their trophy homes on the outer banks or along picturesque rivers...
...I am amazed how many eyes glaze over when I patiently explain that in the years of our Lord there was no year zero, so 2000 is the end, not the beginning...
...But the fatigue factor is not limited to electoral politics...
...If the post-World War I League of Nations collective security system died of impotence when Italy's Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, then the post-World War II UN security system foundered on Somalia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and climactically, on East Timor...
Vol. 82 • September 1999 • No. 11
