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Allan Nairn freed, deported by Indonesia
The American reporter who revealed rights abuses in East Timor, detained by Indonesian soldiers last week, is released.
By Joan Walsh
[09/20/99]

How the Rodham girl lost her accent
These days, Arkansans might have a thing or two to say to New Yorkers about the woman who would be as one among them.
By Suzi Parker
[09/20/99]

Who harassed whom?
The former chief of staff to Sen. Max Baucus claims he sexually harassed her, then fired her, but the senator tells an entirely different story -- that she was relentlessly abusing his staff.
By Susan Crabtree
[09/18/99]

Free Allan Nairn!
An American reporter faces 10 years in a brutal Indonesian jail. His crime: Refusing to turn away from acts of inhumanity. The United States must act -- now.
By Bruce Shapiro
[09/17/99]

When will the GOP court blacks?
African-Americans like George W. Bush, and they're more conservative than ever, but will Republicans be smart enough to recruit them in 2000?
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
[09/17/99]

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Even before leaving Indonesian territory, Nairn wasted no time in laying out the chain of responsibility for the past week's brutal rampage by militias backed by Indonesia. "Newspapers are still reporting this as an independent act by the militias, but it was controlled and planned and funded from the top," he said by cell phone from Jakarta's airport, still surrounded by three armed Indonesian guards and his passport in the custody of Indonesian secret police. But the concentric circles of complicity, he added, do not end with the military commander Wiranto. "President Clinton had to be dragged kicking and screaming to cut off military aid and IMF funding," Nairn said. "If he had acted even two weeks earlier, thousands of lives would have been saved."

It was while reporting on the massacre of the Timorese and the burning of their capital that Nairn was arrested and incarcerated. As recently as Friday, U.S. State Department officials expected him to face criminal charges for defying a military blacklist forbidding him from entering Indonesian territory as a journalist. Indonesia's abrupt turnaround came over the weekend. Suddenly Nairn, a freelance reporter for the Nation and Pacifica Radio who has also written about East Timor for the New Yorker, was told to pack and be ready to be deported within 24 hours.

Until then, his future looked grim: 10 years in prison for rarely prosecuted immigration offenses. He was interrogated by the Army, by regular police, by intelligence officers. He was asked to give a written statement to the Indonesian police -- the first step in the criminal prosecution process. In his statement, Nairn was defiant: "I do not think I am a threat to the Indonesian or Timorese people, but I hope that I am a threat to Gen. Wiranto," he wrote.

He named the names of those officers he holds responsible for the current terror in East Timor: "General Wiranto, and Generals Bambang, Zacky, Syafei, Kiki." And he threw in, for good measure, that the inquiry into accountability for the Timorese massacres proposed by U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson ought also include foreign officials who provided weapons or logistical support to Indonesia during its brutal occupation.

What convinced the Indonesians to reverse themselves just 24 hours later and release such a relentless critic is a matter for speculation, even by U.S. diplomats in Jakarta. Informed U.S. officials believe that from the moment of his arrest there was contention among the country's top leadership over what to do with the troublesome journalist, whose eyewitness account of a 1991 massacre at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili once convinced Congress to cut off much of Indonesia's U.S. military assistance. Military officials and some regional authorities in East Timor wanted to throw him in prison, while in Jakarta Justice Minister Muladi reportedly favored a swift deportation.

But the key element was a groundswell of support for Nairn late last week, which astonished the Indonesians and State Department alike. Nairn reports that even to his low-level immigration-service custodians in Kupang, word trickled down that a United States senator had phoned the minister of justice on his behalf. Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta, leader of East Timor's political independence movement, concluded a meeting on Friday with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, supposed to be devoted to the U.N. deployment, by making a personal plea on Nairn's behalf. According to one individual present, he called Nairn "one of the saviors of my people."

Next page | Exhibit A in the case against Indonesia