Abstract: Following the resignation of Indonesian president Suharto in 1998, interim president B.J. Habibie agreed to an independence vote for East Timor, ultimately scheduled for August, 1999. Despite considerable violence, deaths, threats, and intimidation by militia groups, 79% of the Timorese people chose independence. The vote led to an attempt by the militia and army to reverse the outcome by slaughter, expulsion, and razing the land. In this paper we intensively study coverage by The Globe and Mail, Canada's newspaper of record and most prestigious national newspaper, to ascertain whether and to what extent the ongoing violence was reported, and the forthcoming violence was predictable, and hence preventable.

Perhaps the most important conclusion is that the coverage was minimal. Many of the articles were briefs consisting of a few lines. Other stories were buried inside the newspaper. The only exception occurred when the story reached the front page—on the day after the voting, when it was too late. The average reader could thus be expected to be unaware of events in East Timor. The stories included tended to describe the violence as part of an equal conflict, with atrocities on both sides, committed by “local belligerents” or “factions," even though this was clearly a reign of terror perpetrated by a large, populous country, against a tiny neighbour. The reporting relied on "authorized knowers", in this case the Indonesian authorities, with the resultant bias of official discourse. The local editorials, reliant on foreign news services, dripped with elitist paternalism, indicating that East Timor was incapable of ruling itself, with “no intellectual or political elites to run the society.” The only local writer, other than two editorialists, argued against independence for East Timor, in part because this would open the floodgates for other independence groups.

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