Balibo killings: Beginnings of impunity?

Balibo killings: Beginnings of impunity?

By Ati Nurbaiti

DILI (JP): Indonesia's New Order liked to change local street
names with that of its generals; in East Timor, journalists also
saw it fitting to commemorate colleagues killed in the territory.

A three-kilometer road from the Becora area in Dili to the old
Mercado (market) now bears the name "Press Freedom Road".

The name change was made in December following the set up of
the Association of Journalists of Timor Loro Sae (AJTL) to
commemorate at least nine journalists who died on duty there.

The journalists were Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony
Stewart; Britons Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters; and New
Zealander Gary Cunningham, all killed in Balibo on Oct. 16, 1975;
Briton Roger East, in Dili on Dec. 7, 1975; Dutch Sander Thoenes;
Timorese Bernandhino Gueterres; and Indonesian Agus Mulyawan in
Lautem, all in September 1999.

The name change of the street is also a reminder of how
difficult it has been to convey what has been happening in East
Timor. Lack of access to information, except from official
sources, and media self censorship, has contributed to much of
the apathy toward the East Timor issue among Indonesians.

At the far end of the road, an engraved stone marks the spot
where the body of Thoenes, a reporter from London's The Financial
Times, was found, and further down the road, Gueterres was shot.
Kompas journalist Kornelis Kewa Ama also sustained gunshot
injuries in the nearby Kuluhun area when covering the violence in
Dili in 1999.

The stone plaques and street signs were uncovered on Jan. 14
by, among others, Minister of Economic Affairs Mari Alkatiri,
representing the United Nations Transitional Administration in
East Timor; Hamish McDonald, a journalist from Australia who has
long investigated the Balibo killings; and Lin Neumann of the New
York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Coordinating the ceremony was Virgilio Gueterres, the newly-
elected chairman of AJTL.

The Balibo case is among the oldest of all these mysteries.

In recent history, attention on the Balibo case was renewed
when a former officer implicated in the killings, Capt. Yunus
Yosfiah, was appointed minister of information by the then
president, B.J. Habibie.

Calls for a reinvestigation into the case by CPJ were drowned
in media praise of Yunus' breakthrough policies in enhancing
press freedom.

Investigations resumed in the middle of last year under the UN
civil police, and last week The Sydney Morning Herald reported
that the UN investigators were seeking warrants of arrest for
Yunus, Indonesian Christoforus Da Silva and East Timorese
Domingos Bere.

The investigators, following seven months of work, recommended
that the men be charged with crimes against humanity under the
1949 Geneva convention, the report said.

Yunus has again denied the allegations, saying he has no
knowledge of the journalists and had never come into contact with
them while he was in Balibo. He said, he had never received
orders from his superiors to act against any foreign journalist.

Yunus has said that he was willing to face the UN
investigators to "clarify" the issue.

Apart from Balibo, also under investigation are those
implicated in the killings of Thoenes and freelancer Agus, along
with his fellow passengers, nine nuns and priests. The cases are
among those pursued by Indonesia's Attorney General's Office,
following investigation by the government-sanctioned Commission
for Inquiry of Human Rights Violations in East Timor.

The CPJ says that so far no one has been convicted in the
killings of journalists in East Timor, or in most cases around
the world.

Roger East's death in December 1975 is among the even lesser
mentioned. His body, with hands tied, was found, along with some
Chinese men, women and children, floating in the Dili water front
shortly after he reported the entrance of Indonesian troops into
Dili.

Long dismissed as a lost cause in the Indonesian media, the
Balibo incident was brought to attention again in AJTL's first
congress in Dili from Jan. 10 to Jan. 14.

What is the relevance of Balibo anyway to the Indonesian
public?

Speaker Hamish McDonald told the congress that the Balibo
incident is important, to East Timor and Indonesia, to understand
"the beginnings of a pattern, a model of impunity, repeated in
the following 25 years" since then.

"They got away with murder" in Balibo, McDonald said,
referring to the Indonesian military. Subsequent larger scale
operations were attempted by the military or its elements in East
Timor, and other places in Indonesia, with the confidence that
they would never get punished.

With Desmond Ball, a leading intelligence expert in Australia,
McDonald wrote Deaths in Balibo, Lies in Canberra, published last
year. In the introduction to the book they said they were
"intrigued by the evidence of official lies and cover-ups," in
which Indonesian and Australian government institutions and
officials were implicated.

The incident, the authors say, "is a rare case where
officials decided, in peace time, to sacrifice some of their
fellow citizens to protect security and intelligence interests,
and where ministers and officials knowingly conspired to mislead
the public and parliament afterwards."

They describe cover ups in Australia's foreign affairs,
defense and intelligence units.

"For over 20 years," the authors write, "Canberra did its best
to suppress information of Indonesian culpability for the
killings ... it kept up the fiction that pro-Indonesian Timorese
partisans had carried out the Balibo attack."

They note that "even after (former military intelligence
chief) Gen. Benny Moerdani admitted in 1993 that he had been
centrally involved in the planning and direction of the covert
campaign", and that in 1995 'Jakarta was well aware (before the
attack) that there were journalists in Balibo'", this was
downplayed by the government in Canberra.

With the fall of the Soeharto government, the authors stress
there is no longer a need to cover up the Balibo case on the part
of the Australian government.

Quoting Indonesian officials, the authors note Indonesia's
attitude "is that such revelations are 'decidedly more of an
embarrassment for Canberra than Jakarta,' and that they are
'Australia's problem, not Indonesia's.'"

The writer is a journalist of The Jakarta Post.