Any film slugged "based on a true story" never fails to kindle one's interest. And if it is a film about armed conflict where journalists are the protagonists, you know it is going to be a political thriller. So it is with Balibo. But writer-director Robert Connolly's ambitious work fails. Miserably. It is a true story that is largely fictitious. Anyone who does not have the background knowledge will fall for it.
Balibo is a 2009 Australian feature film that follows the story of the Balibo Five, a group of journalists who were captured and subsequently killed while reporting on the conflict just prior to the full-scale Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. The film is based on the book Cover-Up by Jill Jolliffe, an Australian journalist who met the men shortly before they were murdered.
The Balibo Five group comprised two Australians, reporter Greg Shackleton and sound recordist Tony Stewart; a New Zealander, cameraman Gary Cunningham, for HSV-7 (Seven Network) in Melbourne; and two Britons, cameraman Brian Peters, and reporter Malcolm Rennie, working for TCN-9 (Nine Network) in Sydney. The journalists were killed on October 16, 1975 by Indonesian troops in the town of Balibo. Their bodies were immediately burnt and nothing more than a few charred bones could be recovered. On December 7, the day the capital Dili was seized, Indonesians captured a sixth journalist, Roger East. He was executed by a firing squad the next morning and his body was dumped into the sea.
The Indonesian military at that time justified its action on the grounds that they were communists, and sympathisers of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente or FRETILIN) party; however most historians say they were killed to prevent them from exposing the Indonesian incursions. The men's remains were, in fact, taken to Jakarta for burial, without the consent of their families. In 1999, Sander Thoenes, a young Dutch journalist went to report on the continued struggle of the Timorese people. He also was shot dead in Dili. There has never been a full enquiry into these deaths either, and significant questions about these murders remain.
The story of Balibo is seen through the eyes of veteran journalist East, drawn to East Timor by José Ramos-Horta of FRETILIN, then the young secretary of foreign affairs. East refuses at the onset, but agrees once Horta tells him about five journalists missing in the border town of Balibo.
As a cinematic exposition, Balibo is gripping. The dramatisation, shot often with a handheld, gives you the feeling that you are watching the action live. It succeeds in retaining one's attention and stirring up emotions. It's a good film, but bad cinema. Balibo is short on factual fidelity and long on cinematic hyperbole. It is replete with errors. Those, nevertheless, can be overlooked in a film.
Connolly's work, however, is guilty when it comes to portraying the larger picture: that Australian and British governments colluded to cover up the killings. The Indonesian government did not want footage of its actions in the invasion of East Timor to get out because it could compromise the Australian government’s support for the invasion. The journalists were, therefore, liquidated. The West covered up.
After the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, Indonesia's status as a pro-Western, anti-communist state was far more important to Britain than justice for tiny and obscure East Timor. The process of decolonisation in Portuguese Timor began in 1974, following the change of government in Portugal in the wake of the Carnation Revolution. Owing to political instability and more pressing concerns with decolonisation in Angola and Mozambique, Lisbon effectively abandoned East Timor, which unilaterally declared itself independent on November 28, 1975.
Nine days later, it was invaded and occupied by Indonesian forces before the independence could be internationally recognised. Following the UN-sponsored act of self-determination in 1999, Indonesia finally relinquished control of the territory, which achieved full independence on May 20, 2002. An estimated 250,000 people were killed during Indonesia's tyrannical occupation of an initial population of about 600,000 at the time of the invasion. [Ramos-Horta went on to become the country's first Foreign Minister, and its second President. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.]
Documents show that Britain's main priority was to prevent the issue from outraging British public opinion. East Timor was high on (US National Security Advisor) Henry Kissinger's list of places where the US did not want to comment or become involved. After all, FRETILIN was seen to be communist.
Australian intelligence, in fact, had known 12 hours in advance that the five journalists in Balibo faced imminent death, but the government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam did nothing. A message was intercepted at the spy base, Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin, which supplies US and British intelligence. The cautionary note was held back so that it would not expose Western governments’ silent involvement in the Indonesian plan to invade East Timor. A secretary in the Australian Defence Department, Arthur Tange, did not want the government to even inform the journalists’ families of their murders.
Depicting the Australian and US governments as complicit in the unlawful invasion of East Timor would not have augured well for the film to be distributed in those markets. In fact, the first draft of the film did indict the two governments. Connolly, inexplicably, deleted all those references. All that was left was a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips.
In the end it is a film about Indonesian soldiers brutally killing six journalists. It is not about an Australian government allowing its citizens to die. It is not about the US government sanctioning a full-scale invasion by Suharto. This is how popular culture buries the truth, and propagates half-truths as history.
