For an ethnic Chinese, coverage of the Indonesian crisis, both before and after Suharto's resignation, is striking for what it does not say -- that much of the violence is directed not at the government or the army but at "nonnative" Indonesians. Especially for those who remember the events of 1965, when the current president took power, the silence is threatening. PNS commentator Edward Liu, an ethnic Chinese born and raised in the Philippines, is a practicing attorney in San Francisco.

The cataclysmic events in Indonesia are presented in terms of a single man losing his grip on power after 32 years.

But few reports have detailed the brutal attacks on ethnic Chinese, despite the fact that we are seeing an anti-Chinese pogrom that shockingly recalls 1965, when over 250,000 ethnic Chinese Indonesians were massacred.

More troubling, no protests have come from either Beijing or Taipei, or for that matter from the overseas Chinese themselves.

In the capital of Jakarta, nearly all of the 5,000 buildings torched or looted in recent weeks are owned by Chinese. More than half the city's Chinatown has been vandalized.

Reports in the Indonesian press from Medan, in northern Sumatra, tell of ongoing attacks on "nonnative descendants" rich or poor in that port city. "We are treated like dogs here, and no government officials care whether we live or die," said one Chinese Indonesian whose store was torched.

At the outskirts of Medan, according to "Gatran," a news weekly, young people stopped private cars and demanded the windows be opened.

"Where faces look like those of nonnative citizens," the magazine reports, "they are required to step out of the car, and the car is wrecked. Passengers with dark-brown complexion and not with slanted eyes were then permitted to pass."

These and other actions have caused an exodus of Chinese from Indonesia. Some observers think the attacks have been provoked as a form of ethnic cleansing to create a vacuum in the country's retail and distribution network. Treating the Chinese as scapegoats also buys some time as the succession drama unfolds by releasing built-up pressure among the impoverished and unemployed.

The situation must be terrifying for the ten million people of Chinese ancestry living in Indonesia, exacerbated by their sense of being utterly alone. They are among the over 45 million ethnic Chinese scattered throughout the globe. This diaspora began in the 16th century, and intensified during the period of Western colonial expansion in Asia, when peasants and craftsmen from villages in southern China headed south and helped colonizers from Portugal, Holland, Spain and Great Britain.

These "overseas Chinese," often compared to the Jews, settled for the most part in Southeast Asia. They have succeeded economically in their new homes, yet, even after four or five generations, they remain scapegoats when bad times roll in -- as is happening now with the economic meltdown in Asia.

The exodus of Chinese from Indonesia, coupled with the withdrawal of multinationals, leave the country's economic infrastructure in chaos. Further food shortages and distribution problems, especially in the towns and villages, will make the situation worse for impoverished Indonesians.

As an ethnic Chinese I want the answers to the following questions.

What are the governments of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan doing to stop further violence and loss of life in the Chinese-Indonesian community?

As part of the international community, why are both governments manifestly indifferent to the plight of the ethnic Chinese community in Indonesia?

Where are the human rights advocates and champions now that the victims are not from Tianmen but from Medan and Jakarta?

Why is the western press reporting attacks on the ethnic Chinese community as if it were a faceless, emotion-less community of non-humans?

On their own, without protection from any government, the story of the persecution of Chinese in Indonesia as the Suharto government collapses, cries out to be told.

The brutalization of human beings simply because of their ethnicity is a crime against humanity, and must be condemned.