I have reservations about some of the thinking behind the film Balibo, which deals with the murder of six journalists in East Timor during the 1975 Indonesian invasion but brushes over the bigger political questions.
In my opinion the five journalists killed at Balibo - Brian Peters, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart - placed themselves at risk by ignoring warnings about going to the region.
The subsequent killing in Dili of a sixth journalist, Roger East, did however demonstrate the Indonesians didn't care for rules of warfare.
They were intent on killing anyone who could report their activities.
Reckless or not, a 2007 inquest found the Balibo Five clearly identified themselves as foreigners and journalists. They were unarmed. They had their hands raised in the universally recognised gesture of surrender. They were killed deliberately.
A significant omission from the film and its footnotes is the reality it was right wing US politicians urged on by William P.Clark, the former national security adviser to US president Ronald Reagan, who pushed Timor as an issue when he was working for George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 1999.
The combined actions of Clark and fellow Republicans, and the Catholic Church pressing former US president Bill Clinton at the same time he was meeting with former Australian prime minister John Howard at the APEC conference in Auckland in September 1999, paid off.
The result was a promise from Clinton to Howard that there would be "over-the-horizon" US support for the Australian led Interfet operation when the Indonesian troops withdrew from East Timor. - Piers Akerman, The Daily Telegraph (click below for full article)
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25888397-5007146,00.html