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The Balibo Five - the five Australian and New Zealand reporters were killed by Indonesian soldiers to cover up their 1975 invasion of East Timor - Source: ONE News -
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Indonesian soldiers deliberately killed the Balibo Five to cover
up their 1975 invasion of East Timor, a retired Indonesian army
colonel has admitted.
Gatot Purwanto, a special forces commando when he took part in the
1975 assault on Balibo, is the first senior Indonesian military
figure to publicly contradict the official explanation that the
Australia-based journalists were killed in crossfire.
"If we let them leave they would say that this was the Indonesian
invasion," Purwanto told Indonesia's Tempo magazine.
"If we let them go there would be evidence."
Speaking after seeing Robert Connolly's Balibo, the Australian film
about the killings that has been banned in Indonesia, Purwanto said
he and his fellow soldiers had been surprised to find the men in
the small East Timorese border town.
Purwanto claims his superior Yunus Yosfiah - who has been accused
of ordering the killings - asked Jakarta whether his special forces
squad, known as Team Susi, should execute or capture the men.
But the soldiers were forced to take action before Jakarta could
respond because they were provoked by gunfire from the direction of
the house where the journalists were hiding, Purwanto said.
"Probably, it was someone trying to save them," said Purwanto, who
later became Indonesian intelligence chief in East Timor.
"But our members immediately fired in that direction and all the
journalists died."
Afterwards, soldiers took the bodies to another house to be burned,
Purwanto said.
"To make it easier we tried to make them disappear," said Purwanto,
who now works in private security.
"We would say that we didn't know anything.
"That was our spontaneous reaction at that time."
Nonetheless, Purwanto - who was discharged from the military over
his involvement in the 1991 Santa Cruz Cemetery massacre in Dili -
said Connolly's film over-dramatised the killings.
Meanwhile, Indonesia's chief censor Mukhlis Paeni has finally
formally explained the reasons for the Film Censorship Agency's
ban.
The film was based on verbal testimony of a "questionable nature",
Paeni said in his written explanation.
"We deemed that Balibo is not proper to be screened because it
contains subjective issues which will potentially open old wounds
of questionable objectivity," he said.
Yosfiah is likely to be a firm focus of the Australian Federal
Police war crimes investigation into the Balibo killings.
The AFP launched the probe earlier this year, almost two years
after a coronial inquest concluded Indonesian forces deliberately
killed the journalists.
The inquest dismissed claims by successive Australian and
Indonesian governments that Greg Shackleton, Brian Peters, Malcolm
Rennie, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart were the victims of
crossfire and linked Yosfiah to their murders.
