THE INVASION FORCE was led by Ambassador Woolcott’s confidant, General Benny Murdani. The inhabitants of Dili were subjected to what the historian John Taylor has described as ‘systematic killing, gratuitous violence and primitive plunder’.49 The former Bishop of Dili, Costa Lopez, said, ‘The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the street – all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing.’50 At 2 pm on December 9, fifty-nine men were brought on to the wharf at Dili harbour and shot one by one, with the crowd ordered to count. The victims were forced to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Earlier in the day, women and children had been executed in a similar way. An eye-witness reported, ‘The Indonesians tore the crying children from their mothers and passed them back to the crowd. The women were shot one by one, with the onlookers being ordered by the Indonesians to count.’51
As in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the first to die were often minorities. The Chinese population was singled out. Five hundred were reportedly killed on the first day of the attack.52 An eye-witness described how he and others were ordered to ‘tie the bodies to iron poles, attach bricks and throw the bodies in the sea’.53 In Maubara and Luiquica, on the north-west coast, the Chinese population was decimated.54 The killing of whole families, and especially children, appeared to be systematic. Soldiers were described swinging infants in the air and smashing their heads on rocks, with an officer explaining, ‘When you clean the field, don’t you kill all the snakes, the small and large alike?’55 ‘Indonesian troops’, wrote John Taylor, ‘had been given orders to crush all opposition ruthlessly, and were told they were fighting communists in the cause of Jihad [Holy War], just as they had done in Indonesia in 1965.’56
When President Ford’s plane touched down in Hawaii from Jakarta, he was asked for a reaction to the Indonesian invasion. He smiled and said, ‘We’ll talk about that later.’ His press secretary added, ‘The President always deplores violence, wherever it occurs.’57 Returning to Washington, Kissinger summoned his senior staff to an emergency meeting at the State Department. According to the minutes of that meeting (marked ‘Secret/Sensitive’), Kissinger was furious that he had been sent two cables reminding him that the Indonesians were breaking American law by using American weapons in the invasion. His fear was that the cables would be leaked and that Congress and the public would find out about his ‘big wink’ to the Suharto regime.
KISSINGER: On the Timor thing, that will leak in three months and it will come out that Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law. How many people . . . know about this?
STAFF MEMBER: Three.
KISSINGER: Plus everybody in this meeting, so you’re talking about not less than 15 or 20. You have a responsibility to recognise that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me.58
Although clearly aware that the use of American arms was illegal, Kissinger sought to justify continuing to supply them by making the victim the aggressor. ‘Can’t we construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defence?’ he asked. Told that this would not work, Kissinger gave orders that he wanted arms shipments ‘stopped quietly’, but secretly ‘start[ed] again in January’.59 In fact, as the killings increased, American arms shipments doubled.
Five days after the invasion, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that ‘strongly deplore[d]’ Indonesia’s aggression and called on it to withdraw its troops ‘without delay’. The governments of the US, Britain, Australia, Germany and France abstained. Japan, the biggest investor in Indonesia, voted against the resolution. Ten days later, as Western intelligence agencies informed their governments of the scale of the massacres in East Timor, the Security Council unanimously called on ‘all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor’. Again, Indonesia was ordered to withdraw its troops ‘without delay’. This time the US, Britain and France voted in favour, not wanting to side publicly with the aggressor in such a public forum.60
This resolution authorised the Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, to send an envoy to East Timor to make an ‘assessment’. But East Timor was quickly relegated by the Permanent Five – US, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China – which showed no interest in backing the authority of the UN envoy, Winspeare Guicciardi. Six weeks after the invasion Guicciardi was allowed by the Indonesian military to visit Dili, but was so restricted and misled that his visit was worthless.
In a document prepared for Guicciardi’s visit, the Indonesian military laid down guidelines to its battalion commanders and administrative officials, which became the model for subsequent visits by delegations of foreign officials. ‘All members of the armed forces’, the document read, ‘must wear civilian dress so that it should appear to the delegation that they are unarmed civilians . . . Roads must be cleaned and free of military equipment’. Answers to questions such as ‘What treatment is given to prisoners-of-war?’ were to be rehearsed, with ‘sensible soldiers playing the role of prisoners-of-war who are being well-treated . . . To ensure realism rations should be improved and those playing the part of prisoners must fulfil their role scrupulously.’
