The right discovers East Timor.

• Author: Press, Eyal
• Position: Concern for Timorese people used as a political weapon - Cover Story

Never underestimate the power of partisanship to alter the consciousness of America's pundits and policymakers. In the final months of 1996, soon after the Clinton-Riady-Lippo scandal broke, rightwingers throughout the media and political establishment suddenly became champions of human rights for the people of East Timor, whose plight had until then gone unnoticed in both official Washington and among the punditocracy. For some, this meant breaking twenty years of silence on the subject; for others, it required a dose of amnesia to block out their own complicity.

Former Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist William Safire may have experienced the greatest epiphany On October 7, 1996, in his first-ever Times column on the subject, Safire described East Timor as "a human-rights hellhole," this in the context of discussing Webster Hubbell's visit to the island and the Clinton Administration's financial ties to James and Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group.

"The Riadys gained much face in Indonesia in 1993, helping the Clinton Administration lose interest in labor abuses in East Timor," Safire fumed. Having, like so many others, ignored the issue for more than two decades, the normally well-versed Safire got the facts wrong. The "labor abuses" condoned by the Clinton Administration had been taking place in Indonesia, not East Timor (the latter is a prison-island that barely has a labor market). Safire also referred to "Indonesia's East Timor"--an unfortunate use of the possessive by the master linguist and wordsmith, who may not be aware that Indonesia's annexation of the island is illegal and still not recognized by the United Nations.

In the weeks that followed, Safire turned again and again to the human-rights situation in Indonesia, penning columns on October 14, October 17, and November 28, and pointing once more to "labor abuses in East Timor."

For all his indignation, the pundit has yet to connect East Timor's deplorable condition to his friend and one-time colleague Henry Kissinger, who back in 1975 gave Indonesia U.S. permission to invade East Timor, and continues to nurture a relationship with the Suharto dictatorship earning hundreds of thousands as a consultant to U.S. corporations with interests in the country. He also regularly visits Indonesia.

Another sudden convert to East Timor's cause was that consummate friend of democracy, Oliver North. On his own radio program and on a CNN panel hosted by Larry King, North scolded...