Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991                   TAG: 9102170288
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BY JIM MANN and THOMAS B. ROSENSTIEL/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SOME NEWS YOU HAVEN'T BEEN TOLD/

Finally, amid considerable American prodding and intense press coverage, authorities in Taiwan convicted Wang and two associates of the American murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The sentence was later reduced to 15 years.

But this Jan. 21, less than a week after war broke out with Iraq, Taiwan quietly freed the three men from jail under a special amnesty. The men had spent only six years in prison.

The timing of the release may have been coincidental, yet the results were obvious: Few Americans noticed. Even though U.S. officials had drafted a statement deploring the release of the convicted intelligence chief, not a single member of the American media called to ask for it. No congressman took up the issue either.

"I guess most people have lost interest," says Nat Bellocchi, head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial organization that has handled relations with Taiwan since the United States recognized China in 1979.

The freeing of the former intelligence chief is only one of the events here and around the world that have been lost, overshadowed or shunted aside as a result of the current American obsession with the war in Iraq.

Congress, the American news media and, in some instances, the Bush administration itself have been so absorbed with the Persian Gulf that they have had far less interest than usual in developments elsewhere. Some analysts argue that certain foreign governments have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Iraq to make moves that they knew the United States would have protested more vigorously in other times.

Such instances include:

The recent crackdown by the Soviet military in the Baltic states: Developments in the Baltics call to mind events in 1956 when the Soviet Union resorted to tanks to crush the rebellion in Hungary. The Soviet action came when the West was consumed by the Suez crisis, in which Britain, France and Israel sought to regain control over the Suez Canal.

Although the tumultuous events in the Soviet Union have been covered in the American media, they have not generally received the exhaustive, top-of-the-news treatment the networks and newspapers would otherwise have devoted to them. Without such media coverage, the Bush administration is under less pressure than it might have been to hold up credits and other economic benefits to Moscow.

China's secretive trials of a series of dissident students and intellectuals who had been held in jail since shortly after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989: "Because of the war, China is on the back burner right now," says Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "Just getting people to any meeting on Capitol Hill is difficult. Lots of them are going to briefings on the gulf. We came back to a brand new Congress with a declaration of war. That's a major responsibility."

Syria's bold move into Lebanon last autumn: Without a gulf crisis, Syrian President Hafez Assad's action might well have been treated as a major development changing the map and politics of the Middle East.