The document concluded: ‘Banners of protest against UN interference should be prepared, such as the following [in English in the original] – “United Nations hands off Timor! We are already integrated with Indonesia! United Nations we do not want your intervention here!”’ (This document was held in secret for twelve years by an official in the East Timorese civil service, and was finally smuggled into West Timor under the floor carpet of a car.)61
On February 4, 1976, the CIA reported the success of the charade: ‘Jakarta has managed, during the UN representative’s visit, to conceal all signs of Indonesian military forces . . .’ The Portuguese offered the Secretary-General a warship so that his envoy could be landed in Fretilin-held areas. The CIA reported, ‘The Indonesians are considering whether to sink the vessel before it reaches Darwin . . .’62 This was enough to frighten away the United Nations. In striking contrast to action taken against Iraq in 1991, neither the Secretary-General nor the Western powers uttered a word in condemnation of Indonesia for failing to comply with a Security Council resolution, and for violating almost every human rights provision in the UN Charter. On the contrary, the US Government lent diplomatic support to the invasion.
In a secret cable to Kissinger on January 23, 1976, the United States Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, boasted about the ‘considerable progress’ he had made in blocking UN action on a number of issues related to the developing world, and he mentioned East Timor. This, he explained, was part of ‘a basic foreign policy goal, that of breaking up the massive blocs of nations, mostly new nations, which for so long had been arrayed against us in international forums’.63 Later Moynihan wrote, ‘The United States wished things to turn out as they did [in East Timor], and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.’64
Moynihan also made clear that he understood the nature of his achievement. He referred to an admission by the Indonesian puppet ‘deputy governor’ of East Timor, Francisco Lopez de Cruz, that 60,000 people had already died by February 1976 and acknowledged that this was ‘10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War’.65 In 1980 Moynihan was the keynote speaker at a conference organised by the Committee for United Nations Integrity, which denounced the United Nations as ‘no longer the guardian of social justice, human rights and equality among nations’ because it is ‘perverted by irrelevant political machinations’ and is ‘in danger of becoming a force against peace itself’.
In the week of the Indonesian invasion, while he was carrying out his assignment to undermine UN efforts on behalf of the people of East Timor, Moynihan was awarded the highest honour of the International League for the Rights of Man (now the International League for Human Rights) for his role as ‘one of the most forthright advocates of human rights on the national and international scene’.66
America’s support for Indonesia also had strategic Cold War motives. In August 1976, US Defence Department officials met the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, and cautioned him against straying from the position of his predecessor, Gough Whitlam. American ‘security interests’, reported the Melbourne Age, required the continuing ‘goodwill’ of the Suharto regime.67 The Pentagon’s uppermost concern was that American nuclear submarines should retain right of passage through the Ombai-Wetar deep-water channels that pass by East Timor. This was essential if the submarines were to continue to move undetected between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.68
Australia’s compliance was nothing short of enthusiastic. In October of that year, Fraser flew to Jakarta and, in a speech to Indonesia’s parliament, gave the first public recognition of the occupation of East Timor. At a press conference, he said his government now ‘acknowledged the merger’, but ‘only for purely humanitarian reasons’.69 Fraser was accompanied by J. B. Reid, managing director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP), Australia’s largest corporation. BHP had recently acquired a controlling share in the Woodside-Burmah company, which had been drilling for oil on and offshore from East Timor before the invasion. It was estimated that the seabed between East Timor and Australia, the ‘Timor Gap’, contained one of the richest oil and natural gas fields in the world.70
Ambassador Woolcott, in his cable the previous year recommending ‘a pragmatic rather than a principled stand’, had written, ‘It would seem to me the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor’.71
Other Western governments vied with each other to ‘sympathise with Indonesia’s problems’ by selling Jakarta arms – which, not surprisingly, were used in East Timor. The leading sympathiser was France, which supplied the Indonesian army with tanks and armoured cars and the air force with Alouette attack helicopters, ideal for low-flying ‘counter-insurgency’ in the mountainous interior of East Timor. In announcing the arms sale, reported Le Monde in September 1978, the French Government declared that it would abstain from any discussion in the United Nations about East Timor so as to avoid placing ‘Indonesia in an embarrassing position’.72
