News Update

The Australian

EAST Timor president Jose Ramos Horta has given the film Balibo the thumbs up, saying that watching it was like a flashback, casting him back 34 years to events in East Timor in 1975 to relive "what I thought I had forgotten about".

Speaking ahead of the launch of the film at the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight, he said he hopes the film, about the murder of six journalists during the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia, will do some justice to the memory of the journalists and what his people suffered.

He said there were some “lingering comments” that the Balibo Five journalists and Roger East, who went to East Timor to investigate the deaths and was also killed, were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“They were in the right place at the right time,” he said.

Mr Ramos Horta said East went to East Timor, at his urging, because “he felt disgust at the absolute lack of knowledge about what was going on in East Timor and he wanted to do something about it”.

“He was a man with a mission and the mission was to tell the truth about a small people that no-one cared about," he said.

President Horta said the portrayal of the killing of East was “almost 100 per cent accurate,” but the torture and murder of at least one of the Balibo Five was in reality much more shocking than portrayed in the film.

“They were not just executed,” he said. “At least one of them was brutally, brutally tortured.” The journalists’ bodies were then burned to cover the facts because senior officers knew what the political consequences would be if the bodies were discovered.

Horta said East Timor was regarded in 1975 as “a footnote” in the post-Vietnam era and one senior US diplomat told Indonesia to “go ahead, invade, but do it quickly, effectively and without the use of US weapons”.

Actor Anthony LaPaglia (East) described the journalist as a forgotten man, who “for some reason, in the world of journalism, seems to have disappeared off the map”.

He said he was introduced to the Balibo story, about which he knew little, at a barbeque at the home of producer Rebecca Williamson in Los Angeles where they discussed Jill Jolliffe’s book, Cover Up.

Director Robert Connolly said it was on many trips to East Timor that he became determined to tell the story not only of the Australian journalists killed in East Timor but also East Timor’s “incredible journey to independence”.

“It is not only the story of the Balibo Five and the story of Roger East and the president in ‘75, but also the story of Timor Leste,” he said.

Touching on the conspiracy trial over his attempted assassination last year, President Horta said he had “no problem” about sympathetic coverage given to the case of Angelita Pires, former girlfriend of rebel leader Alfredo Reinado.

“Journalists are human beings, not above any of us mere mortals,” he said. “They have their own prejudices, perceptions (and) sensitivities.”

He said he had “the deepest respect” for East Timor’s young judicial system. “They are part of our new incipient nation handling an extremely difficult case that involves an attempt on the life of the president therefore I can express only tremendous sympathy and respect for them.”

The Balibo Five were Greg Shackleton, 27, Tony Stewart, 21, Gary Cunningham, 27, Brian Peters, 29, Malcolm Rennie, 28. Tony East was 50.