Pilger's film smacks of opportunism

Pilger's film smacks of opportunism

By Dino Patti Djalal

LONDON (JP): In September 1989, two British citizens went to
Indochina to do some field research.

A year later, Anthony De Normann and Christopher MacKenzie
were shocked to learn that their pictures were being shown in a
television program on Cambodia.

The film Cambodia: The Betrayal depicted their trip to
Cambodia as part of a secret British MI6 operation to train the
notorious Khmer Rouge guerrillas near the Thai border.

Their names emerged as hot subjects of disgrace in
parliamentary questioning and the media fuss. That same year, the
producer of the film, John Pilger, received the United States's
George Foster Peabody Award and France's Frontiers Award.

In July 1991, they sued Pilger and the television station
which aired the film for libel. Pilger's lawyer knew that his
case was thin: there was plenty of evidence that the De Normann-
MacKenzie's self financed trip had been meticulously prearranged
with the Vietnamese authorities and Hun Sen's government in Phnom
Penh. When his efforts to get out of the case proved futile,
Pilger was persuaded to quickly settle out of court for a
financial sum that both sides agreed would not be publicly
disclosed.

This case reveals much about John Pilger and his brand of
journalism. Pilger is now being sued, again for libel, by a
British member of Parliament, Rupert Allason, who Pilger falsely
accused of complicity in peddling intelligence information in the
case surrounding the death by hanging of a British journalist in
Iraq.

In November 1992 a strong complaint, this time from the United
Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), was also lodged against
Pilger to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission pertaining to
Pilger's allegation that United Nations logistical facilities in
Cambodia were being secretly rented to the Khmer Rouge as a
munitions warehouse.

The same Pilger recently produced a film on East Timor
entitled Death of A Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. Although it is
generally understood that certain conditions in East Timor remain
problematic, Pilger's film contains too many fabrications.

The film certainly did not deter the UN Human Rights
Commission to issue a positive chairman statement on human rights
in East Timor earlier this year, despite the film being shown in
Geneva and a personal appearance by Pilger.

Death of A Nation has become a key mobilizing instrument for
the international campaign now being waged by Timorese anti-
integration activists to generate support for their cause.

Reportedly, the film will be shown in 40 countries. When it
was aired in New Zealand recently, the country's Parliamentarians
reacted strongly by producing a resolution on East Timor,
followed by a request to visit the area. Pilger has boasted about
the impact in New Zealand, and is expecting similar reactions in
other countries.

To understand Pilger, one must fathom the depth of his
contempt for governments. In Pilger's world, governments are the
source of all evil. His pen is a sword not to defend a cause but
to bleed governments. He revels in saying "I have made enemies in
Southeast Asia".

Hence, it is controversy-making rather than fact-finding that
is the hallmark of Pilger's journalism. Hype takes a premium over
accuracy; impact over balance.

It is not known how Pilger became entangled with East Timor.
When he published Heroes in 1986, he touched on a wide range of
political issues but no mention was made of Indonesia or the East
Timor case.

What is certain, however, is the clear intellectual deference
Pilger accords to long time anti-Indonesia activists such as
Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong (no relation to the
Indonesian conglomerate) in the making of the film.

Carmel and Liem are founders of TAPOL, a London-based anti-
Indonesia political organization whose ideological slant is now
opportunistically couched as "The Indonesia Human Rights
Campaign".

They became Indonesian political outcasts after the abortive
coup of the communist party in 1965 and, driven by grudge and
hatred, have since spent their time launching a smear campaign
against Indonesia, inventing bizarre pseudo-academic concepts
such as Islamization, Javanese imperialism and forced
sterilization.

TAPOL activists happily furnished these concepts to Timorese
anti-integrationists when they established contact in the second
half of the 1970's.

By establishing a symbiotic link with Carmel and the likes,
Pilger has in effect provided a visual medium to what may be
regarded as the "loony literature" on Indonesia, which has been
long regarded as too radical to be taken seriously by
conventional academics and politicians.

