EYE ON ETHICS

Mr. Bayuni is chief editor of The Jakarta Post.

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Covering a war or conflict is never easy. Because of lack of access to the front lines, journalists will be the first to admit the lack of objectivity in their coverage, unless they can tell the story from both sides of the trenches.

Lack of objectivity is thus a perennial ethical issue, but is probably the least of the problems of journalists covering conflict. As the war drags on, the media have a tendency to start oversimplifying the conflict, reducing it to a simple black and white issue. And yet neither a war nor a conflict is ever simple, and therefore the solution is likely to be far more complex than what the media would have us believe.

Thanks to Peace Journalism, which emphasizes the ethical imperatives of neutrality and keeping the welfare of those most affected in mind, journalists can do a much better job in covering conflicts, and even help speed up their end and even the search for lasting solutions. Peace Journalism, in contrast to traditional “War Journalism”, requires journalists to undertake conflict analysis, understand the origins of the conflict, and help find ways of ending it. This in furtherance of the need to focus on the welfare of those most affected by the conflict.

Covering East Timor (now renamed Timor Leste) when it was under Indonesian military occupation between 1975 and 1999 was very challenging in this respect. There was the tight censorship by the government for much of the occupation, certainly until the early 1990s. Only after the massacre by the Indonesian military in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in November 1991 did East Timor start getting the world attention it deserved. Stories of the brutal occupation began to emerge despite military control.

But most international media coverage of East Timor by the 1990s was devoid of historical perspective, let alone an analysis of the conflict and a focus on the ordinary people most affected by the conflict. Their only point of reference was the 1991 massacre. Few reports, if any, bothered to look back to 1975 and beyond to understand why the Indonesian military was in East Timor in the first place.

The 1990s was the time when the United States, no longer inhibited by the cold war, put human rights at the forefront of its foreign policy. The story of East Timor, in international media coverage, is the story of endless human rights violations. The biggest violation was of course the denial of the East Timorese trheir right to self-determination. Thus, the only agenda in East Timor, as far as the international media and public opinion is concerned, was a UN-organized plebiscite in which the Timorese could vote independence or to join Indonesia.

Little did the media know that Indonesia, Australia and Portugal were working on another option: To give sweeping autonomy to East Timor for 10 years, and if this doesn’t work, separation, which would therefore make East Timor independence inevitable. This approach would have the advantage of allowing East Timorese to experience nationhood for 10 years. They would have been much better prepared for independence than they are today. Some of the violence that occurred during the separation, and that continues to beset Timor Leste today, could probably have been avoided.

A quick look at the origins of the conflict would have told us that the 1975 invasion of East Timor was part of the cold war conflict, and Indonesian soldiers moved in with tacit approval from the United States and Australia. Farther analysis of East Timor politics would have told us that East Timor was a divided society, and that a sizable part of the East Timorese people wanted to be part of Indonesia under either a special autonomy arrangement, or as a full fledge member of the republic. Thus to portray the conflict as a war between giant Indonesia and tiny East Timor, between the mighty Indonesian Military and the Fretilin separatist movement, or worse, between Muslim Indonesia and Christian East Timor, is an oversimplification that served no purpose but to worsen the conflict.

The media played a role in driving the East Timor agenda into the plebiscite, with all its consequences since then until today, and for ignoring other options that were on the table. But around this time, because of the recurrent human rights violations committed by Indonesia in East Timor, the Indonesian government had lost all credibility in the eyes of the public and the international media. No matter how sensible and genuine the offer for special autonomy, there was little trust for Indonesia. Independence, and freeing East Timor from Indonesian hands completely, was seen as the only option.

It is anybody’s guess, as well as it is purely academic, whether the ethical imperatives that Peace Journalism reminds us the media must always keep in mind, most specially that of putting the welfare of those most affected in mind first, would have prevented the 1999 mayhem and the subsequent violence when East Timor became independent.