Only a week before Bill Clinton was due to arrive in Indonesia for a state visit, a court in the northern city of Medan sentenced labor leader Muchtar Pakpahan to three years in prison. Pakpahan is the sixth official of the Indonesian Prosperity Trade Union to be convicted in connection with workers' riots that wrecked several factories and blocks of shops in Medan earlier this year. Sixteen of his colleagues are still on trial in what looks to many like an attempt to bust a union that the authoritarian Indonesian government views as dangerously independent. U.S. officials "deplored" Pakpahan's sentence and...
Business First, Freedom Second
Clinton's Indonesia trip underscores how he -- and U.S. firms -- will try to balance trade and human rights
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