A report into the death of five Australia-based journalists at Balibo in East Timor 22 years ago will be examined today at a seminar at the University of NSW Law School. One man who knows just what happened at Balibo, writes Asia Editor David Jenkins, is Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, leader of the attacking force and now one of Indonesia's most influential generals.

When people ask Lieutenant-General Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah to nominate the military figure he most admires, he doesn't hesitate. The man at the top of his list is General Sudirman, the charismatic Javanese teacher who directed Indonesia's guerilla struggle during the independence fight against the Dutch, only to die of consumption as victory was attained.

But Yunus also has a high regard for two of America's celebrated World War II military leaders - General Dwight Eisenhower and General Douglas MacArthur - as well as Germany's General Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox".

"I have read all their autobiographies," he told an Indonesian interviewer recently.

Like many of the men in the upper echelons of the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI), Yunus is known as an orang tempur, or as one old Indonesian general likes to put it, "a fighting animal".

A Buginese from Rappang in South Sulawesi, he joined the elite RPKAD red beret force after graduating from the National Military Academy in 1965. He served as a platoon commander in West Kalimantan, where the Indonesians were tracking down Maoist PGRS guerillas, almost all of them ethnic Chinese, whom they had supported a short time before during President Sukarno's "Crush Malaysia" campaign.

But it was in East Timor that Yunus made his name.

On October 16, 1975, as Indonesia stepped up its campaign to seize control of the former Portuguese colony, Captain Yunus Yosfiah led about 100 red beret Kopassandha (secret warfare) troops in an attack on Balibo, a mountain outpost held by a small force of Fretilin soldiers.

The operation, part of a wider attack, was a clear breach of the United Nations charter, and Yunus's men, who were accompanied by several hundred pro-Indonesia East Timorese "volunteers", had removed all badges of rank and other identifying insignia.

Five Australia-based television journalists - representing Channels 7 and 9 - were camped in the town, prepared to film the Indonesian attack thought to be imminent. The Indonesian assault came at dawn on October 16, with unexpected ferocity.

Instead of making their way up the twisting mountain road from Batugade, a coastal town which they had already captured, the Indonesians came from behind, putting the Fretilin forces to flight under a withering barrage of firepower.

Seventeen people, including the five journalists, were killed in circumstances that have never been adequately explained.

A number of East Timorese who were in Balibo that day have stated that Indonesian soldiers killed at least two of the journalists in cold blood to eliminate foreign witnesseses to their illegal attack. The Indonesian Army has always maintained the journalists were killed in crossfire.

Although Jakarta appeared embarrassed by the furore that erupted over the deaths of the journalists at Balibo, senior army officers took no precautions to prevent a recurrence of the event when they staged a full-scale invasion of Dili seven weeks later.

During the attack on Dili, an Australian freelancer, Roger East, was taken to the docks and killed by troops from Battalion 502, an East Java unit under the command of Major (now Major-General) Warsito. Yunus had served in Warsito's company in West Kalimantan.

From Balibo, Yunus went on to greater things. He was appointed founding commander of Infantry Battalion 744, the first East Timorese territorial unit in ABRI. This was never going to be an easy assignment.

One problem was that East Timorese society was riven by ideological - and to some extent regional - rivalries. Another was that military expertise was in short supply on the non-Fretilin side of politics. Although some followers of the pro-Indonesian Apodeti party had served as second-line troops in the Portuguese colonial army, Battalion 744 needed a high proportion of Indonesian NCOs, and not simply for reasons of control.

Yunus was the commander of Battalion 744 when it killed Fretilin commander Nicolau Lobato on Mt Maubesi at the end of 1978, a propaganda coup for Jakarta. In an interview with the magazine Tempo in 1986, he said his favourite pastime was playing back a video of the killing of Lobato.

In 1979, Yunus, then 35, married Antonia, a 19-year-old of Timorese-Portuguese descent, in a huge wedding ceremony in Dili. This is said to have been the first marriage between a member of the Indonesian armed forces and a resident of East Timor.

Between 1985 and 1987, Yunus was back in East Timor, as commander of Korem 164 Dili, the East Timor military region.

On his way up the army ladder, he attended courses at the US Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth (1979) and the Royal College of Defence Studies in Britain (1989), a sure sign he was marked out for higher things.

During his year at Fort Leavenworth, he wrote a thesis titled The Role of the Mass Media in Developing Countries. His most recent posting was commander of the ABRI Command and Staff College (Sesko ABRI) in Bandung.

A Western military source in Jakarta describes Yunus, who has about 13 military medals, as "a well-respected professional" who is close to the ABRI Commander, General Feisal Tanjung. Yunus was known as someone who exposed officers "to a broad range of views" when he was the commander at Sesko ABRI.

"He's a bit of a military intellectual," said this source. "Yunus makes a big point of how liberal-minded he is."

That claim may raise an eyebrow among people who have heard Yunus issue the standard warning that the time is not yet ripe for ABRI to depart from its tut wuri handayani (leading from behind) role. Nor will it cut much ice with those who have heard him put stress on the dangers posed by left-wing "clandestine forces".

Although Sesko ABRI was an important posting for Yunus, many observers were taken aback last month when he was appointed Armed Forces Chief of Social-Political Affairs (Kassospol ABRI), one of the most important posts in the armed forces.

The Kassospol is not just the political face of a highly political army. Yunus is responsible for the selection and management of those ABRI officers who are assigned a significant number of seats in the national, provincial and district parliaments.

He is in charge of the 6,000 military officers who have been placed in strategic positions in the civilian bureaucracy, giving him an influence at virtually every level of government and in every government department.

Finally, as Bob Lowry notes in his recent book The Armed Forces of Indonesia, the Kassospol "has responsibility for general public political education/indoctrination and for the achievement of social-political objectives such as the election of acceptable candidates to leadership positions in political parties, unions and other community organisations".

It had been widely thought the Kassospol job would be given to Major-General Bambang Yudhoyono, 48, one of the brightest new stars in the ABRI firmament, top of his class at the military academy and a man with an MA from from a US university. Instead, Bambang ended up as one of Yunus's two key assistants.

Yunus is the sixth occupant of the vital Kassospol post in as many years, an unsettling succession which has meant no one office-holder has really had time to get on top of the job. Nor is he likely to be there long - he is due to retire from the army in August 1999, at the age of 55. He visited Australia two years ago to observe the Kangaroo '95 defence exercise, during which members of Battalion 502, Warsito's former unit, took part in a dawn parachute "attack" on Wyndham. Nor is that the extent of his Australia connection. Two of his sisters married Australians and now live in Perth.

How, after all these years, does he look back on Balibo?

According to a source in Jakarta: "Yunus says he wasn't in Balibo when the journalists were killed. [He says] the Timorese volunteers went ahead" - a claim which stretches credulity, some feel. At the same time, the source says, "Yunus expresses concern of some kind over Balibo."