Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight I want to talk about Brian Raymond Peters, Gary James Cunningham, Malcolm Harvie Rennie, Gregory John Shackleton and Anthony John Stewart, all deceased and all known to us in Australia as the Balibo Five, as well as Roger East, another Australian based journalist, deceased. The six of them were killed, murdered, in East Timor.

Today the Australian Federal Police confirmed that they are undertaking a formal investigation into the deaths of all of the Balibo Five. The report has said that they have told the families that the investigation is underway. The reason that I want to talk about it is that it is a matter of public importance in Australia but it is also one that I have had a lot to do with personally in two countries—Australia and East Timor. The case is known to us, so I do not need to go through the facts of it, but when I was living and working in East Timor and an inquest got underway in New South Wales into the death of Brian Peters it required witnesses who had seen what had happened in 1975 in Balibo to come to Australia.

As we know, the way the procedure works is that Australia seeks cooperation in a criminal matter with another country. That was given by Timor Leste—East Timor—and that job fell to me. I accompanied the witnesses to Australia, along with the then Prosecutor-General, Longuinhos Monteiro. We accompanied the witnesses because it was a different country, a different legal system and a whole range of things like that. I sat through a lot of the inquest into the death of Brian Peters. Some of that I will not talk about because I am not too sure how much of that is in the public domain and some of those witnesses were not identified.

I sat through the inquest and I know a lot of the families of the journalists who were murdered in East Timor in 1975. Some of the families wanted the investigation by the Australian Federal Police to happen, so I know that they will be very comforted and very pleased that it is happening because, as a family member, that is precisely what one would want. If one of your family members had been murdered, that is precisely what you would want: you would want to know that the wheels of justice were turning. Also, it is a matter for the Australian Federal Police. It shows that in Australia justice and the rule of law work, and it is great that we live in a country where the rule of law prevails.

I would also like to say that the finding, under section 22(1) of the New South Wales Coroners Act, reads:

Brian Raymond Peters, in the company of fellow journalists Gary James Cunningham, Malcolm Harvie Rennie, Gregory John Shackleton and Anthony John Stewart, collectively known as ‘the Balibo Five’, died at Balibo in Timor-Leste on 16 October 1975 from wounds sustained when he was shot and/or stabbed deliberately, and not in the heat of battle, by members of the Indonesian Special Forces, including Christoforus da Silva and Captain Yunus Yosfiah on the orders of Captain Yosfiah, to prevent him from revealing that Indonesian Special Forces had participated in the attack on Balibo. There is strong circumstantial evidence that those orders emanated from the Head of the Indonesian Special Forces, Major-General Benny Murdani to Colonel Dading Kalbuadi, Special Forces Group Commander in Timor, and then to Captain Yosfiah.

For the families who heard that finding, that had been one of the questions that had always been an issue: were they caught in crossfire? For the families, it was the first time they had had a judicial statement that said differently.

The other thing that I would like to say is that the Indonesia of 1975 is a very different Indonesia to the Indonesia of 2009. I know that this is one of those issues that can raise some complexities between countries. There are three countries ostensibly involved in this but a lot of countries, as they are democratising and dealing with their changes, deal with these issues themselves. It has taken us a long time. This happened in 1975. It is now 2009. It has taken Australia a long time to actually start to deal with this issue. I am pleased for the families and pleased for justice that this is underway. One of the other things that I would say to the families is— (Time expired)

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