Balibo

By Jill Jolliffe

Now reissued as a revised, film tie-in edition

In October 1975, during the decolonisation of Portuguese Timor, five young television reporters travelled from Australia to report on the brewing unrest in the region. It was a journey that would be their last: Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, and Tony Stewart of Channel Seven, and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie of Channel Nine, were killed by the Indonesian military as they filmed the infantry troops advancing into the border town of Balibo. In the months that followed, a sixth man who went to investigate their fate, freelance journalist Roger East, was also executed.

In this revised edition of the book that was originally published as Cover-Up, on which the film Balibo is based, Jill Jolliffe reveals previously hidden details of one of the most shameful episodes in Australia’s history. In doing so, she brings to light new material about Roger East, and details the 2007 Glebe inquest into the death of Brian Peters.

The result of over 30 years of personal investigations and tireless research, Balibo provides a unique first-hand account of the deaths of the five journalists and of Roger East. Jolliffe argues that the Australian government and its Western allies were always aware of the circumstances of the killings of the Balibo Five, as they came to be known, and that their cover-up of those details was a key factor in Indonesia’s decision to invade and occupy East Timor.

Part memoir, part history, this searing book is as much an indictment of the Balibo killers as it is of Australia’s role in East Timor’s recent tragic history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781921753879

Jill Jolliffe

Jill Jolliffe has been following the Balibo Five story for 34 years. She witnessed the first incursions of Indonesian regular troops into East Timor in September 1975, reported on the death of her five colleagues at Balibo in October, and was evacuated from Dili by the International Red Cross four days before Indonesian paratroopers attacked the capital on 7 December 1975. In 1978 Jolliffe moved to Portugal, where she continued to follow the East Timor story and to work as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the BBC, among others. She now lives in Darwin and reports regularly from East Timor.

Book preview

Scribe Publications

BALIBO

Jill Jolliffe has been following the Balibo Five story for 34 years. She witnessed the first incursions of Indonesian regular troops into East Timor in September 1975, reported on the death of her five colleagues at Balibo in October, and was evacuated from Dili by the International Red Cross four days before Indonesian paratroopers attacked the capital on 7 December 1975.

In 1978 Jolliffe moved to Portugal, where she continued to follow the East Timor story and to work as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the BBC, among others. She now lives in Darwin and reports regularly from East Timor.

To the memory of Olandino Luís Maia Guterres,

who guarded the secret of Balibo for 23 years.

7 October 1955 – 18 September 2005

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

PO Box 523

Carlton North, Victoria, Australia, 3054

Email: [e-mail]

First published by Scribe 2009

Reprinted 2009

Originally published as Cover-Up: the inside story of the Balibo Five

by Scribe 2001

Copyright © Jill Jolliffe 2009

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Jolliffe, Jill, 1945-

Balibo

Film tie-in ed.

9781921753879 (e-book.)

1. Balibo (Film). 2. Journalists – East Timor – Balibo – Death. 3. Journalists – Australia – Death. 4. East Timor – Annexation to Indonesia. 5. East Timor – Politics and government.

595.8037

www.scribepublications.com.au

Contents

Acknowledgements

Key Characters

Prologue

1 The Balibo Five

2 Roger East’s First War

3 A ‘Sacred Calling’

4 East Timor, 1975

5 The Stage is Set

6 Death

7 Information Withheld

8 New Evidence Ignored

9 Independence

10 Invasion

11 A Defector Emerges

12 An Anonymous Eyewitness

13 Balibo Forgotten

14 News of Roger East

15 Resistance Reborn

16 The Sherman Inquiry

17 Sherman Scrutinised

18 Making Foreign Correspondent

19 Between Terror and Freedom

20 Freedom’s Grim Dawn

21 Answers at Last

22 More Revelations

23 Chris, the Cowardly Balibo Killer

24 Glebe: the killers indicted

Glossary

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many people who gave generous support to the work of creating Balibo from the foundations of my 2001 book Cover-Up: the inside story of the Balibo Five. Some dedicated souls spanned both projects, such as Judith McLean, Murray McLaughlin, Chips Mackinolty, Kevin Sherlock, members of the Balibo Five families, and the East Timorese eyewitnesses, who courageously backed up their evidence given for the first book by testifying to the 2007 Glebe inquest.

