http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2173&Itemid=202
Indonesia Bans Movie on 1975 Timor Killings
Written by A. Lin Neumann
Wednesday, 02 December 2009
"Balibo" recounts murder of five foreign journalists when East Timor was
invaded
Indonesia has come a long way since 1975, when an aggressive military
dictatorship in Jakarta invaded the tiny former Portuguese colony of East Timor
with the tacit approval - many scholars believe - of Australia and the United
States.
Some 200,000 people died in the ensuing annexation and guerrilla war
before East Timor finally succeeded in severing ties with its giant neighbor in
1999 - again with great bloodshed and destruction.
But despite a rollicking free press and an open democracy, Indonesia has
not, apparently, come far enough to allow a fictionalized account of the
invasion to be seen publicly within its borders.
On Tuesday, the official Film Censorship Agency (LSF) banned "Balibo," an
acclaimed Australian movie about the murder of five foreign journalists by
Indonesian troops at the beginning of the invasion. The film, shot in East
Timor and released in August in Australia, was to have been shown Tuesday
evening at a private screening by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club. It
was also on the slate for the Jakarta International Film Festival, which opens
Friday.
A few minutes after the movie was to show at 7 pm Tuesday, JFCC President
Jason Tedjasukmana, a Time magazine reporter, told about 100 journalists and
other invited guests waiting to see the film, "We have some bad news. The LSF
[Film Censorship Agency] officially banned it today."
Tedjasukmana said lawyers had warned the journalists that legal action
could be taken against them if they showed the movie in the face of the ban.
The film festival reached the same conclusion.
The censors, who are still empowered to approve public screenings of all
movies and television programs in the country, gave no reason for the action.
The Jakarta Post, however, quoted Indonesian Military spokesman Rear Marshal
Sagom Tamboen as saying "Balibo" should not be allowed.
"It will only hurt many Indonesians," Sagom said. "The movie will only do
irreparable damage to the [diplomatic] ties between Indonesia, Timor Leste
[formerly East Timor] and Australia."
The film, starring Anthony LaPaglia, tells the story of five journalists
who were killed when the tiny border town of Balibo was overrun by Indonesian
forces in October 1975. An alleged Indonesian cover-up tried to disguise them
as Portuguese soldiers and later insisted they were civilian casualties of the
fighting. A sixth journalist was shot and killed weeks later when Dili was
invaded by Indonesian forces.
The so-called Balibo Five, according to official Indonesian and
Australian government accounts, died in the cross fire as Indonesian troops
fought East Timorese Fretilin rebels.
The movie portrays the television journalists, who were from Australia,
Britain and New Zealand, as being murdered on the order of Indonesian army
officers eager to prevent news of the invasion from being broadcast.
The families of the dead newsmen have long insisted official accounts are
a lie and they have kept up a steady campaign for decades to bring justice to
their loved ones.
An Australian coroner's inquest in 2007 found that the five men who died
in Balibo were killed deliberately by occupying Indonesian forces, a finding
that eventually prompted Australian police to launch an official investigation
into the incident recently.
The New South Wales deputy coroner, Dorelle Pinch, wrote: "They were not
armed; they were dressed in civilian clothes; all of them at one time or
another had their hands raised in the universally recognised gesture of
surrender; they were not killed in the heat of battle; they were killed
deliberately on orders given by the field commander, Captain Yunus Yosfiah."
"It's quite clear the journalists were murdered," the film's director,
Rob Connolly has told AFP. "The current Indonesian and Australian [government]
point of view that they were killed in cross-fire is quite frankly absurd."
In one of the more ironic twists to the long-running tragedy, Yunus, the
captain widely blamed for the murders in several investigations, became
Indonesia's minister of information in 1998, after President Suharto was forced
from power.
Yunus strongly advocated and presided over the lifting of stringent
controls on the press that Suharto had imposed to help maintain his grip on
power. Those controls meant, of course, that the reality of what happened in
East Timor was long shielded from the Indonesian public. He was widely - and
rightly - praised at the time as a hero of press freedom.
Yunus, who is now a politician with a Muslim-based political party, has
said repeatedly he "never met" the dead journalists when he was serving in East
Timor, but he has refused detailed comment on the incident.
In a review of "Balibo," the Sydney Morning Herald called the film
"tragic, dramatic and enraging." Praising the movie's "cold, hard realism," the
reviewer wrote: "It's not perfect but it is incredibly moving and powerful."
Asked about the banning following Tuesday's announcement, freelance
journalist and local press freedom activist Ezki Suyanto said the action was
"ridiculous."
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