The Australian - May 17, 2007
Indonesia had carte blanche for force: Balibo hearing
Dan Box
The Indonesian Government believed it had been given "carte blanche" by the then Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam to launch the 1975 invasion of East Timor that led to the killings of the Balibo five.
Giving evidence at the coronial inquest into the death of one of the five journalists, Brian Peters, the then head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, criticised the government's policy at the time as "chilling in its simplicity".
Mr Whitlam had initially encouraged Indonesia that it had a legitimate claim to Portuguese Timor, Mr Renouf said, forcing him to personally insist that Indonesia could only exercise this claim through a democratic vote not military force.
"I always thought that Indonesia would adopt the position that we have carte blanche, we can go ahead with force and I'm not sure they believed the Australian Government would oppose that,'' Mr Renouf said.
The former diplomat was also scathing in his description of the Indonesian attack on the Timorese village of Balibo, on October 16, 1975, which he said broke UN agreements and international law.
"I took strong objection to the killings of the five journalists. I thought it was bad enough for the breach of international law ... but I thought the killing of the five journalists therefore was revolting, quite unnecessary, cold blooded and really merciless, wanton , and infamous act.
"When I came to my conclusion about the responsibility and the fault lying with the Indonesian Government ... I found that feeling shared by nearly everybody who was in the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time.''
ABC – Thursday, May 17, 2007. 3:50pm (AEST)
Balibo Five killed in 'cold blood'
A former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs has told a Sydney coroners court that the 1975 killings of the Balibo Five journalists were "revolting" and "cold-blooded".
Allan Renouf was the department secretary when five Australian-based journalists were killed during the Indonesian army's attack on the village of Balibo in East Timor in 1975.
Speaking at the Glebe Coroners Court in the inquest into the death of cameraman Brian Peters, Mr Renouf said the department had been given advance warning of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.
But he said he assumed the journalists had followed then-prime minister Gough Whitlam's advice not to travel to East Timor.
Mr Renouf said he and his colleagues firmly believed the men were deliberately killed. He described the killings as "revolting", "unnecessary", "cold-blooded" and "merciless". Mr Renouf said his feelings were shared by others in the department.
Earlier the inquest heard that a former officer at the Department of Foreign Affairs was told Indonesian troops deliberately killed the Balibo Five so they would not expose Indonesia's actions.
Jim Dunn said that a few months after the attack he met an East Timorese man, Jose Martins, who had fought with the Indonesian military.
Mr Martins told him Indonesian troops deliberately killed the journalists to stop them exposing Indonesia's covert operation.
Mr Dunn told the court he believed the soldiers would not have killed the men unless they had had orders from higher up in the Indonesian military.
Australia's ambassador to Indonesia at the time of the killings, Richard Woolcott, told the court he sent two reports about the impending invasion to Canberra in the days before it happened.
Mr Woolcott said he did not know the journalists were in Balibo, and if he had, he would have taken steps to protect them.
The court has heard it took almost a month for Indonesian authorities to confirm the men had died.
Mr Woolcott said he assumed that was because the Indonesians were deeply embarrassed by the deaths. He said the embassy pressed the Indonesians for information about how the men died, but never got a precise answer.
quinta-feira, maio 17, 2007
Ainda Balibo
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Violência regressa e faz um morto e oito feridos
Jornal de Notícias, 17/05/07
Díli, em Timor-Leste, é o balanço de mais um dia de confrontos feito pelo inspector Mateus Fernandes à Efe e que faz recear o ressurgimento da violência. A UNPol contraria alegações de uma "orgia de violência" contra apoiantes da Fretilin, como defende o partido que apoiou "Lu Olo".
Arsénio Bano, ministro e membro da Comissão Política da Fretilin, insistiu que os seus apoiantes "estão a ser atacados e intimidados por todo o país", na sequência da vitória de José Ramos-Horta nas eleições presidenciais, falando mesmo de uma "orgia de violência" comemorativa.
Arsénio Bano declarou também, em comunicado emitido pelo partido, que as casas destruídas no Bairro Pité são de apoiantes da Fretilin e que "a Polícia das Nações Unidas confirmou que os incidentes foram politicamente motivados".
Reagindo a estas acusações, fonte oficial da UNPol declarou que "não há qualquer base para essa acusação".
"De todas as explicações dadas no local pela população nenhuma tinha motivação política", vincou a mesma fonte.
