Balibo Five: Story of murdered journalists still shames our nation after 50 years
Who killed the five young journalists, who ordered their deaths and why the Indonesian Army insisted the men had to die is debated to this day.
The events of October 16, 1975, proved wrong Albert Einstein’s theory that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. No god would take credit for what happened that day.
Hours before the members of the Senate of Australia’s 29th parliament took their red leather seats to discuss the matters before them that day – chief of which was a motion to block supply to try to strangle the failing government of Gough Whitlam – five young journalists almost 4000km away were murdered.
Who killed them, who ordered their deaths and why the Indonesian Army insisted the men had to die is debated to this day. The vacuum of facts, the details manipulatively kept from Australians by Australians and the lies told about that day shame our nation.
But in the following hours history got a hurry on and decisions were taken that determined that the Balibo Five would be purposely reduced to footnotes in a vast geopolitical conspiracy driven by Cold War fear and seeking convenience.
It was determined that the journalists’ lives were dispensable and the Australian government fell in line. The deaths of the Balibo Five were to serve a greater “good” – the green light for Indonesia to attack, occupy and murderously colonise East Timor.
This particular ball got rolling in April 1974 when disgruntled Portuguese Army officers, who had been planning in secret for months to overthrow a dictatorship that had ruled Portugal since before World War II, decided to act. By then most elements of the army were on board. That month, local singer Paulo de Carvalho had carried his country’s hopes at the Eurovision Song Contest held in Brighton, England. He’d come equal last with his drab and dated song E Depois do Adeus (And After the Farewell), beaten by the then little known Swedish group ABBA and their song Waterloo.
But everyone in Portugal knew E Depois do Adeus, and the rebels put word out that if the song was played on the popular station Emissores Associados de Lisboa at 10.55pm on April 24, it was game on. The so-called Carnation Revolution was over within hours, costing the lives of just six people. But ultimately it would cost many more.
Portugal’s restive colonies – including Mozambique, Angola, Portuguese Guinea and East Timor – all had independence movements. Portugal’s colonial formula was to steal natural resources, “employ” forced labour and develop as little infrastructure as possible. The heartless Portuguese scurried off, leaving infant yet-to-be independent nations in chaos. Wars and massacres ensued.
The Portuguese had established trading settlements on East Timor about the 1510s and it was declared a Portuguese colony in 1702, 26 years before explorer James Cook was born. Following the Carnation Revolution and in anticipation of independence, political parties quickly formed across East Timor and fought each other for dominance in a brief civil war, the pro-Indonesian forces being assisted with weapons from Jakarta.
The East Timorese people’s separateness was unchallengeable: they spoke Tetun and Portuguese and were almost exclusively Catholic, a faith persecuted in mostly Muslim Indonesia next door.
Indonesia never considered independence for East Timor. At the time Indonesia was run by the brutal and corrupt dictator Suharto, who believed East Timor would likely become a communist state, and he did not want “a Cuba” on his eastern flank.
In meetings in Jakarta in 1974 and Townsville the following year, Whitlam let Suharto know that he saw positives in the integration of East Timor, not a consideration for the people of East Timor, but part of his wish for closer ties with our near neighbour. But Whitlam must have known these two things: Catholic East Timor was not about to sacrifice itself for Muslim Indonesia; and Suharto’s long-bloodied hands suggested he’d take it by untamed force.
Incursions of Indonesian soldiers, not always in uniform, began early in October 1975. Melbourne Channel 7 reporter Greg Shackleton, sound recordist Tony Stewart and cameraman Gary Cunningham, a New Zealander, arrived in East Timor on Saturday, October 11, to report on the illegal attacks. British reporter Malcolm Rennie and his countryman, cameraman Brian Peters, from Channel 9 in Sydney, joined them.
All Australia knows what happened next. When other news crews pulled out, the Balibo Five stayed to try to tell the story of the East Timorese and the barbarous cruelty to which Suharto was subjecting them. The men – all in their 20s – knew the danger but believed that as journalists they had a job to do, a story to tell, and should be safe as independent observers.
The red Australian flag painted on the Balibo house they shared proved futile. Indeed, it led Indonesia’s killers straight to them.
