Brutishness in Bali

Indonesia’s expulsion of three Australian and American correspondents confirms the censorship through which that nation has sought to conceal its abuses of human rights and basic freedoms.

The journalists were seeking to report President Reagan’s meeting in Bali with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Two from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. were banned, it seems, in retaliation for reports published in Australia of extraordinary accumulations of wealth by President Suharto and his family, raising the specter of the depredations of the Philippines by the Marcos family and their cronies during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos. A New York Times correspondent was deported without explanation, although there were indications that the government objected to a report she had written referring to the Australian press stories.

There is no way to judge the accuracy of the Suharto reports. Free inquiry, like the free press, is banned in Indonesia. Informed diplomats have given credit to Suharto for reform and slow progress in overcoming some of the more blatant repressions of the past, but his family also appears to have prospered enormously.

Corruption and political abuse inevitably flourish where there is not the balance of a press free to investigate issues in the public interest.