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.