A clumsy attempt to hide the past - We're Left, They're Wrong

The United States has an ample supply of almost every commodity we could possibly need - petroleum, food, steel and antibiotics come to mind. The one commodity that we are lacking, the one that we need most in times like these, is criticism and debate. Despite the availability of news 24 hours a day from many different sources, differing opinions seem harder and harder to find these days. In large part, this is due to the fear of being labeled as anti-American by the rabid (and ascendant) hard right, which has made life very difficult for dissenting voices such as Bill Maher, Susan Sontag and former News-Letter Editor-in-Chief, Tom Gutting.

In addition to the threat of a pile-on by the jingoist factions of the press such as The New York Post and presidential proxies such as press secretary Ari Fleischer, any would-be critic is stifled by a lack of good information. The President holds press conferences in which he admits to no American weakness and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells us that the public will know little about large parts of the military action, even if successful. How can one analyze and criticize government actions if those actions are not made public?

Enter Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol. 26, a plain-looking volume sitting in the stacks of Hopkins' own SAIS library in Washington, D.C.

If the CIA had its way, this volume would not be available to anyone with a J-Card, as it is now, since it contains information that implicates the government in atrocities that took place in Indonesia during the mid-1960s.

According to F.R.U.S. Vol. 26, U.S. officials provided the Indonesian army with the names of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), over 100,000 of whom were assassinated in a purge of the PKI. Also documented is the suggestion by the then U.S. ambassador recommending the payment of about $1.1 million to a death squad backed by the Indonesian army.

Following the events of 1965-1966, the dictator Suharto came to power, ushering in three decades of economic growth coupled with crony capitalism, rampant corruption and intimidation of dissenters that ended in 1997 with bloody riots in which ethnic Chinese were scapegoated for economic troubles related to the region-wide economic crisis.

The story of the 1965 coup and related turbulence is told in F.R.U.S. Vol. 26, documented in telegrams, telegraphs and other communications between high officials in the Johnson administration.

What does all this have to do with the stifling of dissent through control of information?

Over the summer, the State Department wanted the text, printed by the Government Printing Office and received by the SAIS library in May, to be revoked. Apparently, the volume was printed and distributed by accident, after the CIA and the State Department agreed to defer its release. The reason? I speculate that the government wanted to cozy up to Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had just taken power in Indonesia after months of unrest. Fortunately for the public, the volume was already ensconced in libraries (including the SAIS library) and on the Internet, where it is available for viewing at http://www.nsarchive.org/.

After all, releasing this sort of damning information is not good for building a mutually-trusting relationship between the two countries, is it?

The same idiocy that caused the State Department to think it could recall F.R.U.S. Vol. 26 is related to the idiocy that led those same government officials to believe that withholding the information it contains would make what they did 35 years prior go away. The massacre of over 100,000 people is remembered every day by those who lost friends and relatives to the U.S.-assisted purge.

The erasing of history was a tactic used by Stalin. Faces were cut out of group portraits, documents were rounded up and destroyed and the physical documentation of people's existence was carefully cut out of official records. While not as bald-faced, the impulses that led to both are similar. On a related note, there is a F.R.U.S. volume that details goings on in Greece and Turkey after World War II that is still sitting in GPO warehouses, prevented from being distributed.

Now, what does this have to do with the War on Terrorism? Eventually, the situation in Afghanistan will change. It is likely that the Northern Alliance, with American support, will take Kabul and attempt to set up a government. What kind of government will be set up is a matter of some importance. It is crucial to note that the differences between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban are more tribal than ideological, and if we expect a liberal regime friendly to the North to grow organically out of the ashes of two decades of war, we will be very disappointed.

The American government needs to know that if it supports the Northern Alliance in atrocities and purges like the ones in Indonesia, the refuge of secrecy will not shelter them for long from public scrutiny.