Volume 44, Number 1 · January 9, 1997
Smoldering Indonesia
By Jeri Laber
This past fall Indonesia was more frequently mentioned in the American press than ever before in its history. First, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to an Indonesian bishop and an exiled human rights activist who had both worked to promote the rights of the people of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony that Indonesia has brutally occupied since 1975. Some weeks later it was revealed that John Huang, a Taiwan-born employee of the Democratic National Committee and a former Commerce Department official, had raised millions of dollars for the Clinton campaign from the Riady family of Indonesia, who own a twelve-billion-dollar conglomerate called Lippo Group, for which Mr. Huang earlier had worked. It soon unfolded that James Riady, the son of the family patriarch, had become acquainted with Clinton in Arkansas in the 1970s and that he and his father have since had many dealings with the Clinton administration in Washington on behalf of Lippo Group's interests.
Feature, 7179 words
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