COLUMN LEFT : Can 50 More Deaths Change U.S. Hypocrisy? : The occupied people of East Timor cry out again for U.S. censure of Indonesia.

The Indonesian soldiers who shot and killed at least 50 people Tuesday morning in East Timor’s capital of Dili probably spared the lives of two journalists at the head of the procession because they suddenly realized that the Westerners they were smashing with their rifle butts were American.

As Amy Goodman of Pacifica-WBAI told the story from her hospital bed in Guam, she and Allan Nairn of the New Yorker had placed themselves at the front of the crowd of mourners for a Timorese youth killed by the Indonesians a week earlier, hoping that their prominence might deter the soldiers from violence. They were mistaken.

Goodman was battered to the ground, kicked and pounded with rifle butts. Nairn threw himself over her to protect her from further beating. As the blows rained down on him, they cried out that they were Americans. Eventually the blows stopped but then they heard screams and shots as soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on the unarmed crowd, a thousand or so in number. The last sight Goodman can remember is of an old man in a ditch being savagely beaten.

As they recovered in Guam, the two had the pleasure of hearing news bulletins announcing that Secretary of State James A. Baker III was urging the Chinese to respect democracy and human rights. Back in Washington, President Bush was echoing such sentiments.

There can be few places in the world more revelatory of hypocrisy and the double standard, as exercised by the United States, than East Timor. Back in 1975, Portugal was preparing to quit this colony 400 miles northwest across the Timor Sea from Darwin, Australia. But even as the Portuguese packed their bags, Indonesian soldiers were infiltrating the territory. In the desperate hope of gaining the attention of the United Nations, the East Timorese made a unilateral declaration of independence.

Horrifying violence ensued. In their forcible takeover, the Indonesians more than decimated the native population of 700,000. Four years later, State Department officials were privately making estimates of between 100,000 and 200,000 dead. Since then, year after year, Amnesty International has chronicled torture and detentions without trial. In March, Hugh O’Shaughnessy of the London Observer reported Indonesian jailers mutilating their captives with razor blades.

Indonesia has no legal claim on East Timor. In the early 1960s, President Sukarno of Indonesia publicly conceded as much. But once the United States gave its approval to the generals who seized power in Indonesia in 1965, killing at least 500,000 supposed Communists, what happened in East Timor was probably inevitable. When President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger visited Jakarta on Dec. 6, 1975, and were told by their Indonesian hosts of plans to invade East Timor the very next day, they raised no protest. Kissinger announced in the invasion’s aftermath that “we understand Indonesia’s position.” Indeed, as emerged later in congressional testimony, roughly 90% of the arms available to Indonesia came from the United States.

The parallels with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait are pretty exact, though the death toll in East Timor was at least 20 times worse. Indonesia calls East Timor its 27th province, just as Iraq named Kuwait its 19th. To this day the United Nations maintains East Timor on its list of non-self-governing territories; that is, a colonial territory entitled to self-determination, illegally occupied by Indonesia. Even the United States, which gave the nod to the seizure and occupation when they occurred, refuses to recognize the lawfulness of Indonesia’s takeover of East Timor.

But, unlike the case of Kuwait, there has been no fierce talk by U.S. presidents of the rape of East Timor, of the rights of a beleaguered people. Nor have U.S. officials made haste to organize United Nations sanctions against Indonesia nor, for that matter, to threaten to bomb Jakarta. The reason is not hard to find. The Indonesian junta has been a Cold War ally and Indonesia is a rich market.

When the East Timorese listened to Bush’s pledges to free Kuwait, they did so with hope in their hearts. Maybe their turn would come at last, and Bush would recognize their rights, threaten sanctions, block the billions in soft loans that Indonesia gets from the West.

Nothing happened. But maybe Tuesday’s massacre in Dili will make a difference, and a President blustering at the Chinese will have the moral consistency to organize the dispatch of U.N. observers to East Timor, along with pressure on Indonesia. That at least might save the East Timorese from further butchery and give them hope that their cause is not forgotten.