Casting light on Balibo incident
Casting light on Balibo incident
New pieces of evidence about the killing of five journalists in East Timor in 1975 keep filtering through. H. W. Arndt ties together some to the threads.
MELBOURNE: On Nov. 29, 1995, the then minister for foreign affairs, Gareth Evans, announced that in response to new allegations about the circumstances in which five Australian journalists had died in East Timor in 1975, an eminent lawyer, Tom Sherman, former government solicitor and most recently chairman of the National Crime Authority, had been invited to gather and evaluate such new evidence as might be available. From March to early May, Sherman interviewed anyone willing to give evidence in Australia and Portugal. His 140-page report was made public in June.
Sherman has done an admirable job, carefully analyzing and presenting evidence secured from a wide range of informants. While stressing that not all the facts are known or will ever be known, if only because no witnesses of the deaths of the journalists have been found, he has judiciously sorted the grain from the chaff and laid to rest some of the more extreme allegations that had gained currency.
Sherman's chief conclusions are that:
* It is likely that the five journalists were killed at Balibo early in the morning of Oct. 16, 1975.
* They were killed by members of an attacking force under Indonesian officers consisting of Indonesian irregular troops and anti-Fretilin East Timorese.
* They were killed in circumstances of continuing fighting between the Fretilin and anti-Fretilin forces.
* After they were killed, some of the bodies were dressed up in Fretilin military clothes and photographed.
Sherman did not reach any conclusions on the extent to which the Balibo Five -- Greg Shackleton, 28, Gary Cunningham, 27, Tony Stewart, 21, from Channel Seven, and Malcolm Rennie, 28 and Brian Peters, 24, from Channel Nine -- contributed to their own deaths. The measures they took to protect themselves were clearly inadequate, but he did not propose to make any further observations on this issue.
It may seem desirable to let matters rest there. But the announcement that the International Commission of Jurists, a non- government organization, proposes to conduct another investigation, drawing on additional evidence, means that more will be said. The purpose of this article is to amplify the Sherman report by presenting additional information on three aspects:
- The political background to Indonesia's integration of East Timor in 1975-76.
- The five journalists' association with Fretilin.
- The journalists' failure to comply with instructions and warnings not to enter the fighting zone.
* Political background: Sherman says little about the circumstances that led to the Indonesian military occupation and integration of East Timor in 1975-1976, yet some knowledge of this background is essential if the Indonesian role in the tragedy is to be understood.
The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, signaled the communist victory in Vietnam. Communist insurgences were active in much of Southeast Asia. There was widespread concern about more "dominoes" liable to fall. A socialist revolution in Lisbon gave way in mid-1975 to a communist dominated government, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa gained independence more or less peacefully as democratic people's republics. In East Timor, the tiny urban elite of Dili split into three factions: a leftist group which, inspired by the victorious Frelimo in Mozambique, called itself the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor (Fretilin): a conservative group, the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), which initially favored continued Portuguese rule: and a handful who, under the name of Apodeti, favored incorporation in Indonesia.
The Lisbon government sent to Dili two "Red Majors" to encourage, train and equip Fretilin. The conservative governor, Lemos Pires, tried to counter them by acquiescing in a UDT "show of force" in early August, which provoked a counter-coup by Fretilin. After some weeks of heavy fighting, during which about 40,000 East Timorese fled across the border into Indonesian West Timor, Fretilin was completely successful because it controlled the colony's small army and arsenal. As former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam later put it: "Fretilin cleaned up the Portuguese army arsenal and then it cleaned up its opponents."
Ever since its own independence in 1945, Indonesia had been content to leave the neglected and impoverished corner of its archipelago in Portuguese hands. Nor did Indonesia take any steps to annex East Timor when India under Nehru sent its army to annex the Portuguese colony at Goa in 1962. Even in 1975, President Soeharto for some months resisted advice to follow Nehru's example, partly in deference to foreign (and not least Australian) pressure to abstain from the use of force. But when Fretilin appealed for help to Beijing, Moscow, Hanoi and Havana, the Indonesian government, rightly or wrongly, apprehensive of the establishment of a "Cuba" on its doorstep, decided on armed intervention.