Their murders were planned. The team of Indonesian soldiers that entered Balibo at dawn on October 16 had instructions to kill the journalists. What a day it would be. The journalists were up at sunrise eating nuts around a table. About 6.23am Indonesia soldiers arrived and, a Sydney court heard in 2007, Captain Yunus Yosfiah led the attack and was said by witnesses to be the first to shoot dead an Australian. The others were shot and stabbed in a minute-long frenzy.
Soon after, an intercepted radio communication from Balibo confirmed the worst: “We have located and killed the five journalists on your instructions. We are now awaiting your instructions in order to know what we should do with the bodies and the personal effects of the journalists.”
Back in Canberra, not quite 11 hours later, the Senate voted on the Appropriation Bill (No. 2) – the notorious supply bill that doomed Whitlam. The president of the Senate, Tasmanian senator Justin O’Byrne, announced the vote: Ayes 29, Noes 28.
From the day of that Senate vote, the Balibo deaths were a sideshow as Whitlam tried to save himself and his government. Whitlam would be dismissed from office by governor-general John Kerr 25 days later. Australia would not be seeking the truth about the murders in 1975. It never would, other than half-hearted inquiries.
Hours later but on the same date, the director of the US policy planning staff, Winston Lord, oblivious to events in East Timor, sent secretary of state Henry Kissinger a briefing memorandum on American challenges in Asia following the US withdrawal from Vietnam. It was upbeat: “It looks like we can retain a foothold in Thailand for some residual military presence and continue our substantial presence in the Philippines; all Southeast Asian countries – save those in Indo-China – are eager to keep us engaged, politically and economically.” Kissinger was already organising a trip to Jakarta by his president, Gerald Ford. This would green-light Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor.
The Ford-Kissinger party flew to China and then on to Jakarta on the evening of December 5, 1975. Suharto met them at the airport and he and his foreign minister, Adam Malik, sat down with Ford and Kissinger and sealed East Timor’s fate for the next quarter century.
By then, the Indonesian Navy was already shelling East Timor. The Ford trip was a courtesy call. Suharto’s invasion plans were well under way; indeed, it is said that as Kissinger and Ford’s plane – Air Force One was then known as the Spirit of 76 – ascended from Jakarta airport there were military aircraft taxiing behind them to head to Dili. The Spirit of 76 headed off from Jakarta at 11.26am, destined for Manila and a meeting with Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, another Asian domino on which the US could rely.
Americans did not know much about the East Timorese – George W. Bush called them East Timorians – but we did. They had bravely assisted Australian troops when the Japanese occupied it from February 1942, and while we lost 155 troops from the Sparrow Force, the Japanese killed up to 70,000 locals, many of them for siding with Australia despite Portugal being neutral during the war.
To underscore how things would be in East Timor under Indonesia’s jackbooted invaders, they rounded up an AAP reporter from Darwin, Roger East, who had travelled to Dili to try unravel the mystery of the Balibo Five. On December 8, 1975, officially day two of the invasion, soldiers bound East’s wrists in wire, marched him to the Dili wharf and, despite his appeals to them that he was an Australian journalist, repeatedly shot him in the back. Suharto’s henchmen were making sure Australians understood their place.
Our nation stood by as reportedly up to 308,000 East Timorese were murdered by Indonesia up until 1999. That is more than 36 a day. The military term for the strategy in the territory was “encirclement and annihilation”. It worked well. The genocide was the price East Timorese paid for insisting they were not part of another country. Australia considered trade and relations with Indonesia superior to those lives. The Balibo slaughter was just a nuisance.
Jose Ramos-Horta, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner who had led the Fretilin resistance movement and who later become prime minister and president of his liberated land, was a lonely voice in exile. Xanana Gusmao, also with Fretilin in the early days and later also to become president and prime minister of East Timor, was the loudest voice for freedom, which was merely amplified when he was captured, tried on rebellion and gun charges, convicted and sentenced to life in an Indonesian jail. The pope wrote to him and his visitors included Nelson Mandela.
Successive Australian prime ministers toed the Indonesian line on East Timor’s annexation until John Howard indicated to Suharto’s successor BJ Habibie that the East Timorese should be given a vote for independence.
Richard Woolcott, in 1975 the Australian ambassador to Jakarta, wrote in 2003 that some of Habibie’s ministers were happy to be “rid of 600,000 Catholics”. They voted overwhelmingly to be free of their replacement colonial masters and Australian peacemakers helped in the transition to a peaceful independence, but not before departing Indonesians angrily torched the place.
