indonesiamatters.com, 9 December 2009
The banning of "Balibo" the movie, screenings of it in Jakarta, and talkative Colonel Gatot Purwanto.
Last week the Film Censorship Board/Lembaga Sensor Film (LSF) banned the release in Indonesia of the Australian made movie Balibo, which purports to recount the story of the killings of five western journalists (Gary Cunningham, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, and Brian Peters) in East Timor in October 1975, during the early stages of the Indonesian invasion.
While the organisers of the Jakarta International Film Festival (JIFFest) agreed at the last moment not to show the film, in accordance with the ban, the liberals and rebels at Utan Kayu in Jakarta on 3rd December screened 'Balibo' in two packed to the house sessions, the screening being put on by the Independent Journalists' Alliance/Aliansi Jurnalis Independen (AJI).
Ezki Suyanto of the AJI said the showing of Balibo was intended for journalists only, and that they accounted for 80% of the audience. The AJI could not forbid non-journalists from viewing the film however.
Of the Utan Kayu screening Tourism and Culture minister Jero Wacik responded:
Jero said the film insulted the Indonesian nation and the military, because it claimed that the TNI deliberately murdered the five journalists. Indonesia and the government of now independent East Timor had agreed to put the past behind them, he said.
Meanwhile, not helping Jero's cause, eyewitness to the killings 62 year old retired Colonel Gatot Purwanto, a former Kopassus officer and intelligence commander in East Timor, told Tempo magazine in a rambling and self-contradictory interview recently that the journalists were intentionally killed, and their bodies later burnt, to hide from the international community the evidence and nature of the Indonesian infiltration of the abandoned Portugese colony.
In his own words:
If they were not executed, they could be witnesses to the fact that the Indonesian army had invaded Timor.
The bodies were covered with rice husks and then burnt … they needed to be totally disintegrated. That took two days.
We were in a bind … We had to make sure that the involvement of Indonesian troops was not known.
Of the film Balibo the Colonel is not impressed
From the start until the middle, it's quite balanced. But the main incidents surrounding the shooting of the five journalists were over-dramatised. No one was tortured.
Colonel Gatot Purwanto has a history of being talkative, and supposedly once told US journalist Allan Nairn that by 1990 roughly a third of the East Timorese population had died since the "integration".
Source: indonesiamatters.com
The banning of "Balibo" the movie, screenings of it in Jakarta, and talkative Colonel Gatot Purwanto.
Last week the Film Censorship Board/Lembaga Sensor Film (LSF) banned the release in Indonesia of the Australian made movie Balibo, which purports to recount the story of the killings of five western journalists (Gary Cunningham, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, and Brian Peters) in East Timor in October 1975, during the early stages of the Indonesian invasion.
While the organisers of the Jakarta International Film Festival (JIFFest) agreed at the last moment not to show the film, in accordance with the ban, the liberals and rebels at Utan Kayu in Jakarta on 3rd December screened 'Balibo' in two packed to the house sessions, the screening being put on by the Independent Journalists' Alliance/Aliansi Jurnalis Independen (AJI).
Ezki Suyanto of the AJI said the showing of Balibo was intended for journalists only, and that they accounted for 80% of the audience. The AJI could not forbid non-journalists from viewing the film however.
Of the Utan Kayu screening Tourism and Culture minister Jero Wacik responded:
Jero said the film insulted the Indonesian nation and the military, because it claimed that the TNI deliberately murdered the five journalists. Indonesia and the government of now independent East Timor had agreed to put the past behind them, he said.
Meanwhile, not helping Jero's cause, eyewitness to the killings 62 year old retired Colonel Gatot Purwanto, a former Kopassus officer and intelligence commander in East Timor, told Tempo magazine in a rambling and self-contradictory interview recently that the journalists were intentionally killed, and their bodies later burnt, to hide from the international community the evidence and nature of the Indonesian infiltration of the abandoned Portugese colony.
In his own words:
If they were not executed, they could be witnesses to the fact that the Indonesian army had invaded Timor.
The bodies were covered with rice husks and then burnt … they needed to be totally disintegrated. That took two days.
We were in a bind … We had to make sure that the involvement of Indonesian troops was not known.
Of the film Balibo the Colonel is not impressed
From the start until the middle, it's quite balanced. But the main incidents surrounding the shooting of the five journalists were over-dramatised. No one was tortured.
Colonel Gatot Purwanto has a history of being talkative, and supposedly once told US journalist Allan Nairn that by 1990 roughly a third of the East Timorese population had died since the "integration".
Source: indonesiamatters.com
