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May 21, 2003
News for The Masses
Eating breakfast and reading my daily dosage of the StraitsTimesOnline, I was suddenly hit by a wave of sadness. The news provided in Singapore is too skewed and too one-sided. And sometimes, I do think, that is where media hegemony is really taking place.
The Indonesian Separatist issues have always hit a soft spot for me. East Timor (now liberated), West Papua and Aceh. Right now, the Aceh issue is in the limelight and violence has resurged. And the Straits Times' article on it reflects merely an errant province fighting against its rightful "patriachal" overlord. Terms like "rebels" are used. And reading it, we would think that it's another uprising by a group of mindless and wrongly-motivated good-for-nothings creating nothing by trouble. That is not the case. Aceh, as to East Timor and West Papua, has a case for demanding separation. And the atrocities committed towards the Acehnese and the West Papuans, it seems, go undocumented in The Straits Times either. As a nation who separated from Malaysia in 1965 and faced alot of problems, I'd expected Singapore to be a little more sympathetic, or rather, empathetic.
In addition to the news article that The Straits Times published, The Age also reports the other side of the story. Thus, as much as I do not have time to write about the entire story, I urge you to take a little read and never never take whatever's presented in front of your eyes, for what's real.
I'm rambling. Being wrought by emotions, being too tired, having just awaken and having a sore back. But I hope I made, but a little sense.
Posted by lainey at May 21, 2003 07:19 AM