At the same time, the British Labour Government signed a deal with Indonesia for four Hawk ground-attack aircraft. When asked about the implications for East Timor, the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, said that the estimates of the killings had been ‘exaggerated’ and that ‘the most reliable estimates [are] at around 10,000, probably less [and] this includes the civil war . . .’ He went on, ‘Such a total is, in all conscience, tragic enough, but foreign observers, whom the Indonesians have allowed to visit East Timor, have reported that the scale of fighting since then has been greatly reduced.’73
The opposite was true. Owen’s ‘reliable estimates’ of deaths merely reflected Indonesian propaganda, and, far from the scale of fighting being ‘greatly reduced’, the genocide was then actually reaching its height. Moreover, Western – mainly American – military equipment was now the main instrument of terror. Eye-witnesses to the onslaughts in East Timor spoke of scenes reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. ‘After September [1978],’ wrote a priest, ‘the war intensified. Military aircraft were in action all day long. Hundreds of human beings die daily, their bodies left as food for the vultures. If bullets don’t kill us, we die from epidemic disease; villages are being completely destroyed.’74
Canada, one of the leading Western investors in Indonesia, broke its own laws barring the export of weapons to areas of conflict simply by pretending that there was no fighting in East Timor. The Canadian Government claimed that ‘groups opposed to the Fretilin political faction requested the assistance of Indonesia [and] made a formal request for the integration of East Timor, and Timor is now an integral part of Indonesia’.75 Indonesia was also backed by its partners in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and by most Islamic countries, by India, which had annexed Portuguese Goa in 1963, and by Japan, which looked to Indonesia for both commerce and vital oil supplies. The Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc allies split their votes in the UN over East Timor rather than upset their own burgeoning realpolitik with Indonesia.
As for Portugal, since the Governor’s humiliating withdrawal to Atauro Island (the aptly named ‘Isle of Goats’), the ineptitude of its handling of its responsibilities might have been excused by the enduring confusion in Lisbon. But the Portuguese appear to have taken, in secret, quite deliberate steps to ‘solve the problem’ of their colony.
In September 1974, the Portuguese foreign minister, Mário Soares, met his Indonesian counterpart, Adam Malik, and reportedly agreed that Portugal would not discourage support for East Timor’s ‘integration’ with Indonesia. This led the deputy security chief in the Jakarta regime, Ali Murtopo, to remark that ‘the problem of Portuguese Timor is now clear’.76 The Indonesians may have distorted Soares’ ‘agreement’; certainly, in public Soares maintained that Portugal had a moral obligation to abide by the wishes of the East Timorese. However, when Ali Murtopo made an unpublicised visit to Lisbon a few weeks later, and described to Portuguese leaders Australia’s accommodating attitude, he was, according to one account, told that full independence was ‘unrealistic’ and ‘nonsense’.77
Six years later the ghosts of East Timor returned Hamlet-like to Portugal. A 1,000-page secret government report on East Timor was ordered declassified by President Antonio Eanes. It described a series of clandestine meetings between Portuguese and Indonesian officials in which Lisbon’s left-wing government accommodated Jakarta. At the last of these meetings, in Hong Kong in June 1975, the Portuguese told the Indonesians they had drafted East Timor’s decolonisation statute in such a way that it would give them a year to try to persuade the population to accept integration with Indonesia. If this was rejected, and Indonesia chose to use force, ‘the Portuguese Government is not prepared to create problems, and could easily send a ship to Timor to evacuate all Portuguese’.78
David Munro and I had planned a documentary film about East Timor for more than a year. We wanted to pick up where Max Stahl’s exposé had left off and to find out what had happened to those who had ‘disappeared’ following the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991; and we wanted to ask why other atrocities and injustices had remained unchallenged for so many years. We intended to film in Portugal, Australia, the United States, Britain and in East Timor, if that was possible. An eye-witness report was crucial; and whether we could get into East Timor with cameras, and get our film out, would determine whether or not the project went ahead. It would be a relatively expensive operation; and although Central Television was prepared to stand most of the cost, another backer was needed.