In late September, Indonesia initiated a series of small military operations against Fretilin on the East-West Timor border. Since these incursions into Portuguese territory were illegal under international law, Indonesia at first denied they were taking place and then attributed them to East Timorese "volunteers". On Oct. 9, a Channel Seven news team was sent from Melbourne to Dili to verify rumors of Indonesian involvement in the conflict. They were followed later by a reporter and cameraman from Channel Nine in Sydney.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and almost universal repudiation of communism, the threat of a Cuba on the doorstep means little nowadays. At the height of the Cold War, it implied a serious threat to the national security of a non-communist (indeed anti-communist) country such as Indonesia.
* Association with Fretilin: Seven's Melbourne director of news, John Maher, warned his team of journalists before heir departure for East Timor "not to take sides" (Sherman Report, hereafter SR, 4.18). It was a warning they singularly failed to heed. From the moment of their arrival in East Timor, they associated with Fretilin, whose leaders encouraged journalists to visit the colony: as their most prominent spokesman, Jose Ramos Horta, explained, "It was the only weapon we had... for winning sympathy around the world." (SR, 4.10).
On Oct. 11, 1975, the morning after their arrival in Dili, the Channel Seven team made straight by car for the Balibo border area where fighting was going on. On the way they met an ABC team accompanied by the Fretilin information officer, Chris Santos, hurrying away from Balibo. Santos warned Shackleton not to go to the Balibo area, which was dangerous. Shackleton ignored the warning, saying he wanted to film some action and offered to make a written declaration absolving Fretilin from responsibility (SR, 4.25-28). Much of the diary kept by Shackleton during his last days was taken up with notes of interviews with Fretilin leaders.
When the Channel Nine team arrived in Dili on Sunday, Oct. 12, Ramos Horta met them at the airport and took them to the border in a Toyota Landcruiser. According to a report by officials of the Australian embassy in Jakarta who visited East Timor in May 1976, the only people in Balibo on the evening of Oct. 15 (the day before the tragedy) were "Fretilin soldiers, the five journalists and possibly a very few Timorese civilians assisting Fretilin" (SR, 3.33).
It is not surprising that the party of East Timorese irregulars under Indonesian leadership who attacked Balibo on Oct. 16 thought the Australian journalists were supporting Fretilin. The Indonesian commander, General Dading, told the UDT officer, Carrascalao, on discovering the bodies of the journalists, that "they kill some Australian people who are fighting with Fretilin. Only later on I found out they were not fighters but they were journalists" (SR, 4.62). A few days later, leaders of the anti-Fretilin forces claimed in a statement that when "our forces arrived to the house it was found that 15 people were killed... among them some white people who were previously controlling and guiding the fire of Fretilin against our troops" (SR, 3.21). According to another of Sherman's informants, the Indonesians did not accept the Australians' explanations that they were journalists. "In the Indonesian minds during the invasion all the white people were communists" (SR, 4.103).
There is little doubt that the sympathies of the Balibo Five were with Fretilin (as indeed have been the sympathies of most Australian journalists and media people ever since).
This does not run counter to Sherman's conclusion that they were killed in circumstances of continuing fighting between the Fretilin and anti-Fretilin forces. But it would help explain, though not justify what happened, if indeed (as seems likely) they were killed by anti-Fretilin forces. * Failure to comply with instructions and warnings: Both news teams were strongly warned by their superiors in Melbourne and Sydney against going near the fighting area in East Timor. The news director of Channel Seven "stressed to them more than once, repeatedly, that he did not want any false heroics". He warned them "not to go into areas where the danger was so high that it was risking their safety" (SR, 4.17). The Channel Nine news director, Gerald Stone, was equally explicit in his instructions to Rennie: "I said the absolute first duty of the reporter in a dangerous or war zone is to get his material back" (SR, 4.19). But the five were young and enthusiastic, scenting adventure and professional kudos.
