Even in a world with Rwanda and Bosnia, the cruelty at this place has been horrifying: an invasion by a foreign army that has killed as much as a third of the population.
The place is East Timor, the killers the government and army of Indonesia. East Timor is half of an island 300 miles north of Australia, so remote that Indonesia has been largely successful in hiding from the world the slaughter and repression it has carried out since occupying the territory in 1975.The shroud covering the occupation was pierced in 1991, when Indonesian soldiers fired into a crowd of mourners at a cemetery, killing more than 100. An American was there and wrote about the massacre, and a Briton filmed parts of it.
Now we have powerful new evidence of the horror in East Timor. John Pilger, an Australian reporter, and two others went in incognito and used hidden cameras. British Independent Television has shown their film, "Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy."
The film includes firsthand descriptions, ghastly in their detail, of the mass killing of Timorese civilians. It also has much new material on the role of Britain, Australia and the United States in aiding Indonesia and condoning the invasion.
President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Indonesia for several days just before the invasion. Philip Liechty, a CIA official there at the time, says in the film that he is sure President Suharto "was explicitly given the green light to do what he did."
The Pilger film quotes Kissinger as telling a staff meeting: "Can't we construe a communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" The Timorese, 90 percent of them Roman Catholics, had shown no sympathy for communism. They just wanted independence for their country.
Today, nearly 20 years after the invasion, the Suharto government continues to make strenuous efforts to prevent international discussion of East Timor.
But more evidence of continuing repression is emerging. Some of it comes from Western journalists who have been allowed into East Timor this year on tours that were carefully controlled but that nevertheless let reality slip through from time to time.
The Economist magazine had a writer there with others on a guided tour in April. He wrote that they were treated to robotic praise of Indonesia but that discontent was evident. The Indonesian-appointed governor, Abilio Soares, admitted to them that between 100,000 and 200,000 Timorese had died as a result of the war. The pre-war population was 688,000.
The world is said to be suffering from compassion fatigue these days. A place as small and distant as East Timor is going to have a hard time persuading major governments to support its people's desire for the right to express their views in a referendum on how they should be governed.
But President Clinton will have an opportunity to say a private word to Suharto this fall, when he is scheduled to go to Indonesia for a summit meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He could at least make clear American disapproval of the repression in East Timor.
And the press should continue to bring the world's attention to the reality of East Timor. In that regard it is shameful that "Death of a Nation," which has been seen in Britain and 35 other countries, has not yet found an outlet on American television.