I am especially grateful to Roger East’s sister, Glenise Bowie — a person of firm principles, courage, and humour, as he was — for the interview time she gave me 31 years after I last interviewed her, and for the access to documents about her brother. Any conclusions I have drawn from these sources are entirely my responsibility.

To the East Timorese community in general I owe a long-term debt that can never be repaid, but specific thanks are due to Filomeno da Silva Ferreira, Maria da Silva Benfica, Elvis Sarmento Guterres, and Olga Quintão do Amaral, and all staff of The Living Memory Project, for their moral support and patience during the writing of this work.

The mobilisation of my foreign-correspondent mates in Portugal, Spain, and France to smoke out colleagues in England, America, Europe, and Africa who might know some Roger East stories was spectacular. Thanks to Peter Wise, Alexander Sloop, Alan and Jacqueline Reditt, Marion Kaplan, Jane Walker, and Nat and Helen Gibson for their efforts. These led to responses from Andre del Amo, Ken Brown, Mike Keats, Gerry Loughran, and John Newton Tidey. The surfeit of swashbuckling East stories was such that I was unable to use them all.

Closer to home, friends and acquaintances of Roger East in Australia were also unsparing with time and resources. Darwin interviews with Peter Simon, Bill Fletcher, and Richard Creswick led to a rich correspondence with Peter Blake in New York concerning the executed reporter. They also deepened my and Anthony LaPaglia’s knowledge of the man and his mannerisms. Roger East’s Australian friends John Tulloh, Bill Brannock, and Peter Maley provided key information.

John Maynard, Rebecca Williamson, and Rob Connolly of Arenafilm provided vital input to the book and gave me important access to the film during various phases of production, while the successful transformation of Cover-Up into this second edition of the book, Balibo, would have been impossible without the dedicated work of Henry Rosenbloom and Nicola Redhouse of Scribe Publications.

I am grateful, too, to David and Kristin Williamson for their hospitality and insights during the early phase of the project.

Various friends retrieved obscure files and provided invaluable research support.

Steven Sengstock of the Australian National University and John Hajek of Melbourne University gave expert assistance on the Manufahi uprising and on East Timorese languages, respectively.

John Milkins, Greig Cunningham, Anya Dettman, and Bob Legge acted as research troubleshooters (with Bob almost dying in the process). William Edwards of the National Archives of Australia found essential material for me politely and promptly, while bearing no responsibility for the NAA’s ongoing censorship of key Balibo files.

In the first days of writing in Melbourne, Mark Williams and Fiona Gruber gave me shelter and intellectual nourishment, while Helen Barnes gave valiant back-up as a reader. In Dili, Sophia Cason also gave me shelter, while doubling as a research troubleshooter in Darwin.

Finally, I am most grateful to Julia Quilter and Mark Tedeschi for guiding me through the legal maze of the Glebe inquest evidence.

I would also like to thank the following individuals and institutions for granting permission for several illustrations to be reproduced in this book: the registrar of Glebe Coroner’s Court, for the right to reproduce the aerial map showing Balibo town square on p. 239, which was used as an exhibit during the 2007 inquest into the death of Brian Peters; Geoscience Australia of the Commonwealth of Australia, for the right to reproduce the map ‘Timor 1975’ on p. 85, from Tom Sherman, ‘Report on the Deaths of Australian-based Journalists in East Timor in 1975’, Canberra, 1996, (Appendix I); and the National Archives of Australia for the right to reproduce the image of Roger East’s 1952 passport reproduced in the photographic section, NAA: A6980, S200623.

Key Characters

Braga, Pedro

fretilin soldier at Balibo who was with the Balibo Five before they died.

Carvalho de Sousa, Alberto

Eyewitness to Balibo Five deaths who testified to author in 2000.

Cunningham, Gary

Cameraman for Channel Seven; one of the Balibo Five.

Da Silva, Manuel Gaspar

fretilin eyewitness who testified to Roger East in November 1975 on the Balibo deaths, and to other investigators, including the author, in 1998 and 2000.

David

Alleged member of Team Susi, the unit which led the killings.