Arsénio Bano apoia-se no facto de o Bairro Pité "não ser uma área da Fretilin" e de nas eleições presidenciais "ter votado em força em José Ramos-Horta". No entanto, a informação oficial das Nações Unidas não refere qualquer ligação partidária de atacantes ou de vítimas.
Os dois incidentes obrigaram à intervenção das forças autónomas de Polícia da Malásia e da de Portugal (com militares da GNR), apoiados por meios das Forças de Estabilização Internacionais. "As pessoas que cometem actos criminosos serão tratadas como criminosos pela Polícia", declarou o representante especial do secretário-geral da ONU em Timor-Leste.
"Não serão toleradas alegações de motivação política no seguimento das eleições da semana passada", acrescentou Atul Khare.
Enquanto isso, o Parlamento aprovou uma alteração da lei eleitoral para as legislativas, introduzindo mudanças no local de contagem e no conteúdo do boletim de voto.
Com a alteração, é eliminada a contagem em cada estação de voto, como aconteceu nas presidenciais, e estabelecida a contagem "nas respectivas sedes dos distritos". A contagem passa a ser feita pela assembleia de apuramento distrital imediatamente à chegada das urnas. Outra alteração aprovada pelo Parlamento é relativa ao boletim de voto, onde não constará, depois de debatida essa hipótese, a fotografia do cabeça-de-lista de cada partido ou coligação.
http://jn.sapo.pt/2007/05/17/mundo/violencia_regressa_e_um_morto_e_oito.html
The Balibo Five
There's a story of a local newspaper headline that reads "Thousands Die In Earthquake: No Local People Involved". It may be apocryphal, but it's so true that people only take an interest in a tragedy when some of their own people are involved.
An Aussie friend told me that when InterFET went into East Timor in 1999, he heard someone say "'Bout bloody time - after what they did to our journos". My friend was puzzled as he didn't know the story of the 'Balibo Five', the five TV newsmen killed in the border town in October 1975. For years the official line was that the men died in crossfire between rival factions, and that they were unwise to have been were they were, but the recent inquest in Sydney has heard from Timorese witnesses who confirmed that the men were murdered by the Indonesian military when they tried to surrender.
The story of the Balibo Five, like that of East Timor itself, is a squalid tale of deception and cover-up, and not just on the part of the Australian government. While the men were working for Australian TV channels, only two of them were Australians - two of the others were British, and one was a New Zealander. But as far as London and Wellington were concerned, it was a matter for Canberra. After all, these men lived with their families in Australia, worked in Australia, so for all intents and purposes, they might as well have been Australian.
Most of my East Timorese friends don't know about the Balibo Five, or about Roger East, the Australian journalist who went to Dili "to get the truth out", only to meet the same fate as the other men when he was killed on the day of the invasion. And why should they? Their families all experienced indignities and traumas of their own - they weren't just bereaved, like the families of the Balibo Five, they were tortured as well. As a friend remarked "I wasn't born in 1975!" so if she doesn't know about what happened to her own people, then why should she know about the fate of a handful of Westerners? Yes, their fate was gruesome, but so too was the fate of many more East Timorese.
I have met the relatives of two of the men, and am in touch with another, and their attitude could not be more different from that of some in the Aussie media who bang on about "our boys" as if only their deaths mattered, and those of East Timorese were just 'collateral damage'. Their relatives were killed because, as Greg Shackleton's widow, Shirley, said "the Indonesians had every intention of invading East Timor, and they didn't want the world to know."
There are now plans afoot to turn the story into a movie. Thankfully it isn't Steven Spielberg behind it, or the men would be depicted as Americans, or some other Hollywood historical travesty. José Ramos Horta, one of the last people to see the men alive, is now likely to become East Timor's next president, so it will be interesting to see how he is portrayed. Had this movie been made ten or fifteen years ago, there would have been less risk of it becoming a hagiography for Horta. But then again, it would never have been made because it might have offended the Indonesians.
However, rumour has it that Roger East is going to be portrayed as a hard-drinking foul-mouthed ocker, when he was anything but. That would be more like Bill Mabbely in Timothy Mo's 1991 novel, The Redundancy of Courage, set in 'Danu' a country based on East Timor. Bill Mabbely calls the malai (Indonesian) soldiers 'pig fuckers' before they shoot him dead, as they did Roger East. But Roger East never swore, not so much because he was a stern moralist, but because he felt people who did lacked vocabulary. That makes him more interesting, so why make it up?
http://livingtimorously.blogspot.com/2007/04/balibo-five.html
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Ainda Balibo
The Australian - Maio 17, 2007
Audição sobre Balibo: A Indonésia tinha carta brança para uma solução de força
Dan Box
O Governo Indonésio acreditava que lhe tinha sido dada "carta branca" pelo então primeiro-ministro Australiano Gough Whitlam para lançar a invasão de Timor-Leste em 1975 que levou à morte dos Cinco de Balibo.