The Channel Seven crew left Melbourne on Oct. 9 and stayed overnight in Darwin. Shorty after the tragedy had become known, the former Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Mick (later Sir Keith) Shann, rang me. A man he did not know had called on him and told him he had been in Darwin and in a pub had encountered Australian journalists boasting exuberantly that they were going to get as near the fighting as possible and were going to wear Fretilin uniforms. He was prepared to make a statutory declaration in support of his account. Shann and I discussed whether to make the story public but decided not to.
When, in response to demand by Shirley Shackleton to release all information about the tragedy for public scrutiny, I reported it in a letter to The Australian on July 4 this year, it received unexpected corroboration by Dr. John Whitehall, former medical director with the Australian Society for Inter-Country Aid, who had been in Timor in 1975.
In a letter to The Australian on July 12, Whitehall explained that "the Indonesians did not need to dress the bodies of newsmen Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters in military clothing after they died in East Timor in October 1975. They were already wearing that style of clothing when I farewelled them on the morning they left Dili with uniformed Fretilin officials. I had traveled to Dili with them ... Overnight they received news that fighting was about to start on the border ... Both Rennie and Peters were excited about the prospect of getting the story. Peters had lamented to me that he had missed out on Vietnam. His last words were that he was going to the border and was 'not coming back' until he had secured 'good footage'. I was worried for their safety but, strangely, also disappointed by the apparent affectation of the uniforms."
Whitehall's account does not exactly corroborate that of Shann's informant, since the former refers to the Channel Nine team and the latter to Channel Seven. It is also unlikely that the uniforms Whitehall saw (and the Seven team planned to wear) were those in which the bodies were dressed and photographed after their death. Ramos Horta told Sherman that "both crews were wearing civilian clothes in Balibo" (SR, 4.33). If they did put on uniforms, that two accounts agree on the enthusiasm, not to say recklessness, with which the young journalists embarked on their enterprise.
One contributing factor appears to have been competition. When Santos warned Peters of the Channel Nine crew not to go near the fighting area at Balibo, "his response was that they had to go because if Channel Seven was there and they were shooting all this film with action and they were not, they would be in trouble with their bosses" (SR, 4.31).
On Oct. 14, the day after the two crews joined up at Balibo, Australia's ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, sent an urgent warning to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra to alert Australians to avoid the Balibo area. Recently he was reported as saying that "I've always felt that this tragedy may have been avoided if the warnings we had sent from Jakarta on the basis of the intelligence we had acquired had been communicated to the journalists in Balibo" (Cameron Stewart, The Weekend Australian, Oct. 21-22, 1995). In response, Cyril Jones, Channel Seven news producer in 1975, stated that his office was "at no time warned by any government agency of the imminent danger in Balibo" and that, in any case, they had no means of communicating with the journalists (The Australian, Oct. 25, 1995).
The reason Woolcott's warning was not communicated was that the "intelligence" to which he referred came from Australia's Defense Signals Directorate, which was continuously monitoring radio communications between Indonesian army units in East Timor and Jakarta. As early as Sept. 30, DSD had intercepted plans by the Indonesian army to intrude into East Timor at Balibo and on Oct. 16 it intercepted an Indonesian army report that the bodies of four white men had been found at Balibo. Neither report was made public by the Australian government. The then prime minister, Whitlam, accepted the advice of the Defense Department that the government could not divulge this information, even to the relatives of the newsmen, because "it would compromise Australia's extensive electronic spy operations in Indonesia" (Cameron Stewart, The Weekend Australian, Oct. 21-22, 1995).
Whether a warning from the Australian government would have made any difference to the Balibo Five is another question. As Whitehall has said: "The Balibo Five were long on enthusiasm and short on appreciation of risk... Life would be less colorful without those attributes."
Heinz Arndt is emeritus professor at the Australian National University and is the former head of the ANU Indonesia unit.
-- The Australian
Window: But when Fretilin appealed for help to Beijing, Moscow, Hanoi and Havana, the Indonesian government, rightly or wrongly, apprehensive of the establishment of a "Cuba" on its doorstep, decided on armed intervention.