Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [204]
The nature of the Western agony over Cambodia during phase II of the genocide, as a sociocultural phenomenon, becomes clarified further when we compare it to the reaction to comparable and simultaneous atrocities in Timor. There, as in phase I of the Cambodia genocide, the United States bore primary responsibility and could have acted to reduce or terminate the atrocities. In contrast, in Cambodia under DK rule, where the blame could be placed on the official enemy, nothing at all could be done, a point that was stressed by government experts when George McGovern called for international intervention in August 1978, eliciting much media ridicule.85 Neither McGovern nor anyone else recommended such intervention against the United States during phase I of the genocide, or against Indonesia and the United States during the Timor atrocities, to which the United States (and, to a much lesser extent, other powers) lent material and diplomatic support, just as there has been no call for intervention as the armies of El Salvador and Guatemala proceeded to slaughter their own populations with enthusiastic U.S. support in the early 1980s.
The comparison between Timor and phase II in Cambodia was particularly striking, and was occasionally noted after the fact. The excuses now produced for this refusal to report what was happening in Timor, or to protest these atrocities or act to stop them, are instructive in the present context. Thus, William Shawcross rejects the obvious interpretation of the comparative response to Timor and Cambodia in favor of a “more structurally serious explanation”: “a comparative lack of sources” and lack of access to refugees.86 Lisbon is a two-hour flight from London, and even Australia is not notably harder to reach than the Thai-Cambodia border, but the many Timorese refugees in Lisbon and Australia were ignored by the media, which preferred “facts” offered by the State Department and Indonesian generals. Similarly, the media ignored readily available refugee studies from sources at least as credible as those used as the basis for the ideologically serviceable outrage over the Khmer Rouge, and disregarded highly credible witnesses who reached New York and Washington along with additional evidence from church sources and others. The coverage of Timor actually declined sharply as massacres increased with mounting U.S. support. The real and “structurally serious” reason for this difference in scope and character of coverage is not difficult to discern (see chapter 1), although not very comfortable for Western opinion, and becomes still more obvious when a broader range of cases is considered that illustrate the same conclusions.87
6.2.7. PHASE III IN INDOCHINA: CAMBODIA AND THE BLEEDING OF VIETNAM
As we write in 1987, Western moralists remain silent as their governments provide the means for Indonesia to continue its campaign of terror and repression in Timor. Meanwhile, the United States backs the DK coalition, largely based on the Khmer Rouge, because of its “continuity” with the Pol Pot regime, so the State Department informed Congress in 1982. The reason for this differential reaction to the Fretilin guerrillas resisting Indonesian aggression in Timor, and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas attacking Cambodia from Thai bases, is also explained by the State Department: the Khmer Rouge-based coalition is “unquestionably” more representative of the people of Cambodia than Fretilin is of the Timorese.88 There is, therefore, no need to puzzle over the apparent inconsistency during the late 1970s in U.S. attitudes toward Pol Pot and the Indonesian generals: the former, the object of hatred and contempt for the massacres in Cambodia under his rule during phase II; the latter, our friends whom we cheerfully supplied and supported as they conducted comparable