Australia seemed the most likely place to look for funding. For geographical and historical reasons there is perhaps a greater awareness of East Timor’s suffering in Australia than in any Western country, apart from Portugal. In 1992 I approached the Australian Film and Finance Corporation in Sydney for co-production money. The AFFC at first welcomed my application, while reminding me that final approval rested on a ‘pre-sale’ commitment by an Australian broadcaster to air the film on Australian television. All my films have been shown in Australia. Curiously, there were no takers for this one. Cost was given as the reason. Shortly afterwards an AFFC official phoned me in London. ‘Timor’, she said, ‘is too much of a political hot potato in Australia while there is a Labor Government in power.’79
The ‘special relationship’ the Australian establishment believes it has with Jakarta involves communications and the profitable commercial sharing of satellite ‘footprints’.80 In 1993 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) began transmitting programmes to Asia via an Indonesian satellite, the ‘Palapa’, to broadcast programmes to Asia. This ‘packaging’ venture is to include a reciprocal deal with Indonesia’s TPI network, which is controlled by Suharto’s eldest daughter. It has been described as a ‘showcase for Australia’. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian programmes will need to be ‘encoded to meet the requirements of the [Indonesian] Ministry of Information . . . Many Asian governments . . . are very concerned about unwelcome political messages raining on viewers from satellites . . . Given the Australian media’s touchy relationship with Jakarta, the prospect of the ABC using an Indonesian satellite to broadcast current affairs must be questionable’.81
Editorial guidelines for the ABC’s satellite signal are laid down in a document drawn up by Radio Australia management, which is headed by a career diplomat. While insisting that journalists should not ‘distort or censor’ material in order to avoid offending Asian governments, the managers say that material critical of regimes should be broadcast in ‘circumspect’ language. ‘Discreet understatement’, said the document, ‘is better than melodramatic embellishment’ and it warns against the portrayal of ‘fanatical separatists . . . freedom fighter terrorists’.82 How the genocide in East Timor can be reported with ‘discreet understatement’ is not explained, neither is it made clear which ‘freedom fighters’ the officials consider ‘fanatical’ and ‘terrorist’.
In 1977 the Indonesian regime threatened to close down the ABC’s bureau in Jakarta after its correspondent in Washington, Ray Martin, reported that the Indonesians were using Napalm in East Timor. The threat was relayed to Martin personally by the director general of the ABC, who demanded to know why his scoop had not been verified by other media coverage. (It was.) In 1981 the ABC office in Jakarta was closed down after Radio Australia’s reporting of the famine in East Timor, which was the direct result of the Indonesian occupation. It was re-opened in 1990 only after ‘careful negotiations’. In future, reported the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade are to have regular meetings with the corporation [the ABC], as it has already done with Radio Australia, to discuss where problems with the service might arise’.83 No problems have arisen. ABC correspondents in Jakarta dutifully report the pronouncements and denials of the regime. After rare videotape of the East Timorese resistance leader, Koni Santana, was made available to the new satellite service, it was ‘lost’ en route to the Darwin studios.
In November 1991 British photographer Steve Cox, who was a witness to the Santa Cruz massacre, was the only passenger on a flight from Timor to be body-searched by Australian Customs officials when it landed at Darwin. ‘They looked at every passport and picked me out,’ he said. ‘It was clear they had been tipped off and were looking for my film. They were disappointed. I had given it to another passenger, who hid it in her clothing.’84
We planned to enter East Timor in three ‘teams’. David and I would go first, followed by Ben Richards,fn1 a voluntary aid worker, and Max Stahl. Each of us would have a Hi–8 video camera, which is not much bigger than a professional stills camera. David had designed a bag with concealed compartments in which the camera operated through a gauze screen. We had started out with a number of eccentric ideas for disguises – priests was one rejected early, followed by ornithologists, although we did acquire the latest volume of Birds of Borneo, Java and Bali in preparation for a period of study.
This, however, was overtaken by ‘Adventure Tours’, which, according to a draft brochure I wrote, offered ‘a new concept in developing third world tourism’ that promised ‘hard currency of the kind only tourism brings’. In 1989, when it was thought that Fretilin was beaten, the Jakarta regime decided to lift the ‘batik curtain’ around East Timor just enough, it hoped, to improve its international image and to be able to say that its ‘27th province’ was not closed to the outside world. A policy of ‘openness’ was declared and a few tourists were permitted to travel to Dili, where they were restricted and watched. Tourism, believed the generals, would legitimise their hold on East Timor.
Although the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery had set back ‘openness’, we believed we stood a reasonable chance of success disguised as ‘travel consultants’. A London travel agency provided us with documents which lauded our business acumen and which we had translated into Bahasa Indonesia. (Of course, if all else failed, we could talk authoritatively about the Lorico, Timor’s ‘curiously small parrot’.) In the meantime, Ben would be travelling on ‘aid business’; and Max would acquire yet another identity. We expected one or two of us to be caught, probably David and myself. One successful camera would be enough. We agreed to meet again in six weeks.
