200,000 Killed and I Didn’t Even Know About It

Bangkok, July 8, 2010. It takes a powerful film to tell a little-known story. I attended a screening at the FCCT on July 8, of “Balibo,” which tells the story of five young Australian journalists slaughtered in East Timor in 1975, and the subsequent ghastly murder of another Australian journalist, Roger East, who took it upon himself to find them, when they went. Balibo is the name of the small, nondescript town where the five journalists were assassinated.
The five young Australian journalists murdered in East Timor

Okay, where is East Timor, f/k/a Portuguese Timor? It probably won’t help to say that it is next to West Timor, f/k/a Dutch Timor. Actually, both occupy the same island of Timor, located about 400 miles northwest of Darwin, Australia. I had to study a goggle map to get some general idea where Timor is. In 1975, apparently with the complicity of the United States (Henry Kissinger presiding) and Australia, Indonesia invaded East Timor after the Dutch left and the indigenous population declared independence. The slaughter within the first few months of the invasion, of 60,000 Timorese by the Indonesian army, has been classified by many commentators as genocide, and if the film is a guide to what actually happened, it is hard to argue with the classification. Ultimately, about 200,000 people were killed by the Indonesians.

Assasinated journalist Roger East as played by Anthony Lapaglia in "Balibo"


Here’s where art comes in. I need a story to make an impression upon me, preferably one created by a master story teller. If you tell me that 100’s of people were executed by the Indonesians, on a dock in Dili, East Timor, and thrown into the sea, my cognition is fleeting. But, watching Roger East and other innocents dragged, shot, and then dumped in the sea, as dramatically reenacted in the docudrama “Balibo,” my consciousness and emotional memory are awakened, not only by the cinematography, but, more importantly, that during the past hour or so, I had been brought into Roger East’s life and thereby know the tragedy. Similarly so with the murders, also most likely by the Indonesian military, of the five young Australians, whose lives and stories have been told in the film “Balibo,” as only good artists can do.

At the end of the screening, the atmosphere of emotional exhaustion of the audience at the FCCT, was palpable, so much so that the question period produced virtually no questions from the usually interrogative audience. My individual response, aside from my usual resignation that justice is rarely done (no one has ever been indicted for either the murders of the six journalists, or the genocide), is that I’ve now read several articles about the history of Timor and the conflict, and the eventual independence of East Timor in 2002. Still, although somewhat more educated than I had been, I’m still not exactly sure where Timor is.