Djumaryo

see Muhni, Djumaryo Imam

East, Roger

Australian freelance journalist who went to Timor to investigate the Balibo deaths but was himself executed, on 8 December 1975.

Edie

Commander of Battalion 501 during the 1983 Kraras massacre.

Gomes, Adelino

Leader of Portuguese television crew which took the last film of the Balibo Five.

Gonçalves, Tomás

Eyewitness to Balibo killings who accompanied Indonesian troops and testified to the author in March 1999.

Guterres, Olandino Maia

Eyewitness to Balibo Five deaths, accompanied Indonesian troops. Interviewed by the author in 1998; later, the focus of the television programme Foreign Correspondent; died unexpectedly in 2005.

Jerónimo, Lucas

fretilin eyewitness who testified to Roger East on the Balibo Five deaths in November 1975; has since died.

Kalbuadi, Colonel Dading

Indonesian operational commander of the attack on Balibo.

Kirbiantoro, Lieutenant Slamet

Company commander in Balibo attack, alleged by some to be one of the killers.

L1

Anonymous witness to events in Balibo, interviewed by Tom Sherman in 1996 and by Foreign Correspondent in 1998.

Lopes da Cruz, Francisco

Pro-Indonesian udt leader who broadcast propaganda after the Balibo Five deaths saying the journalists were ‘communists’.

Maia, Domingos Bere

East Timorese suspected by UN police of being one of the Balibo killers. He was not accused by the 2007 Glebe coronial inquiry.

Marcos

Alleged member of Indonesian army’s team Susi; from Indonesian island of Flores.

Marpaung, Lieutenant

Company commander in Balibo attack.

Martins, José

Leader of Timorese monarchist party kota who initially supported the Indonesian invasion. He entered Balibo soon after the killing of the reporters and collected evidence which he revealed in 1976 after defecting from Indonesia.

Muhidin, Captain

Commander of Rajawali infantry force during the Balibo attack.

Muhni, Djumaryo Imam

Indonesian journalist and intelligence operative who photographed the corpses of the Balibo Five dressed in military uniforms; died in 1998.

Murdani, General Benny

Architect of 1975 invasion of East Timor, as commander of intelligence services in the Department of Defence and Security.

Murtopo, Lieutenant-General Ali

Head of Indonesian intelligence service bakin in 1975, a planner of the Balibo attack.

Musa, Ali

An alleged killer of the Balibo Five, deputy commander of Rajawali infantry force.

Pereira, Augusto

Anonymous eyewitness to Balibo Five deaths, interviewed by Tom Sherman in 1999.

Peters, Brian

Cameraman for Australia’s Channel Nine; one of the Balibo Five.

Pinch, Coroner Dorelle

Magistrate who presided over the 2007 coronial inquest into the death of Brian Peters of the Balibo Five, in Glebe, Sydney.

Rennie, Malcolm

Reporter for Channel Nine; one of the Balibo Five.

Sabika (Américo Ximenes)

Commander of fretilin forces at Balibo who urged the journalists to retreat with him.

Santos, Guido dos

fretilin soldier, eyewitness to the Balibo killings. First testified to the author and Tony Maniaty in October 1975; re-interviewed in 1999 and 2000.

Shackleton, Greg

Reporter for Channel Seven; one of the Balibo Five.

Sherman, Tom

Australian investigator who conducted two government inquiries into the Balibo killings, in 1996 and 1999.

Silva, Christoforus (Kris Snu)

Accused killer of the Balibo Five. Glebe Coroner’s Court recommended he be extradited to Australia for trial. Also accused of involvement in the 1983 Kraras massacre.

Stewart, Tony

Soundman for Channel Seven; one of the Balibo Five.

Subianto, General Prabowo

Son-in-law of Indonesian dictator Suharto, who was allegedly operational commander of the 1983 Kraras massacre. Candidate in Indonesia’s 1999 and 2009 presidential elections.

Subroto, Hendro

Indonesian journalist and intelligence operative who filmed the attack on Balibo.

Sutiyoso, General

Senior commander of the Balibo operation. As Governor of Jakarta, was invited to Sydney by the New South Wales parliament in 2007, but fled to Indonesia when the Glebe coronial inquiry requested his testimony.