Ben and Max flew direct to Indonesia; David and I flew to Australia. In the warm, late southern winter, Sydney, my hometown, was welcoming. I had arranged to meet former Ambassador Richard Woolcott, now retired as head of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Standing in front of a spectacular Javanese painting in the dining-room of his flat overlooking Sydney Harbour, he seemed the embodiment of a career diplomat, courteous, with a constant faint smile.
I reminded him of his leaked 1975 cable recommending a ‘pragmatic rather than a principled approach’ to East Timor. He said that what had happened since had been ‘rather disappointing and rather tragic’. ‘At that time’, he said, ‘I saw no intrinsic reason why the East Timorese would not be as comfortable within the Republic of Indonesia as were the rest of the Timorese.’
I suggested that what the Indonesians had done to them amounted to genocide. He disagreed; neither did he believe the figure of 200,000 dead. ‘There was a civil war raging,’ he said. I replied that it was generally accepted that no more than 2,000 people had died in the civil war. ‘I don’t know that figure,’ he replied.
He said that Australians did not have ‘the luxury’ of Europeans ‘to read moral lectures’ to Indonesia, and that the Suharto regime was ‘moderate, tolerant and stable’. He said it was ‘a myth’ that journalists could not visit East Timor, that ‘thirty Australian journalists’ had been there since 1976. As for the two Australian television crews murdered by the Indonesian army, they were ‘unwise to be where they were’.
‘The Indonesians’, he said, ‘are highly sensitive and feel that journalists may well cause further trouble, as happened of course after the massacre of 1991.’ I suggested that the ‘trouble’ had been caused by the Indonesian troops who murdered several hundred people. ‘I don’t know the truth of this,’ he said. ‘Some of the journalists were there on tourist visas and had played a part in the stirring up of the trouble.’ He added, ‘That doesn’t justify what happened.’
I asked him if he was seriously suggesting that the action of journalists had led to the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery. He replied no, but that was what the Indonesians had put forward. ‘The trouble with the world we live in,’ he said, ‘[is that] there has been a very substantial focus on East Timor [and] it’s not the only trouble spot on earth by any manner of means.’85
James Dunn also looked the diplomat he once was, as Australia’s consul in Dili, though he will be remembered for his tireless personal campaign to break the international silence on East Timor. His book, Timor: A People Betrayed, published in 1983 by the tiny Jacaranda Press in Queensland and long out of print, is one of the finest documents of human tragedy, struggle and betrayal I have read. ‘I think it is incredible’, he told me, ‘that the resistance continues with no outside help. It is such a tribute to the East Timorese. I recall one of them saying to me, “Although we have to work with the Indonesians we all support the armed resistance, because it’s a spark . . . a spark that shows it isn’t over, that somewhere out there some of us are saying, “You can’t get away with this”.’86
‘You can’t get away with this’ could be the title of Shirley Shackleton’s autobiography, should she ever decide to write it. I hope she does. The murder of her husband Greg and of his five Australian television colleagues, the cover-up that followed and Shirley’s odyssey to find the truth say much about what has happened to the Timorese themselves. When we met in Canberra she spoke only about the Timorese, their courage and ingenuity, and about a recent meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs between herself, the minister, Gareth Evans, and Amelia Gusmao, wife of the Fretilin leader given a twenty-year prison sentence by an Indonesian kangaroo court.
‘Evans didn’t want this meeting,’ she said. ‘But we wouldn’t be put off. When he saw us, he put his hand over his heart, looked sorrowful and said, “We can’t endanger our relations with the Indonesians. What little influence we have we want to keep.” I said, “Are you going to take on Xanana as a special case?” He said nothing. Well, I did it, I broke down, I said, “My husband’s dead, but this woman’s husband is still alive. You can do something for him.” I didn’t want to cry, I tell you I didn’t want to cry, not there, not in front of him. Because then they have me typed; I’m the widow, you see, and I can be dismissed. But I won’t be . . .’87
When the Indonesians launched their secret invasion in September 1975 no proof had been produced that they were operating inside East Timor. So they could continue to lie that the ‘instability’ in the island was due entirely to the civil war. At 4 am on October 16, Indonesian special forces came ashore on the north coast, near Balibo. The defending Fretilin troops had between them only one machine-gun and quickly withdrew, leaving the two Australian crews. They were Greg Shackleton, aged 29, a television reporter, and Tony Stewart, 21, a sound recordist, both Australians with Channel 7, Melbourne; Malcolm Rennie, 28, a British citizen and a reporter with Channel 9 in Melbourne; Brian Peters, 29, also British, who was the cameraman accompanying Rennie; and Gary Cunningham, 27, a New Zealander and the second cameraman.