Ao prestar evidência no inquérito judicial à morte dos cinco jornalistas, Brian Peters, o então responsável pelo Departamento dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Alan Renouf, criticou a política do governo da época como "chocante na sua simplicidade".
O Sr Whitlam inicialmente encorajou a Indonésia que tinha uma reivindicação legítima ao Timor Português, disse o Sr Renouf, forçando-o a insistir pessoalmente que a Indonésia apenas podia exercer a sua reivindicação por intermédia de uma votação democrática e não pela força militar.
"Sempre pensei que a Indonésia adoptaria a posição temos carta branca, podemos avançar com força e não tenho a certeza que acreditavam que o governo Australiano se oporia a isso,'' disse o Sr Renouf.
O antigo diplomata foi ainda destruidor na sua descrição do ataque Indonésio à aldeia Timorense de Balibo, em 16 de Outubro 1975, que disse quebrou os acordos da ONU e da lei internacional.
"Objectei fortemente a morte dos cinco jornalistas. Pensava que era demasiado mal o rompimento da lei internacional l... mas pensei que a morte dos cinco jornalistas depois disso foi revoltante, bastente desnecessário, a sangue frio e realmente sem misericórdia, vingativo, um acto infame.
"Quando tirei conclusões sobre a responsabilidade e a falta do governo Indonésio ... concluí que esse sentimento era partilhado por quase toda a gente que estava no Departamento dos Negócios Estrangeiros na altura.''
ABC – Quinta-feira, Maio 17, 2007. 3:50pm (AEST)
Cinco de Balibo mortos a 'sangue frio'
Um antigo responsável do Departamento dos Negócios Estrangeiros disse num tribunal de inquérito de Sydney que as mortes de 1975 dos Cinco jornalistas de Balibo Five foram "revoltantes" e a "sangue-frio ".
Allan Renouf foi o secretário do departamento quando cinco jornalistas baseados na Austrália foram mortos durante o ataque das forças armadas Indonésias na aldeia de Balibo em Timor-Leste em 1975.
Falando no Tribunal de Inquérito de Glebe sobre o inquérito à morte do operador de câmara Brian Peters, o Sr Renouf disse que ao departamento tinha sido dado aviso antecipado da invasão de Timor-Leste pela Indonésia.
Mas disse, assumiu que os jornalistas tinham seguido o conselho do então primeiro-ministro Gough Whitlam para não viajarem para Timor-Leste.
O Sr Renouf disse que ele e os seus colegas acreditavam firmemente que os homens foram mortos deliberadamente. Descreveu as mortes como "revoltantes", "desnecessárias", "a sangue-frio " e "sem misericórdia". O Sr Renouf disse que os seus sentimentos eram partilhados por outros no departamento.
Antes o inquérito ouviu que um antigo funcionário do Departamento dos Negócios Estrangeiros que lhe contaram que as tropas Indonésias mataram deliberadamente os Cinco de Balibo para que não expusessem as acções da Indonésia.
Jim Dunn disse que alguns meses depois do ataque se encontrou com um Timorense, José Martins, que tinha lutado com os militares Indonésios.
O Sr Martins disse-lhe que as tropas Indonésias mataram deliberadamente os cinco jornalistas para evitar que expusessem a operação secreta Indonésia.
O Sr Dunn disse ao tribunal que acreditava que os soldados não teriam morto os homens a não ser que tivessem vindo ordens de cima aos militares Indonésios.
O embaixador da Austrália na Indonésia na altura das mortes, Richard Woolcott, disse no tribunal que enviara dois relatórios acerca da eminente invasão para Canberra dias antes disso ter acontecido.
O Sr Woolcott disse que não sabia que os jornalistas estavam em Balibo, e se soubesse, teria dado passos para os proteger.
O tribunal ouviu que demorou quase um mês para as autoridades Indonésias confirmarem que os homens tinham morrido.
O Sr Woolcott disse que assumiu que isso aconteceu porque os Indonésios ficaram profundamente embaraçados com as mortes. Disse que a embaixada pressionou os Indonésios para obter informações sobre como morreram os homens, mas nunca obteve uma resposta precisa.
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