In Death of A Nation, these sideline crusaders finally found
an access to the mainstream.

The astonishing thing about Pilger's film is really not the
message, which is an old song in a flashy jukebox, but the fact
that some uninformed or semi-informed circles, unable to place
the film in context, are taking his propositions as truth.

The general public cannot perceive the games and schemes
involved in the vicious public relations campaign on East Timor.

Let's face it, East Timor is no rose garden, but with all the
things that genuinely need fixing there, the danger of the film
is that it creates out of touch hot heads and misleads them in
the real issues at stake and what is needed to address the issues
constructively.

The bottom line is this: to secure their future, the East
Timorese must come to terms with their past and mend the socio-
political fractures and emotional wounds which have blistered
since 1975. After all these years, greater socio-economic
progress and reconciliation -- not prolonged conflict -- are what
the East Timorese need and deserve most.

Some international circles must stop treating the East
Timorese as if they are prized gladiators endlessly cheered,
jeered and agitated by excited international spectators.

Indeed, many of the propositions in Pilger's film can be
easily picked apart. But a recent chance to put Pilger to the
test ended in disappointment, when Carmel Budiardjo and Pilger
organized a discussion on East Timor in London on June 30.

What started as a completely partisan discussion turned
interesting when a number of East Timorese figures unexpectedly
showed up and challenged Pilger's account. Pilger, obviously
surprised, seemed unable to bear the irony of being publicly
confronted by the very people he claimed to champion, and did
what would be considered odd for a star speaker: he and David
Munro left the talks before they concluded, leaving behind an
almost speechless Carmel Budiardjo.

Among the Timorese present that evening was Francisco Xavier
Amaral, the ex-chairman of Fretilin and President of the Fretilin
founded Democratic Republic of East Timor. He later issued a
statement in which he accused Pilger of "liberally corroborating
the many lies, rumors and propaganda (on East Timor) in his
film," and called Pilger's film "part of a game" to turn his
people into "political commodities".

When Pilger charged UNBRO of commercial complicity with the
Khmer Rouge, he conveniently attributed the information to "our
sources" and left it at that. The Broadcasting Complaints
Commission, after thoroughly examining the case, later stated
that "The Commission are not persuaded that the program makers
had sufficient -- or indeed any evidence of UNBRO's involvement" in
property dealings with the Khmer Rouge.

Given all this, Australian journalist Greg Sheridan has a
point in stating that "Pilger's films have generally been full of
misrepresentation, half truth, exaggeration and extreme
tendentiousness." Rupert Allason has also expressed dismay at
Pilger's "deplorable methods in writing stories".

Consider Pilger's claim that British made Hawks were used to
bomb East Timor. One may ask, for example, if entire villages
were wiped out in 1983, as he claimed, how could Amnesty
International completely miss this out in its annual reports on
East Timor that same year?

What's more, how Pilger managed to find a fluent English-
speaking Timorese peasant as a "witness" deep in the interior of
East Timor is beyond anybody's guess -- something which I
certainly was not able to do during my last visit there.

Equally dubious was his other "witness", a Timorese man in
exile whose impressive knowledge of the physical features of the
Hawks made him look as if he was uttering memorized cues.
(Outside East Timor capital of Dili, the locals still have
difficulty identifying models of automobile let alone jets). Was
this yet another smart gimmick which Pilger crafted to capture
his British viewers?

What motivates Pilger? "That's really beyond me," Rupert
Allason said. Some may point to an insatiable craving for
personal fame, which Pilger certainly has done a good job at. De
Normann, however, is more straightforward: "Money. He simply
loves money".

Whatever the answer, what captured my attention was a curious
sentence at the very end of what was supposed to be a news
column: "Pilger's account is contained in Distant Voices, 7.99
pound sterling."

The writer is a regular contributor to The Jakarta Post.

Window: Pilger's film on East Timor has generally been full
of misrepresentation, half truth, exaggeration and extreme
tendentiousness.