The Oz Foreign Affairs Department released 67000 more pages on Oz/ET/Indonesian dealings during the 74-76 period yesterday (Tuesday). Obviously, that little lot is going to take a few minutes to parse, but here's a whiff of what's coming. BTW, I might mention that the bloke who offered the Australian government the eye-witness account of the torture and killing of the fifth Oz journalist (hardly the 'collateral damage' of our still official accounts, eh?), not only had his (apparently now validated) account filed NFA, but we gave his name and details to the Indonesian government at the time, too.
Oh, and I'll stop going on about this if no-one's interested - it's just that this seems a story with a big and multinational future, so I'm burning a bit of bandwidth on preparing the ground, is all.
Cheers, Rob.
New doubts on Balibo victim's fate
By Foreign affairs writer Robert Garran 20sep00
DOCUMENTS released yesterday raise
new doubts about the fate of one of
five journalists who died during the
Indonesian invasion of East Timor on
16 October, 1975, lending weight to
claims he may have died some time
later than his colleagues.
The new material released yesterday
covers 20m of shelf space at the
National Archives, and was the source
of the edited collection of 1974-76
Timor documents from the Foreign
Affairs and Prime Minister's
departments issued last week.
One of the documents released by the National Archives quotes a witness to the day's events, Jose Martins, saying the fifth journalist was killed "in ways too horrible to recount".
The documents show repeated efforts by Australian officials to find the remains of the fifth journalist. "Please make further effort to try to establish which of the papers were found in the vicinity of the fifth body," said a message to Jakarta dated December 1, 1975. "The matter is very important."
The funeral service was delayed in the hope "that the Indonesian authorities may be able to provide the remains of the fifth journalist", a December 2 cable said.
Security expert Des Ball yesterday called for a fresh inquiry into the fate of the journalists - Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart, Malcolm Renny and Brian Peters.
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I'd written:
>Australia's Foreign Affairs Department today released a package of secret
>documents concerning East Timor - from July 1974 to late 1976. It shows
>our secret service knew of a provisional invasion plan in July '74, that Oz
>PM Whitlam (the left's hero here) not only condoned but very possibly
>encouraged Soeharto to go in (the latter says in the papers that his plans
>and resolve 'crystallised' during his September '74 talks with Whitlam),
>and that the Department knew three days in advance of the Indonesian battle
>plan - including the rather important bit about how the town of Balibo was
>a focus for the assault - which is where we had our journalists ensconced,
>and which is where they duly died three days later.