Peace Researcher 40 – July 2010
- Jeremy Agar
On Mount Victoria, in the heart of Wellington, a native tree was planted
and a park bench was officially opened, in May 2010. The plaque indicates that
the simple memorial honours the memory of Gary Cunningham, a TV journalist
working for an Australian network in East Timor who was murdered by Indonesian
soldiers in 1975. The memorial was organised by the Indonesia Human Rights
Committee with support from the Media Freedom Committee and Wellington City
Council. It’s a suitable site. Cunningham once lived nearby and he won an award
for his coverage of the 1968 Wahine disaster when the inter-island ferry sank in the
harbour below. There’s another link. The view from Mount Victoria has something
in common with the view from Balibo, the place
Cunningham died.
Balibo is high on a hill in East Timor, near the border with Indonesian West
Timor. The Balibo Five, as they’ve come to be called,
were journalists covering an anticipated invasion from Indonesia. As we see in
the film, the five had stationed themselves in an old
Portuguese fort overlooking the sea, where Indonesian warships were arrayed.
Armed men in civilian clothes emerge from the bush, photographed by the
Australian team. The crew sense they’re in danger and flee. Hiding in the fort,
they’re shot in cold blood. These scenes are chillingly effective.
They’re also historically accurate, as was established by a sixth
journo. Connolly tells the story via Roger East’s search for the missing
quintet some days after they had failed to return from their Balibo assignment. The film opens with East in Darwin. He’s
a frizzled, cynical veteran at first unmoved by the plea from an East Timorese
democrat (the young Jose Ramos Horta, now his
country’s President) to pay attention to the imminent plight of his homeland.
It’s a movie cliche perhaps, but in this instance the
cliche happened. East thrashes through the
jungle, finds evidence of the butchery, and reports back. East stayed on in Dili, determined to honour his colleagues by reporting on
the invasion, so he, too, was murdered by the Indonesian military. Roger East,
subtly played by Anthony LaPaglia, is the centre of
the story.
Indonesia didn’t want the world to know that it was crossing
an international border with no provocation except that the East Timorese
wanted an independent country in the same way that a generation earlier
Indonesia had successfully fought for its own independence from the Dutch. If
you look at a map, which depicts East Timor as part of an Indonesian island
within an Indonesian archipelago, it might seem that Jakarta at least had a
case for wanting East Timor to become part of the country. But the map is
misleading. We have to look at history. Indonesians followed the normal
logic of post-colonial nationalists by fighting for a country that would take
over the areas that had been Dutch possessions. That’s why New Guinea has a
line running down the middle, separating Papua (formerly Dutch and now
Indonesian) from Papua New Guinea (formerly Australian). So, by its own rules,
independent Indonesia should not have expected to annex East Timor, a former
Portuguese colony.
In the context of unprovoked brutality this background might seem academic,
but it could be part of the reason for Indonesia’s behaviour. Under
international law it knew it couldn’t justify its claim for East Timor. So did
all the governments that connived at the aggression. This is the significance
of Balibo. It’s why Gary Cunningham’s name is largely
unknown in Wellington and New Zealand. The governments of NZ and Australia
collaborated with Indonesia in covering up the massacres. They actively went
along with the Indonesian lie that the journalists had been caught in crossfire.
The version of events that the film depicts, of a sustained and deliberate mass
murder of unarmed civilians, is accurate, as even the Indonesian Army now
admits.
It’s not as if the incident can be explained away as the emotions of the
moment, like the killing of Japanese prisoners of wars during World War 2 (as
happened in both New Zealand and Australia). This happened in 1975, when the
most passionate public event in NZ was the replacement of the Rowling Labour
government by the Tories led by Muldoon. Neither Indonesia nor East Timor has a
history of bad relations with NZ or Australia. We’re not talking Gaza or the
Balkans. Yet the events at Balibo were officially
being denied for the next generation.
US, Australia, NZ Accomplices
Why did successive governments of NZ and Australia - along with the UK
and US - behave so deplorably? The first pointer is to look towards America.
Indonesia would not have been brazen without at least a hint from the US. The
Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, saw the world as a playpen for American
adventures. When it came to the “South”, the part of the globe that was neither
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) nor the former Warsaw Pact, he
was contemptuous. Places like Indonesia and, even more so, tiny East Timor,
were pawns in his global game. Immediately before the invasion Kissinger and
President Gerald Ford were in Jakarta for talks with Suharto, the Indonesian
dictator. As soon as Air Force One left Indonesian air space, the Indonesian
military invaded East Timor and started killing people. That’s as close to a
smoking gun as it gets (similarly, in 1975, Gough Whitlam, the Labor Prime Minister of Australia, gave Suharto the go
ahead. The film shows their meeting in a photo in a newspaper used to wrap
Roger East’s fish and chips in Darwin. There has always been a bipartisan
consensus in Australia that is obsessed with “instability” in their huge Asian
neighbour. Ironically, Whitlam gave that go ahead whilst he himself was,
fruitlessly, fighting for his political life against being unseated by a
bloodless coup waged by the Australian Right and its American backers. After a
carefully manufactured political and economic crisis his Government was
dismissed by the Governor General and heavily defeated in the ensuing election.
