Terry Friel – Fifty years ago this week, five young journalists from Australia, the UK, and New Zealand were murdered in what was then East Timor by Indonesian troops – and their families are still angry that no one has been held accountable and that governments, especially Australia, have done nothing.

The "Balibo Five" were murdered in the town of Balibo, a five-hour drive west along the coast from the capital Dili, despite clearly identifying themselves as foreign journalists, with an Australian flag painted on the wall of the house they were using.

Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters, Malcolm Rennie and Anthony Stewart, all in their 20s, were murdered as they covered Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, now the independent country of Timor-Leste. Their bodies were burned.

Several months later, Australian journalist Roger East, who went to investigate their deaths, was executed on the Dili docks by the Indonesian military, which had invaded the former Portuguese colony after it was abandoned by Portugal.

Memorials were held by families and friends on Oct. 16. Shackleton's son, Evan, flew to Timor-Leste and made the long drive west along the north coast from the country's capital, Dili, to Balibo.

"When I came here, I got that feeling," he told the Australian government broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC).

"That feeling you get in your throat, when you think I can't breathe properly, and your voice is quivering and you want your little bottom lip to stop wobbling."

Oct. 16 was also National Press Freedom Day in Timor-Leste.

"Fifty years ago, five young journalists in Balibo, and one in Dili, stood between silence and the world," the country's Minister of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Agio Pereira, told a memorial ceremony in Balibo.

"They chose truth and paid with their lives.

"Today, we remember them not as distant figures, but as echoes of our responsibility. We must speak out. Demand. Act."

He said the Balibo Five and East are "not just footnotes on our history. They remain wounds on our conscience."

He said the truth should never be silenced again.

The murders were committed under the rule of former strongman President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist from 1965 until a bloody revolution in 1998.

Pak (father) Harto, as he was familiarly known, has since been accused of the genocide of up to three million mainly Chinese Indonesians.

The world's most populous Muslim nation has had six presidents since Suharto's reign ended in riots in 1998. It is now led by a former general accused of atrocities in East Timor, Prabowo Subianto, 73, Suharto's son-in-law.

The Balibo Five and Roger East are still a dark shadow over Indonesia-Australia relations, says a former Jakarta-based foreign correspondent for a major Australian media organization.

"Over decades, the Indonesian military has claimed the Australian media has viewed the relationship through the prism of the Balibo murders," he told UCA News. "That is, of course, untrue.

"Several brave journalists did relentlessly pursue the truth to expose the murders and the Indonesian military's attempts to cover them up."

He says successive Australian governments have put trade over morals.

"Fifty years on, Indonesia should apologize for the murder of six Australian journalists," he told UCA.

"The Australian media sat by and did nothing.

"But the East Timorese defied threats of violence and voted for independence in 1999."

Source: https://www.ucanews.com/news/5-foreign-journalists-murdered-in-east-timor-remembered/11064