Greg Shackleton and the others knew the risks they were taking. From the battlements of the old Portuguese fort they had filmed the Indonesian warships approaching. They must have expected to be captured, but they also had reason to believe they would be released quickly, given the ‘special relationship’ between Indonesia and Australia. They went to some lengths to demonstrate that they were non-combatants. They were unarmed and dressed in non-military clothing, and Greg Shackleton had painted a large ‘Australia’ sign and an Australian flag on the whitewashed wall of the house where they were based.
But staying on was very dangerous and demonstrated a real commitment to getting the evidence they had come for. As Greg Shackleton’s last recorded words indicated, he felt deeply about helping the East Timorese. This is his last ‘camera piece’, filmed on the eve of his death:
‘Something happened here last night that moved us very deeply. It was so far outside our experience as Australians, and so inextricably interwoven with the atmosphere of this place, that we find it very difficult to convey to you watching in an Australian living-room; but we’ll try. We were brought to this tiny native village from Maliana because we were told that Maliana was not safe at night. When we arrived the second in charge, who speaks very little English, came to us and in a haunting but urgent way said the commander wanted to speak to us. And then for the next hour, sitting on woven mats under a thatched roof in a hut with no walls we were the target of a barrage of questioning from men who know they may die tomorrow and cannot understand why the rest of the world does not care. Why, they ask, are the Indonesians invading us? Why, they ask, if the Indonesians believe that Fretilin is communist do they not send a delegation to Dili to find out? Why, they ask, are the Australians not helping us?
‘My main answer was that Australia would not send forces here – that’s impossible. However, I said, we could ask that Australia raise this fighting at the United Nations. That was possible. At that the second in charge rose to his feet, exclaimed, “Commerado journalist”, and shook my hand, the rest shook my hand and we were applauded because we were Australians. That’s all they want – for the United Nations to care about what is happening here.
‘The emotion here last night was so strong that we, all three of us, felt we should be able to reach out into the warm air and touch it. This is Greg Shackleton at an unnamed village which we’ll remember forever, in Portuguese Timor.’88
The next day, one of the cameramen filmed the Indonesians entering the village. He was shot. The others pointed frantically to the ‘Australia’ sign, and they were shot and stabbed. A retreating Fretilin soldier who saw this was interviewed by the Australian journalist Roger East, who himself met the same fate less than two months later. He told East, ‘The Australians were screaming, “Australians, Australians!” with their hands up. The soldiers circled them and made them turn their backs and face the wall of the house. The firing died down and we crawled away through the undergrowth. We heard the Australians screaming and then there was a burst of automatic fire.’89
Shirley Shackleton has also spoken to eye-witnesses. ‘What happened’, she said, ‘was that most of them were strung up by their feet, their sexual organs were removed and stuffed into their mouths, and they were stabbed with the short throwing knives that the Indonesian soldiers carry. Nobody knows for sure whether they choked to death or whether they choked on their own blood, or whether they just died from their wounds or whether they bled to death.’90
The bodies were dragged into the house, where one was found to be still alive. This may have been young Tony Stewart, the sound recordist. Although terribly wounded, he tried to say something into his tape recorder. According to one report, a Timorese reached out to him but was ordered back by an Indonesian officer, who then shot dead the wounded man.91 The bodies were stripped and dressed in Portuguese uniforms, of the kind used by Fretilin, and the corpses propped up behind a captured machine-gun in front of the ‘Australia’ sign. An Indonesian soldier took photographs which were intended to ‘prove’ that the journalists had been fighting for Fretilin. The bodies were then burned.
