Time for both sides to face music over Balibo Five
Paul Daley; 18/5/08
A week before the last election, Kevin Rudd placed on record his unambiguous views about a crime that many Australians have come to regard as perhaps the most shameful recent episode in Australian diplomacy. On November 16 last year, NSW deputy coroner Dorelle Pinch referred the case of the Balibo Five — the Australia-based journalists murdered by the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1975 — to the Commonwealth Attorney-General for possible war crime prosecutions. This move followed four separate Australian inquiries that amounted to nothing, and three decades of official intransigence here and in Indonesia. Finally, it seemed, officialdom had leapt the gaping moral abyss that for decades has underpinned a pragmatism-ahead-of-human rights approach to Canberra’s sacrosanct bilateral relationship with Indonesia. Justice might finally be achieved, damn the diplomatic implications.