Former TV reporter Tony Maniaty tells Andrew Stone about the haunting guilt of surviving when colleagues died
Is a story worth dying for?
Journalist Tony Maniaty has wrestled with the question for 35 years, ever since he fled East Timor late in 1975 ahead of invading Indonesian forces.
By leaving, Maniaty unquestionably saved his own life. But it also meant he was forced to endure the taunts of colleagues who accused him of abandoning the East Timorese in their hour of need, even of cowardice.
His own boss at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation rebuked him.
"I rang my editor. I told him I was going to pull out, that we were extraordinarily unsafe and that we were next on the list. His exact words were: 'A good correspondent stays on the job'."
The five journalists who stayed on the story in October 1975 never got out.
They were murdered by Indonesian Special Forces at Balibo in the brown dusty hills of East Timor where they had waited - despite Maniaty's desperate warnings that they faced grave and imminent danger - to get what clearly would have been a sensational story: evidence of Jakarta's illegal invasion.
Two months later, in December 1975, a sixth reporter, Australian Roger East, was also killed. A shell-shocked Maniaty had met the veteran journalist in Darwin after he flew out of the capital, Dili.
"Listen to me," Maniarty told East over a breakfast beer, "don't do it. You'll die if you do."
Maniaty, now 61 and a journalism lecturer in Sydney, says the tumultous events of 1975 - and the fate of the "Balibo Five" - have never left him.
He remains conflicted by what he calls "survivor guilt" - the fact that he is here today, yet still calls his survival decision to leave Dili ahead of Indonesia's full-scale invasion a "strange failure".
"I was no more experienced than the Balibo Five. I didn't have any clues that they didn't have. I just followed my instincts to some degree. When you survive and others die who are exactly the same age and much like you, you can't help but ask yourself 'how come I was so lucky to have had a whole life and they missed out?"'
East Timor's bloodstained modern history suggests that the Balibo Five were only the most famous casualties of Indonesia's savage 25-year occupation, certainly from an Australian perspective.
A United Nations report estimated more than 100,000 Timorese died in that time. A committee of the Australian Parliament said "at least 200,000" perished during Jakarta's rule - one-third of the population.
Three New Zealanders lost their lives. Cameraman Gary Cunningham was one of the Balibo Five, former Auckland Grammar student Kamal Bamadhaj was fatally shot when Indonesian troops opened fire on protestors at Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery in November 1991 and Private Leonard Manning, who was serving with UN peacekeepers, was killed by pro-Indonesian militia in July 2000.
Maniaty says he's been troubled by his decision to leave Timor all his life.
"It wasn't a decision I made lightly but I clearly made the right decision in terms of my survival and the evidence is in the death of Roger East."
But he reflects that the issue - whether a story is worth dying for - remains a complex one.
At a seminar on war reporting in Auckland this week, Maniaty, the guest speaker, observed that by abandoning a conflict in the face of extreme danger, correspondents risked handing over the conduct of war to belligerents without morality, law or limits.
"War without independent witness is war without mercy. The very presence of the media ensures to some degree that war is modified to standards that are hopefully less than barbaric."
Equally, by remaining, correspondents entered another ethical minefield: by risking death and raising the prospect of dying on their job, observations and impressions remained "unheard and unwritten and without impact, told to nobody. No audience will hear the beauty of their cause".
Two years ago Maniaty got the chance to confront his Timor demons when he worked as a consultant on Robert Connolly's 1975 film Balibo, a riveting recreation of events leading to the deaths of the newsmen, and East's cold-blooded execution on Dili's wharf.
Maniaty has now written an account of his chaotic few weeks in East Timor as a raw ABC television reporter, and his reflections on returning for the first time, in Shooting Balibo. His revealing 2008 memoir, which shuffles in time between the two tours of duty that Maniaty made to the tiny nation, is subtitled Blood and Memory in East Timor.
He had found over the years that episodes from Timor kept surfacing "like a screen inside my head".
"I realised this story had never left my brain and probably never will but I found by going back and talking to people up there and then writing a book about it, some of that anxiety went away."
On his return to Australia in 1975, Maniaty was told by his boss to disappear for a few days, partly to escape ill-feeling and taunts directed his way and partly to recover from physical and mental exhaustion.
The message was "get out, get pissed and get over it".
The remarks, says Maniaty, reflected the "Hemingway version of war reporting, the sort of Boys' Own version with journalists throwing themselves into the battle and if they get killed, well ... that's what they do for a living".
"If you'd challenged that perception four decades ago, you'd find a lot of opposition, both institutionally and within your peer group - 'what are you, a man or a mouse?"'
He caught an echo of this when he made his way back to Balibo two years ago. In the building where Channel Seven journalist Greg Shackleton famously painted the word Australia on its outside wall - perhaps in hope it might protect his crew - Maniaty found a visitors' book with an entry: "They deserved what they got - no heroes here."
Things have moved on, says Maniaty. Laws which reveal war as inhuman and horrific and not an heroic enterprise have helped with the shift, as have measures which protect frontline journalists and impose justice on parties who breach legal guarantees of protection.
"Journalists must go to war zones. They must. If the media isn't present, even more horrific things happen because the media bear witness. And without some sort of independent observers, it's very likely the torture or the violence will only increase."
The remaining task was to ensure they came out alive.
Tony Maniaty is the keynote speaker at the Qantas Media Awards on June 11. For tickets to the black tie presentation and dinner at the SkyCity Grand, contact sarah@newspapers.co.nz