Tedeschi, QC, Mark

Senior Crown Prosecutor for the State of New South Wales who, as Senior Counsel Assisting the Coroner, presented the 2007 inquest case recommending the extradition and trial of the Balibo Five’s killers.

Woolcott, Richard

Australian ambassador to Indonesia at the time of the Balibo killings, who was informed in advance, by Indonesian intelligence agents, of Jakarta’s plans to annex Portuguese Timor.

Witness 1 (‘P5’)

Key eyewitness to the deaths of the Balibo Five who testified to the author in 1979 that he saw Yunus Yosfiah lead the killings. He changed his testimony at both Sherman inquiries (1996 and 1999) and at the 2007 Glebe coronial inquiry.

Ximenes, Rosito

fretilin eyewitness who testified to Roger East in November 1975; has since died.

Yosef

Member of Team Susi; an alleged killer of the Balibo Five.

Yosfiah, Yunus

Leader of Team Susi, accused of commanding and participating in the killings of the Balibo Five by the Glebe Coroner’s Court, which recommended he be extradited to Australia and tried.

Prologue

‘Today, it’s tempting to imagine that cruelty can be put behind us, but if we refuse to hear about it, we are allowing states to get away with it.’

Helen Bamber, founder of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, who has treated torture survivors since 1944

In March 1999 former Australian cabinet minister Doug Everingham issued a public apology to the East Timorese people for his role in accepting the Indonesian invasion of their country. Between 1972 and 1975 Everingham had served as health minister in the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam, and now he confessed to shame. ‘I am ashamed to have belonged to the first of a series of Australian cabinets which failed to protest while our prime minister, unlike the world community, recognised the takeover of East Timor,’ he said. In a later radio interview, he explained the reasons for his unexpected stand, saying that ‘in the long term, anything that rides over human rights, particularly the rights of people that [helped and saved] a lot of Australian lives in World War II, is going to damage Australia’s long-term interests’. He attributed the policy of the time to greed for oil from the rich reserves in the Timor Sea. ‘The reason why successive governments and not just the Whitlam government have recognised Indonesia … is to get hold of the oil for big oil companies,’ he asserted. ¹

It was symptomatic of the feelings that the issue of East Timor engenders in Australia, as in other parts of the world, that a politician reached deep into the past to make that apology. The tragic history of the former Portuguese colony since its invasion by Indonesia in 1975 is one that has haunted not only politicians but Australians from all walks of life. For more than three decades it has seized the national conscience. After Indonesian paratroopers descended on Dili, the East Timorese capital, at dawn on 7 December 1975, a curtain fell over the half-island territory. Occasionally it was pulled aside to reveal scenes of indescribable horror — mass executions, imprisonment, torture, rape, death by starvation and bombardment — heightening the disquiet many Australians felt about the 1975 policy which had determined East Timor’s fate, and which remained in place. The skeletons would rattle briefly in Australia’s closet before East Timor disappeared from view once again.

The skeletons were not only Australian. Australia was the nearest regional western power with a great deal of diplomatic influence over Indonesia and, officially, it led the way. But the decision to back Suharto’s annexation of Portuguese Timor was part of a cynical re-arrangement of regional geography by western powers in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam in 1975. The United States and Britain shared responsibility with Australia for the Timor invasion, and in a later period the arms they supplied were instrumental in the success of military operations conducted by Jakarta against East Timor’s hapless population. ² New Zealand was a complaisant ally of Australia, simply tailing whatever Canberra decided.

Only after Australia abandoned its pro-Indonesian stance in 1999 did the prospect of freedom present itself to the long-suffering population. This occurred after the downfall of president Suharto, the dictator who had held power in Jakarta since 1965. He was replaced by his former vice-president, Jusuf Habibie, whose short-lived government ushered the way for deeper change, as the reformasi movement swept Indonesia. The writing was thus already on the wall when then Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer announced in January 1999 that Australia was to change its policy. He said that prime minister John Howard had written to president Habibie outlining Canberra’s new policy, adding: ‘I am of the view that the long-term prospects for reconciliation in East Timor could be best served by the holding of an act of self-determination at some future time.’ ³

It was as though in the blink of an eye Australian policy-makers had wiped the slate of their moral delinquency of 24 years. The Australian Defence Force played a leading and justifiably proud role in interfet, the United Nation’s peacekeeping force which entered East Timor in September 1999 to restore liberty to its people. ⁴ However, one could be forgiven for wondering when a reckoning was to be made for the years of closed-door decisions on Timor, years of stubborn insistence by Australia’s leaders that Indonesia had brought development and prosperity to the territory, and that those who said otherwise belonged to a carping ideological fringe. How can future policy be formulated if the past is not analysed?

