New Information About the Murder of the “Balibo Five” in East Timor

On October 16, 1975, the first full day of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, five journalists — two British, two Australian, and one New Zealander — were killed in the border town of Balibo. The official Indonesian position has always been that the journalists were accidentally killed in a crossfire as they attempted to film Indonesia’s invasion of the town. Historians have long suspected, however, that Indonesian soldiers actually executed the journalists to prevent them from reporting on Indonesia’s incursions into East Timor territory.

According to a recent inquest conducted by the New South Wales Coroner’s Court, the skeptics have been right all along:

[O]n Wednesday a top government lawyer said in his summing up of the evidence presented at the inquest over the past four months that it was clear the journalists had been killed in cold blood by Indonesian troops.

“The journalists were not killed by being caught in crossfire … but rather were deliberately killed by the Indonesian troops who had arrived at the Balibo town square,” said lawyer Mark Tedeschi.

The journalists had been attempting to surrender to the troops, who were headed by Captain Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah, he said.

“At least three of the journalists were shot by Indonesian troops after an order was given by Captain Yunus Yosfiah. He also joined in the shooting of those three,” Tedeschi said.

Another journalist was shot separately and the fifth was stabbed to death by Indonesian officer Christoforus Da Silva, he said.

Tedeschi argued that such drastic action would only have been taken with the sanction of officers superior to those on the ground at Balibo.

The inquest’s findings are likely to spur additional criticism of the Australian government, which has already taken a beating over its tacit approval of the invasion:

It became clear, with the release of official documents last year, that the Australian government of the time not only knew about the imminent invasion of the town, but they failed to warn the journalists of the likely danger they were in.

Documents released by current Foreign Minister Alexander Downer show Australia’s embassy in Jakarta received full details from Indonesia of the timing of the Balibo attack three days before it occurred.

It also appeared Australia had always been complicit in the invasion of the territory.

The then Labor government of Gough Whitlam virtually assured the Indonesian annexation of the region by indicating to Indonesia’s Suharto administration that it would not oppose such an action.

While Australia supported a United Nations general assembly resolution condemning the Indonesian action, Canberra had quietly told Jakarta it did not want to get involved in East Timor.

It appears, moreover, that the Australian government still hasn’t learned its lesson. The Indonesian government is claiming that it was assured by Canberra that nothing would come of the inquest:

The strain the inquest has put on relations between Australia and Indonesia was further illustrated Wednesday in a dispute over whether Jakarta had been told not to worry about the hearing.

Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said Canberra had basically guaranteed his government there would be no fallout from the inquest, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

His Australian counterpart Alexander Downer, however, told the national broadcaster that was not the case.

“I wouldn’t put it in those terms, we had a very brief discussion about this quite some time ago,” he said. When pressed, Downer denied he had offered any such assurance.

The inquest’s findings are also interesting from the standpoint of international criminal law. The government lawyer overseeing the inquest ended his report by claiming that the murder of the journalists could be prosecuted in Australia as a war crime (ostensibly pursuant to the Geneva Conventions Act 1957). That claim is bound to further harm Indonesian-Australian relations, because one of the men suspected of being involved in the murders is none other than the current Governor of Jakarta. (He denies the allegations.)