Arguably independence would not have come but for Ramos-Horta, Gusmao and the small group of relatives of the Balibo Five who kept pressure up on the Australian and Indonesian authorities for decades for the truth to be told. They also sided with the East Timorese in their fight for freedom and independence. After all, it had cost kin their lives.
Some timid requests were made by Australia about what had happened to the Balibo Five, but these were rebuffed with lies and obfuscation, and not just by the Indonesians. The incinerated remains of the victims were packed into four boxes. (This was to represent Indonesian authorities’ original claim that four men had been killed, the bones crudely divvied up.) Then they accepted that five men had died. Australians would just have to be satisfied with four boxes.
Incredibly, no forensic expert examined the remains; only the Australian embassy general practitioner, Henry Will, looked at them and helpfully noted they were “probably human”.
The remains were moved to Jakarta, placed in a single coffin and buried without any communication with the families on December 5, 1975, in a cemetery south of the capital. Woolcott, ever keen to brush away the bothersome interruption to the relationship he had cultivated with the Indonesians, attended in a small gathering of embassy staff.
Among those unaware of the funeral was the Stewart family from Melbourne’s St Kilda. Their son and brother Tony was 21 and on his first overseas assignment. The Stewarts have seldom been told anything, even 50 years later.
Tony’s brother Paul, then 15, was walking home from De La Salle, a Catholic boys school nearby, and saw a Melbourne Herald newspaper poster outside a newsagent stating “Five journalists missing in Timor”. “Mum had mentioned something about my older brother going to Timor,” Paul said this week. “I ran all the way home, two miles.
“Sure enough, there was my mum and all my aunties sitting around the kitchen table crying.”
At that stage the family had been told Tony was missing with the others. But they consoled themselves with the thought that the Indonesians were friendly towards Australia and things would work out.
October 16 was also the date of Paul’s year 10 school social and his mother, June, insisted he go. “She wanted everything to be back to normal.” Towards the end an announcement was made at the dance that Paul’s brother had just been found alive. “I went, you beauty, and danced my arse off and then ran home so happy. When I walked into the kitchen, Mum’s opening words were that this was a false report, Tony is still missing.”
Paul said the only communication his family had with the embassy in Jakarta was a note to ask where to send the bill for the coffin.
The destiny of the buried remains – whose bones are they or, as some other have speculated, are they even human? – divided the Balibo families, some believe purposely.
At one stage there was a plan to spend perhaps $500,000 disinterring the remains and digging up the ground around the Balibo house for DNA testing. At a divisive meeting, Paul spoke against this. He was concerned that Australia would spend that money when it was clear so many other locals had been killed at that same site that day and in the following days. He preferred the money be spent on a freshwater system for the village.
“My mum never got over it,” says Paul. “She lived the rest of her life distressed. She managed to keep a lid on it all because she had four other kids to bring up.”
He says his mother never blamed Indonesians, nor their army’s foot soldiers – often from poor parts of the country.
After June died, the family received a letter from a mother in Java who was aware of the Stewarts’ loss and of Paul’s activism on behalf of the East Timorese. She wrote: “I know about your brother and I want you to know that every night in our prayers to Allah we include Tony Stewart.” She asked that the Stewarts include her son’s name in their prayers. She told them her son had been taken from their farm, put in uniform, sent to East Timor, “and we never, ever heard from him again”.
Through the years, Paul and I tapped the goodwill of News Corp’s newspaper readers and organised shipping containers of food, goods, farm implements, bicycles and even musical instruments that were sent to Dili. We also raised funds compiling CDs, one of which briefly topped the charts in Australia and included – thanks to Paul’s contacts – unreleased songs by Midnight Oil and U2. Paul remains active in the welfare of the East Timorese, and the band he formed with refugees in Melbourne in 1992, the Dili All Stars, performs around the world to highlight the issues of those who live there.
But, largely, Australia stands condemned for the decades it turned its back on the East Timorese, notwithstanding their unending faith and support of Australians. For years we forgot them. But they never forgot us.
Some years ago, when Paul lay perilously ill in Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, I visited him. The nurse led me to his room but warned me he’d be sleeping. I sat by his bed for an hour or so. I had heard nothing like it. Were snoring an Olympic event, I was before a gold medallist.
Then his bedside phone noisily rang. I picked it up. The caller asked for Paul. I said he was deeply asleep. Could I take a message?
“Yes, can you please tell him Jose Ramos-Horta called?”
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