Suharto Gets the Pinochet Treatment
The Sydney Morning Herald
reports Portuguese lawyers' plans to extradite former Indonesian
President Suharto and charge him with mass killings in East Timor. Human rights
groups claim that as many as 200,000 Timorese have been killed since Indonesia
invaded and annexed the Portuguese colony in 1976. The United Nations still
recognizes Portugal as the area's administrative authority, and the lawyers
behind the move say it was inspired by Spain's attempts to try former Chilean
dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The Suharto case has better legal standing, the
Herald points out, because "the crimes he is accused of were committed
on territory still recognised by the UN and international law as being
Portuguese."
The Pinochet specter is
also raised in the Hong Kong Standard , which questions the possibility that
Cambodian leader Hun Sen might grant amnesty to two prominent members of the
Khmer Rouge: "Why should these killers be let off?" The paper reports that Hun
Sen promised the United Nations that he would help apprehend Khmer Rouge
leaders and bring them before an international tribunal for crimes against
humanity. "Can Mr Hun Sen now justifiably refuse to hand them over to an
international tribunal, particularly at a time when war criminals from the
former Yugoslavia have been indicted and former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet is under siege?"
Pessimism pervades papers' seasonal stories around the
world. Under the headline "Not a Merry Christmas For Everyone," the Moscow Times , while
recognizing that residents of the capital were better off than the rest of
Russia, writes that "even here in the showpiece of Russian society, tens of
thousands of people have lost their savings in the collapse of the country's
banking system. Still more have become unemployed or had their salaries slashed
as the banking, media and consumer-goods businesses have switched from boom to
bust." Meanwhile, Britain's Sunday Times names the Cuban trade union weekly Trabajadores
"Scrooge of the week" for its lack of Christmas spirit. After a hiatus of 30
years, Christmas Day was restored as a public holiday in Cuba, but
Trabajadores attacked state-run shops for stocking Christmas decorations
and denounced Santa Claus as "the leading symbol of the hagiography of US
mercantilism."
In a season when
Americans can only be envious of their overseas counterparts' more generous
vacation packages, the Age of Melbourne reveals that Australians "have lost the will or can't find the
way to take that annual break." The decline can be explained in part by workers
trying to keep up with their American counterparts in an increasingly global
economy. "American leave provisions (20 days in total) are among the lowest in
the world--slightly more than Cambodia (16), slightly less than Japan (25 days)
and Singapore (26 days) and substantially less than the world's best holiday
practitioners, Sweden and Greece (a whopping 38 days each)."
The Statesman of Calcutta announces that "[t]ourist traffic in
Jaisalmer, the Rajasthan desert district where nuclear weapons were tested this
year, decreased alarmingly, apparently due to the alleged Western propaganda
against the Pokhran nuclear tests." According to the paper, India's first
nuclear test in 1974 gave the area a tourism boost. "This time, though, things
are different."
A comment in the Independent on Sunday deflates entrepreneur and balloonist
Richard Branson. The paper challenges Branson's spin that the balloon, piloted
by Branson, Steve Fossett, and Per Lindstrand, had ditched in "shark-infested
waters." "There are, needless to say, sharks in the Pacific Ocean but Oahu,
home of the capital Honolulu, is about as savage a place as Weybridge [a
British seaside resort]. There are coral reefs off the island which are dying
because the millions of Americans on holiday there urinate in the water so much
that, at peak flow, the ocean surrounding the reefs becomes toxic. That wasn't
mentioned in the reports. 'Branson ditches into urine-rich ocean' doesn't sound
quite as good, does it?"
Japanese daily Asahi
Shimbun declares that "[g]loom and despondency sum up 1998, according to
the kanji chosen by the public to symbolize the year now drawing to an end. In
an annual poll ... the kanji for 'doku' (poison) was the overwhelming
favorite." Apparently, the summer's "curry-poisoning sensation," when someone
added arsenic to food that was served at a summer festival, and media stories
about dioxin poisoning and environmental hazards account for doku 's
popularity. Previous years' kanji have not been much cheerier: In 1995
"earthquake" took the honors; in 1996 a mass food poisoning scandal led to the
victory of "food"; and 1997 was represented by "bankruptcy."
In Britain, where betting
is legal, the Sunday Times lists some of the "unusual bets for the next
year" accepted by a leading bookmaker. William Hill has offered odds of 10-to-1
that Bill and Hillary Clinton would announce divorce proceedings during 1999,
20-to-1 that the controversial "Millennium Dome" would be scrapped, 100-to-1
that Prince Charles would marry his sons' former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and
1 million-to-1 that the world would end in August.
