DETAINED AMERICAN JOURNALIST FACES IMPRISONMENT

Journalist Allan Nairn remains in military detention after three days of questioning by Indonesian authorities.

Nairn is being held and interrogated by the local Immigration Chief in Kupang, West Timor, Mr. Zurya. According to Zurya, the Indonesian regime is divided over his fate: Justice Minister Muladi and Information Minister General Yunus Yosfiah, want Nairn deported; while Benny Mateus, the Chief Justice of Nusa Tenggara Timor province wants Nairn prosecuted and jailed. Nairn. The immigration chief said Nairn could face up to 10 years imprisonment.

During his interrogation, Nairn was asked to hand write a statement (full text attached). In the statement, Nairn said:

"I know that the army has put me on the black list. They did this because I watched their soldiers murder more than 271 people at the Santa Cruz cemetery. . . . Because I survived the massacre and denounced the crime to the outside world, the TNI/ABRI and the Suharto government banned me as a "threat to national security." That ban has been reaffirmed by each subsequent TNI/ABRI commander, including General Tanjung and General Wiranto."

Nairn was one of the last journalists to remain in East Timor after the Indonesian military and militias began to sack Dili, forcing nearly all United Nations personnel and independent observers to flee the country. Indonesian soldiers picked him up at a military checkpoint on September 14 5:30am(Dili time). He was then taken to KOREM, central army command headquarters for East Timor. There he was questioned by the Indonesian general in charge of martial law as hundreds of Itarak militia amassed in the back of the army compound.

On September 16, the military expelled Nairn from East Timor, flying him in a military jet to Indonesian West Timor. Also on the plane were militia armed with automatic weapons.

Nairn is a freelance journalist who filed regular reports from East Timor for news organizations, including The Nation magazine and Pacifica Radio. In 1991, while reporting for The New Yorker magazine, Nairn survived the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in which Indonesian soldiers, armed with U.S. supplied M-16s, gunned down more than 250 unarmed Timorese. Soldiers fractured Nairn's skull at the time.

After the massacre Nairn, (together with Amy Goodman of WBAI/Pacifica Radio) was banned from Indonesia and occupied Timor as "a threat to national security." The ban has since been personally reaffirmed by the TNI commander, General Wiranto. Nairn returned to East Timor without the knowledge of the Indonesian armed forces in 1994 and 1998.

Earlier this year, in defiance of the ban, Nairn again entered Indonesia. He has been in occupied East Timor since August.

Nairn has covered military and human rights issues since 1980. His reporting from Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, East Timor and other places, has won the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, The DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, as well as awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Radio/Television News Directors Association.

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Updated: 9/18/1999