Balibo focuses on just one set of ghosts still haunting the Australian government: the ghosts of six journalists executed in cold blood by the invading Indonesian army.

The men known today as the Balibo Five were five young television reporters who were killed in the border town of Balibo on 16 October 1975. On the evidence of seven eyewitnesses interviewed in this book, the reporters — Greg Shackleton, 29, Gary Cunningham, 27, Tony Stewart, 21, Brian Peters, 24, and Malcolm Rennie, 29 — were killed by Indonesian soldiers at dawn on that day. Shortly before they died they had filmed, at close quarters, an attack on the town by air, by sea, and by advancing infantry troops. Shackleton, Cunningham, and Stewart worked for the Melbourne-based Channel Seven television company, while Peters and Rennie worked for the Sydney-based Channel Nine organisation. Only two of the five, Shackleton and Stewart, were Australians. Peters and Rennie were British, while Cunningham was a New Zealander. The film they had in their cameras could have changed the course of history, and was the principal reason they died: it provided the first indisputable evidence of a massive presence of Indonesian regular troops inside the Portuguese colony.

A sixth journalist also shared the fate of the Balibo Five. Freelance journalist Roger East, who travelled to East Timor in early November 1975 to investigate the deaths of the five journalists, was captured on 8 December during the Indonesian paratrooper landing in the East Timorese capital and dragged before an execution squad on Dili wharf.

This book also tells the story of these men’s families and the suffering they have endured as a result of the cover-up of the circumstances of their deaths. These circumstances, known to the Australian government very soon after the journalists died, were suppressed for 32 years, despite four official inquiries in response to public pressure. It was only with the 2007 coroner’s inquest held in the Glebe court in Sydney that many long-festering secrets kept by politicians and spies since 1975 were finally revealed. Others are still to be told.

It is legitimate to ask why this story of the deaths of six foreigners, in the context of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese, should be the focus of special attention. There is a personal reason and a political reason: the first is of little importance; the second, of pressing importance.

I began my career as a journalist in East Timor in the months September to December 1975, and the Balibo Five and Roger East were my colleagues. I knew five of them superficially, one of them a little better. My own baptism of fire as a journalist occurred only a few kilometres from Balibo not long before the first five died, and I had slept in the house in which they were killed. There was a certain camaraderie among the small band of journalists working in East Timor at that time, as opposed to the elbows-in-face competitiveness of many journalists who worked there in the period of the UN peacekeepers’ entry in 1999.

Almost all of us had gone to East Timor in the face of attempts by the Australian government to prevent us from doing so through a ban on transport from Darwin to Dili. We wanted to get the story out that Indonesian regular forces were crossing illegally into East Timor from the Indonesian half of the island, to counter propaganda from Jakarta characterising this border activity as an extension of the Timorese civil war which had flared between 11 and 28 August. This propaganda was uncritically accepted by the world press, with few exceptions. To this end, we shared information and helped each other. I had lunch with Greg, Gary, and Tony in Dili before they left for the border on 10 October; the next day, I met Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie, who arrived in their wake. I had met Brian previously in Darwin, and we renewed our friendship and talked about the war in Timor. I knew East in the last weeks of his life, when, with Age correspondent Michael Richardson, we were the last three journalists in East Timor, all lodged at the Hotel Turismo.

Around a week after my meetings with the Balibo Five I found myself in the position of reporting their deaths for Reuters newsagency. I felt certain that had I died in Balibo instead of them, my last thoughts would have centred on the hope that somebody would eventually get the story out, that my colleagues would do everything possible to uncover the truth. The deaths of the five and then of Roger East marked me personally, and led to a determination that whoever was responsible for their killings would not go unpunished, no matter how long it took.