Ed.).
Kissinger was obsessed with fighting Communism, and it was announced
that the East Timorese freedom fighters (Fretilin)
were Communists, an analysis about as useful as saying that they were bogeymen.
The complicit governments wanted to keep on side with Indonesia, regionally a
big player which could be relied on to be brutal in suppressing freedom.
Suharto himself had come to power by killing anywhere from half a million to
more than a million opponents, people he called Communists and thus deserving
of death (see Peace Researcher 25, March 2002, Special Issue, “Ghosts
Of A Genocide: The CIA, Suharto And Terrorist Culture”, by Dennis Small, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr25intr.htm.
Ed.). All concerned had been there, done that. It’s possible that by
allowing speculation that Balibo followed a US nod
and wink, Kissinger and Suharto were signalling to the region that they were in
charge and weren’t to be messed with (remember that 1975 marked the humiliating
defeat of the US and its puppet governments in the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia
and Laos).
US allies, governed by elites who had to put down their own domestic
bogeymen, had traditionally taken Commie panic at face value. It was a default
setting. But this time, didn’t they take it too far? Measured purely as an act
of naked aggression, the invasion could be seen as cruder than other more
documented events such as Hitler’s attacks on Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland
in 1939. The East Timorese were subjected to 24 years of brutal occupation,
throughout which our governments continued to deny all. The film is based
on Jill Jolliffe’s book “Cover Up”. It tells the
story by cutting between the Balibo Five and East’s
covering of the same ground. It’s a particularly effective solution to the
tricky narrative problem of dealing with interlocking periods. It’s gripping
stuff.
183,000 Deaths Before Independence Won
Thanks to the work of groups like the Indonesia Human Rights Committee
the events that followed the Balibo massacre became well
known and after 183,000 deaths East Timor won independence in 1999 (Jose Ramos Horta, East’s guide, started off as Prime Minister and is
now President). Yet the NZ government was still doing all it could to see no
evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil. For a detailed account of New Zealand’s
shameful quarter of a century of appeasement of Indonesia vis a vis East Timor, see
my review of Maire Leadbeater’s
book “Negligent Neighbour” in Peace Researcher 34, July 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr34-141b.html).
The East Timorese were still to be punished for being a small and non-strategic
society, and for having suffered too long under Portuguese military
dictatorship (in that, had Portugal been a democracy in 1949, when, after
prolonged struggle, Indonesia was let go by the Netherlands, East Timor would
have been allowed independence).
Early in their relationship, when a frustrated
Horta is imploring East’s support, the young East
Timorese accuses the older Australian of being interested only in a few deaths
of white people rather than the rape of a culture. Given Horta’s
experiences, this is a sentiment that’s easy to identify with, but in the
immediacy of common struggle the difference is soon forgotten. Beyond the Balibo Five and Roger
East, there’s a third framing of the narrative. The first shots are of a young
East Timorese girl who witnesses East’s execution. She reappears as a mature
woman at the end, an indication that Connolly sees his story in terms of a
human solidarity which transcends race, time and gender. Cultural tension is
not his theme. Balibo is an expose of complicit
governments and a statement about freedom of the press.
No representative of the NZ government was present at the Mt Victoria
ceremony. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Murray McCully,
said he had raised the matter of war crimes with the Indonesian government on a
visit in 2009 but had not sought an apology and an admission. The present
Government is not the sort to wear its heart on its sleeve, but apologies are
in fashion. Lots of institutions have been saying they’re sorry, with varying
degrees of sincerity. The apologists tend to share a confidence that the thing
they’re apologising for is buried in the past with no present implications (by
contrast, in 2009, the Australian Federal Police, a mere 34 years after the
event, launched a war crimes investigation into the murders, following a 2007
coroner’s inquest. This investigation, specifically the suggestion of
prosecuting the Indonesian senior officer in charge at the Balibo
massacre, who went on to become a politician and minister, has led to
diplomatic tensions with Indonesia, which has banned this film. The inquest
also forced evidence into the open that the Australian Defence Signals
Directorate, the spy agency equivalent to the NZ Government Communications
Security Bureau, had, via its Darwin spybase, been
fully aware of the Indonesians’ invasion preparations and of their murder of
the Balibo Five. Ed.).
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