When the commander of the East Timor invasion, gen. Benny Moerdani, learned of the presence of five foreign journalists in Balibo he quickly dispatched the order through the chain of command that there were to be no witnesses to Indonesia’s flouting of international law. The order trickled
down through col. Dading Kalbuadi who instructed capt. Yunus Yosfiah to order his unit, the Susi Team, to “silence” all five newsmen on Oct. 16, 1975.

What else were the soldiers and militia to do when their commanders relayed the direct order that “there are to be no witnesses”?

At work was the political-military logic, which was built on the fundamentals of Soeharto’s New Order state. Dading’s reply to Benny’s order — “Don’t worry” — tells us the depth of that logic. Subsequently they took it for granted that those journalists, who were there to report on the secret operation in East Timor, simply had to be eliminated. (Benny’s quotations are taken from Jill Jolliffe’s ‘Cover Up, The Inside Story of the Balibo Five’, 2001, p. 312).

The Balibo killings, in other words, were a symptom of New Order’s way of doing things:  routinized cover-up. Today it would be impossible to launch a military campaign into another country and systematically eliminate any witnesses without the knowledge of the President and parliament.

Gen. Ali Moertopo’s Opsus (Special Operation) in East Timor led by Gen. Benny, was open-ended, resulting in an almost 25-year brutal occupation with countless tragedies. Hence, our national shame.

The context to the conflict was, of course, the Cold War. A potential “enemy in our backyard” or — in the words of an Indonesian diplomat before the UN General Assembly in 1976 — “a fire at our neighbor’s house”, was the excuse to invade our tiny neighbor. Once annexed, its troubles were belittled as “a pebble in our shoe”.

But the justification at home for the atrocities that occurred remained as it had always been: “a mission to maintain state unity”. The obsession with unity displayed by the military — itself becoming a sacred state institution — thus became a powerful justification for the many war crimes it committed. Since the mission into East Timor often involved intelligence operations, both its sacrosanct status and its justifications were simply taken for granted.

So, is the Balibo incident really any different to other unresolved atrocities in which army intelligence units, claiming to act in the interest of the state, took the lives of innocent civilians?

Forget for a moment the great tragedies of 1965-1966 and the prolonged war in and around East Timor’s Matebian in the late 1970s. Remember instead the 1983 massacre of Kraras villagers in East Timor, the 1980s torture center in a Pidie village, Aceh, the 1984 Tanjung

Priok killings, the 1989 Talangsari assault or the more recent assassination of rights activist Munir, to
name a few.  

Such cases were never clarified and ended up in impunity apparently because they were all part and parcel of state’s sacred mission and were justified as such.

Even in civilian crimes such as the recent Antasari murder trial, a police officer, whose career reflects New Order’s legacy, explicitly used the same language — a discourse of “state mission” — when he allegedly ordered thugs to kill Nasruddin Zulkarnaen.  

Indeed, the Balibo commander, the late gen. Dading Kalbuadi, proudly saw the Balibo case as part of his patriotic dedication running from the late 1940s to the war against the Permesta rebellion in the mid-1950s. In 1995, he told this writer: “East Timor? Well, we had to take it over. Just like Lawrence of Arabia’s [mission] in the Arab land, you know”.

Meanwhile, evidence, including eye witness accounts, has accumulated and debated in many publications, commissions and courts around the world. So such so that it has become simply ridiculous to maintain Dading’s claims that the Balibo journalists were victims
of cross fire, and not murdered in cold blood.

Let us remember that when President Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid apologized in Dili in 2001 for the occupation and subsequent tragedies (the only Indonesian state leader to ever do so), it surely included the Balibo tragedy.

Therefore, to suggest, as the Indonesian military and diplomats voice to this very day, that the Balibo incident was just collateral damage incurred in the heat of battle, is a pertinent lie.

Neither should the case be considered closed. It appears that Jakarta is now taking fruit from the CTF pact (RI-Timor Leste Joint-Commission of Truth and Friendship), using it to once and for all relegate to the pages of history whatever past wrongs the military and militia committed in East Timor, effectively diffusing any investigations into cases like Balibo.

In doing so, the authorities have encouraged, and at times forced, society to turn a blind eye. The most recent example of this is the Film Sensor Agency’s blanket ban on the film Balibo.

It’s an anomaly in this infant democracy that prolongs Balibo-like agonies and leaves little room for future generations to learn from our own past. Indonesian journalists cannot be blamed for their belated solidarity on the Balibo case, since they too were victims of repressive media constraints by the New Order regime.

Instead of this arrogant approach to our nation’s wrongs, we should take the stance of Argentina, where the post-military regime has allowed the public release of Argentine in the Seventies, a documentary film similar to Balibo.

In a democracy that has started to stabilize itself with growing electorate maturity, the free flow of information is a must. Without this, past wrongs will only burden us with more national shame.


The writer is a journalist. He covered East Timor in the 1990s for Radio Netherlands.

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