The other reason for writing this book has to do with Australia’s ghosts and the wider picture of East Timor. Until the journalists’ deaths, an understanding had existed between the Whitlam and Suharto governments whereby Australia would turn a blind eye to the military takeover of Portuguese Timor, as it was then known. Considerable dissent already existed within Australia over this understanding, and news of the Balibo killings sent a shock wave through the country. There was an immediate clamour for a full investigation and a formal protest to Indonesia.

The cross-border incursion in which the newsmen were killed was the first massive movement of regular troops over the border, the first step in the invasion of East Timor. As writers Des Ball and Hamish McDonald first pointed out, Australian diplomats in Jakarta were fully informed by Indonesian authorities on 13 October 1975 of the attack planned for Balibo and other border towns three days later. ⁵ When Australian citizens were killed in that attack, Canberra was faced with a terrible dilemma. For the purposes of the big picture it was deemed desirable that the takeover proceed, as long as it was not too visible. But it had become visible, and the Australian press was clamouring for answers — and for Australian political leaders to take a stand. In this context, Jakarta halted its advance into East Timor, waiting and watching for the Australian response.

In the words of Timor specialist Jim Dunn, this was ‘the point of no return’. ⁶ Had the Australian government taken a stand at this juncture, it is possible the Indonesian invasion may have been halted. East Timor would have been spared 24 years of foreign military occupation.

Australia made no formal protest to Indonesia about the deaths. Instead prime minister Gough Whitlam wrote a letter to president Suharto on 7 November 1975 which began with a polite exchange about general aspects of Jakarta’s policy on Timor. He went on to say:

On one particular aspect of the question of Portuguese Timor, I am taking the opportunity of your ambassador’s visit to Jakarta to seek through him Your Excellency’s personal help. I refer to the fate of the five missing newsmen from Australia.

Whitlam said his concern was that ‘the longer the issue is not settled the greater will be the speculation in our newspapers and elsewhere about the circumstances in which the five died’. He asked the Indonesian president for assistance ‘to establish the facts, to obtain positive identification, and to carry out the wishes of the next-of-kin in regard to the disposal of the remains and the return of personal effects’. ⁷ Jakarta’s response was to block an Australian investigation team from visiting Balibo and to provide a concerted barrage of disinformation.

This was the hard edge of Australian policy. In the absence of any meaningful protest, in early November the Indonesian military advance resumed. It began with the bombing of Bobonaro and Atabae, reaching a climax with the landing of around 30,000 troops in Dili on 7 December. Roger East, the only journalist who remained in a bid to report the story, was publicly executed the next day. The rest is history — unexamined history.

The Balibo Five killings and that of Roger East were, then, a pivotal event in the tragic story of East Timor. The cover-up surrounding the deaths of Greg, Gary, Tony, Brian, Malcolm, and then Roger East signalled the beginning of a wider cover-up. Understanding what happened at Balibo is the key to understanding the past complicity of successive Australian governments, Labor and Liberal, in the Indonesian military occupation of East Timor. What sort of government would put the lives of its own citizens second to assisting an act of international aggression? East Timorese of all political persuasions also recognise the importance of these deaths for their history, and have shown their willingness to testify as to what happened, in some cases at risk to their own lives. Without them it would be impossible to tell this story.

In the first edition of this book, originally titled Cover-Up, I attempted to reconstruct and describe the circumstances of the killings as faithfully as possible. ⁸ During research, old spies in Australia and abroad slammed doors in my face, but a few put their consciences first and spoke to me. Although I was limited by available information, both on the ground in East Timor and from official sources, most of the material in that edition was published for the first time. It raised a series of unanswered questions. Despite the mass of new evidence presented since then at the Glebe coronial inquiry of 2007, replies to many of these questions remain hidden in the intelligence files of Australia, its western allies, and those of the Republic of Indonesia.

Much of this new material was researched in East Timor after I arrived in Dili with interfet troops on 23 September 1999. It was a precarious situation. Under a flawed UN agreement of May 1999 Indonesian troops were still on the ground, supposedly to assist the incoming peacekeepers restore order, although they themselves were the main source of the violence. In practice they were departing sullenly, booby-trapping buildings they had occupied, and burning others before filing onto troopships at Dili wharf. No one extinguished the fires, and the capital was both a depressing sight and a dangerous place to be.