There is little doubt that the journalists were killed not out of any misunderstanding in the heat of battle, but because they would have exposed Indonesia’s conspiracy to invade and to which their own governments were privy. The news reports of Greg Shackleton and Malcolm Rennie would have almost certainly forced the Australian Government to modify its appeasement of Jakarta. ‘What is particularly disturbing’, wrote James Dunn, ‘is that the Whitlam Government knew about the impending attack [on Balibo] some days before it took place. [I] was warned about it by a sensitively placed senior official . . . Five days later US intelligence analysts, using information to which Australia had access, advised their government that the attack would be launched in a few days. Thus, the government had at its disposal enough information – and enough time – to warn Australians in East Timor of the impending risks at the border. More importantly, they could have advised the Indonesians of the presence of journalists in the area, and stressed that they should be afforded protection appropriate to their status.’92
According to Australian journalist Jill Jolliffe, on the day the journalists were murdered, the Australian Associated Press bureau in Darwin was informed by telephone by the Department of Foreign Affairs that ‘something big’ was about to happen in East Timor that day. The ‘something big’ had already happened that very morning. When the call came, the journalists had been dead for four hours.93
The Australian Government made no formal, public protest to Jakarta. Two of the dead were Britons; the British Government said nothing. The official Australian response was first to try to blame the victims, then to feign that ‘no definitive information’ had ‘yet come to hand’.94 According to the then Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Don Willesee, the journalists were ‘missing’ at ‘the scene of heavy fighting between rival factions’.95 Willesee referred to a Fretilin soldier who had ‘described the entry of anti-Fretilin forces into Balibo’.96 James Dunn, who was present at the interview with the soldier, wrote that what he ‘actually described was the entry of Indonesian troops’ into the village where the television teams were.97
More than two weeks elapsed before Prime Minister Whitlam took action. This was in the form of a letter to Suharto in which he sought his friend’s co-operation in determining the fate of the newsmen. Six months later the government of Malcolm Fraser agreed to participate in an Indonesian enquiry, which was stage-managed to the point of farce. ‘Despite its knowledge of the true facts,’ wrote Dunn, the government ‘agreed to this futile exercise in a deliberate attempt to dispose of an obstacle to the normalisation of relations between Jakarta and Canberra.’98
On April 28, 1976, Australian embassy officials flew from Jakarta to East Timor. Witnesses to the killings had already been moved out of Balibo by the army; and the ‘Timorese’ the Australian officials met were Indonesian soldiers ‘specially selected from among the troops originating from neighbouring islands where the people resemble the Quemac of the Balibo area’.99 Others were trusted agents working for Operasi Komodo, the Indonesians’ subversion campaign, and well-known collaborators who went on to occupy high positions in the puppet administration of East Timor, including the ‘governor’ and ‘vice-governor’.
Unsurprisingly, the official report submitted to the Australian Parliament was inconclusive on just how the journalists were killed and who killed them. A funeral service was held at a cemetery in Jakarta with a wreath sent from the Australian embassy and a card, which read, ‘They stayed because they saw the search for truth and the need to report at first hand as a necessary task’.100 Shirley Shackleton’s response to this platitude was understandable outrage. The Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra told her that if she wanted her husband’s body brought back to Australia, she would have to pay for it.
Shirley travelled to East Timor in 1989, at the time of the Pope’s visit to Dili. In the Hotel Turismo she confronted General Murdani, who commanded the invasion and whose troops had killed her husband and his colleagues. ‘He was having breakfast in the dining-room,’ she told me. ‘People were genuflecting and grovelling to him. After drinking a double-strength coffee I walked over to his table and said, “General, my name is Shirley Shackleton. I’ve always wanted to ask you what exactly happened to my husband and his colleagues.” He said, “I wouldn’t know; we weren’t there.” I said to come off it, that Greg had filmed his ships arriving at Balibo before he had been killed.
‘At this he stood up to go; and I realised that for once in my life I had absolute power over this man, because everyone was watching and he wouldn’t dare be rude to me. So I put my hand on his elbow and said, “Sit down, because we’re not going to get anywhere with that, but I’d like to tell you what I’ve seen in the time I’ve been in Timor.” He sat and he listened as I told him about the atrocities committed by his troops. I told him that a lot of young men they were now torturing had Indonesian fathers and were the result of the rapes of Timorese women. I said the Timorese would never accept the Indonesians under any circumstances. He said nothing. He knows who I am now.’
fn1 Like Max Stahl, Ben Richards is a pseudonym.