When I arrived at the Hotel Turismo, which had become interfet’s downtown bunker, it was to an awful sense of déjà vu. I was warned that the mutilated body of Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes had just been found on the outskirts of Dili. Thoenes was a respected Jakarta correspondent for the British daily the Financial Times and the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor. Here was a grim epitaph to the Balibo story a quarter of a century later. Eyewitnesses testified that he had been killed by Indonesian soldiers from Battalion 745.

It was a message of terror which was part of a campaign by the Indonesian army. Twenty-four hours before Thoenes died, a car carrying veteran journalist Jon Swain of the UK Sunday Times had also come under fire from 745 soldiers.

On 25 September two other journalists died, in attacks in Dili and in Lospalos, 225 kilometres to the east. Joaquim Bernardino Guterres, 25, became the first East Timorese journalist to die exercising his profession when he was shot dead in a Dili street at point-blank range by Brimob, the Indonesian anti-riot police. As Guterres died in Dili, militiamen from the Team Alfa unit slaughtered Indonesian journalist Agus Muliawan and nine Catholic church workers, after ambushing their van outside Lospalos. Team Alfa had been formed secretly by Battalion 745 over a decade before and was still under its command. ⁹

Over the following months new eyewitnesses who had been at Balibo came forward, taking courage from the Indonesian exit, and some re-enacted the events of 16 October 1975 for me at the crime scene.

During this period, the UN opened its own inquiry into the Balibo deaths, throwing up fresh clues as to the identity of the perpetrators. In February 2001, its investigators named former Indonesian cabinet minister Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, Indonesian soldier Christoforus da Silva, and East Timorese Domingos Bere Maia as suspects in the Balibo killings. They recommended that international arrest warrants be issued for them under the Geneva Conventions of 1949, a recommendation that was ignored.

I began to follow the trail of these men through East Timor, as it had not stopped at Balibo. In December 2000 my search for clues led to the killing fields at Kraras, near the south-coast town of Viqueque. There I met Teresa dos Anjos, daughter of Celestino dos Anjos, a man decorated by Australian troops after World War II for his role in assisting them in the fight against the Japanese. As a very old man, he had been summarily executed in 1983 by Indonesians allegedly commanded by Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto.

Teresa is a long-time political fighter with a poetic wit and a will of steel. She led me into the Kraras jungle, where villagers testified to the mass execution of 181 unarmed civilians on the banks of the Bi-Tuku River in September 1983. Further research presented evidence that Christoforus da Silva was one of the soldiers involved. Thus it was that a tangible link had finally been forged between the story of Balibo and the wider suffering of the East Timorese, going beyond the abstract significance of Australian complicity in the 1975 cover-up.

In attempting to tell this story accurately I may have dealt harshly with some colleagues and well-intentioned individuals active in the Timor cause. The reason for this is my belief that the battle for East Timor during the long years since 1975 has always been a battle against propaganda for accurate information. From whatever quarter it comes, propaganda has the effect of distorting the historical record. In trying to get the account right, I have found it necessary to rebut myths from both sides of the political divide.

Since this book was first published in 2001, as Cover-Up, progress has been made in correcting the injustices described there, and this has been partly due to its influence. The Balibo families found relief in memorial ceremonies in Balibo in 2003 organised by the state government of Victoria, Australia, under premier Steve Bracks. In 2007 the Glebe Coroner’s Court inquest into the death of Brian Peters made history and gave them further solace, with its naming of Yunus Yosfiah and Christoforus da Silva as two of the killers and its recommendation to Australia’s attorney-general that they be indicted and extradited to serve trial for crimes against humanity.

In one case, there has been no progress. Roger East remains the forgotten man of the equation, although the Glebe inquest revived interest in his death. The forthcoming film Balibo by Australian filmmakers Rob Connolly and John Maynard, starring Anthony LaPaglia as East, should result in a new bid to call his killers to account.

If justice is to follow from the sad events of Balibo, Australians should examine the history presented here and apportion blame where it belongs — whether in Jakarta or Canberra — for the killing of journalists dedicated to recording the truth, and for the terrible suffering inflicted on our innocent East Timorese neighbours, to ensure that the shameful acts of 1975 will never be repeated.

It is my hope that this book will contribute to bringing the perpetrators to trial within a just legal framework. Only this measure can set the historical record straight and rectify a great wrong.

–1–

The Balibo Five

On 26 August 1975 a Panama-registered trawler slipped out of Darwin harbour after dark, bound for Portuguese Timor. Among those on board the Konpira Maru were Brian Peters, a 24-year-old cameraman, and Gerald Stone, an experienced war reporter who was international editor for Australia’s Channel Nine.

Their shipmates were a colourful bunch. Media mogul Kerry Packer — Stone’s boss — headed the passenger list. He was travelling with a Portuguese bodyguard called Manuel, Dr John Whitehall, a surgeon who headed the Australian Society for Inter-Country Aid, Vietnam veteran Michael Darby, and Darby’s friend Bill Bancroft. The crew included veteran Darwin skipper Cedric (‘Sid’) Hawks, his partner John Chadderton, and a deckhand called ‘Esky’ (an Eskimo who ‘looked like Arnold Schwartzenegger but couldn’t swim to save himself’, according to Chadderton). Kerry Packer’s cargo included a rubber dinghy, which he inflated on deck and lived and slept in during the two-day trip; a pile of salami sausages; a stack of soft-drink cans; and an array of guns, which Chadderton remembers as ‘pistols, .44s and .45s, 7.6 automatic weapons, and a fancy German-manufactured automatic rifle. It was a big assortment, surprising, well beyond self-protection.’1 Packer told Hawks he had paid $3000 for the German rifle. When not sitting in the dinghy and cutting off slices of salami with a Bowie knife, Packer ordered Manuel to throw the cans off the boat, firing round after round with his German gun, never hitting once. When Chadderton fetched an old .303 from below deck and began expertly picking off each can, Packer got in a rage, and moved as though to throw the expensive weapon overboard.

They sailed into Dili harbour two days later, not knowing which of the two parties in the recent civil war controlled the capital: udt or fretilin. The city was ringed by fire. Watching the strange party step ashore was a line of young, long-haired fretilin soldiers, harbingers of the new revolutionary order in Portuguese Timor. Gerald Stone stayed only two days, returning to Australia by plane with Packer from nearby Ataúro Island. Brian was left to film more and return later with the Konpira Maru. Before Stone left, Brian had his baptism of fire when the pair were filming around Dili. ‘He was very steady and very cool,’ Stone asserts. ²

Brian wrote home about it:

Gerry and I were walking back to our jeep when both sides opened up … this time we could [hear] the bloody bullets zinging [past] us, we ran for a pile of drums in the middle of the airfield (the camera rolling all the time) and find ourselves in the middle of two groups fighting, we got some bloody good film allthough [sic] I was shit scared.

Brian was on the ground with Chadderton and Esky for a little over a week, travelling in the mountains where they were stopped at roadblocks by fretilin tribesmen with bows and arrows. Brian told his sister Maureen that, on occasion, an arrow would be pressed to his throat until he identified himself, as a result of which he vomited with fear ‘for four hours’. ³

They returned with first-class footage: Stone and Peters had scooped the press pack waiting in Darwin to enter Timor since Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam clamped a blanket ban on travel in early August. Their success was certainly due in part to the financial power and influence of Packer, but also to their ingenuity and courage. It was Brian Peters’ first experience of war reporting and the young Bristol-born cameraman had shown his mettle.

Of the five journalists selected in October by Australia’s two leading commercial channels to report Indonesia’s covert war in Portuguese Timor, Brian Peters arguably had the toughest early life, which had prepared him for this first success, a month before he was to return. Yet each of the men who were to die there and become known as the Balibo Five had special qualities. These are their stories:

Brian Peters

Brian Peters was born on 17 February 1949 in the British port of Bristol, four years after World War II ended. Bristol had been bombed by the

Reviews for Balibo

[bjenks-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First-class journalism and organisation of the facts about how Australian and British TV news crew workers were murdered in 1985 by Indonesian soldiers commanded by Yunus Yosfia; and how the Australian Government colluded with Indonesia in a cover-up of those facts.