Gary Cunningham, pictured helping to paint a friend's pool in Melbourne before he was killed in East Timor in 1975. Photo / Greig Cunningham
On October 16, 1975, five reporters in the East Timorese village of Balibo held their hands up and called out “Australians” and “journalists”.
Their declarations made no difference. Indonesian special forces, wanting to keep their incursion secret, killed all five.
Less than two months later, Indonesian troops invaded East Timor.
This week’s 50th anniversary of the murders of the “Balibo Five” is a reminder of the sometimes fraught dealings between New Zealand and Indonesia, not only over Balibo, but over the ongoing trouble-spot of West Papua.
One of the Balibo Five was New Zealander Gary Cunningham, 27, a cameraman with Melbourne’s Channel 7. His family struggled to get information after the killings.
“At the time, we couldn’t even get the [New Zealand] Government to look for them,” said Cunningham’s aunt, the late Patricia McGregor, in 2010 at a commemoration by Wellington City Council, human rights groups and journalists.
Cunningham’s younger brother, Greig, told me from Melbourne that, for 50 years, the family had been “lied to and ignored”, especially by Australian authorities. It was time New Zealand and Australia admitted they had “handled it in a poor way”.
“People seem quick to apologise for other past grievances, and it would be nice to have an official apology and be acknowledged.”
In 2015, Greig Cunningham received the Order of Timor-Leste on behalf of his late brother from President Taur Matan Ruak.
After the killing, he said, the only official contact from New Zealand was to ask where to send the bill for Cunningham’s coffin. According to Auckland-based human rights activist Maire Leadbeater in her book Negligent Neighbour, British and Australian diplomats attended a burial service for the five in Jakarta, but New Zealand was not represented.
At the 2010 ceremony in Wellington, Newspaper Publishers’ Association chief executive Tim Pankhurst said it was “shameful” that successive governments had refused to engage. “A fundamental tenet of a democracy is freedom of speech. Well, you need to back that up with supporting your citizens.”
No central government representatives attended the ceremony, but several sent apologies.
The other Balibo victims were Australians Greg Shackleton, 29, and Tony Stewart, 21, both of Channel 7, and Britons Brian Peters, 29, and Malcolm Rennie, 28, of Channel 9.
In December 1975, Indonesian troops shot dead Roger East, 53, of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at the Dili wharf. During Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor, the United Nations estimated up to 200,000 Timorese died.
On February 5, 2001, in a Herald report headed “UN closes in on killers of NZ journalist in Timor”, investigators sought to arrest three men: Mohammad Yunus Yosfiah, Christoforus da Silva and Domingos Bere.
Almost 25 years later, Cunningham says, “None of the named killers have been brought to justice.”
Yunus was allegedly the captain who ordered the Balibo killings and took part, using guns and knives. He later became a Cabinet minister.
Decades of drip-fed leaks and official information requests show why Britain, Australia and New Zealand downplayed Balibo. In public, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam supported Timorese independence after Portuguese rule ended in 1974. Privately, he decided the government of the leftist Fretilin group, also called the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor, could lead to a version of Cuba in Australia’s backyard.
In 2005, researcher Hugh Dowson found papers showing Australia had known that Indonesia’s invasion was imminent. John Ford, Britain’s ambassador in Jakarta, told London “the Australians” had divulged “clandestine activity” by Indonesian troops in East Timor. He said Indonesia feared its secret moves would be exposed.
“A particular hurdle … is a plane load of Australian journalists … who are due to visit Timor … to investigate allegations of Indonesian intervention,” Ford said.
Greig Cunningham told me that Australian officials had refused to release the files. It seemed Australia failed to warn the journalists or ask Indonesian President Suharto to protect them, although it was known that Indonesia had jailed and killed some of its own journalists.
“I blame the Australian Government most because they constantly lied to us,” he said. “To a slightly lesser extent … New Zealand.”
A week after the killings, Ford said of the Balibo Five: “We have suggested to the Australians that since we … know what happened … it is pointless to go on demanding information from the Indonesians which they cannot, or are unwilling to, provide ... no protests will produce the journalists’ bodies … they were in a war zone of their own choice.”
Wellington journalist Anthony Hubbard wrote in December 2005 that British documents had “many parallels in New Zealand archives”. New Zealand’s Canberra high commission cabled Wellington: “The (assumed) death of the five journalists was the first irritant, and journalists have since tended to be a primary source of difficulty.”
Senior diplomat Merwyn Norrish told Indonesian officials on December 8, 1975, the day East was killed, that New Zealand “had a private and a public position with respect to Timor”. Norrish also said: “Publicly we had sought to emphasise the need for … self-determination … privately we acknowledged the most logical solution would be … [Indonesian] integration …”
A Foreign Affairs paper on June 29, 1976, warned Foreign Minister Brian Talboys that protesting about the journalists’ deaths “would harm our own relations with Indonesia”. Cunningham told me: “Gary was carrying a New Zealand passport.” The Talboys briefing argued that he was an Australian resident employed by an Australian organisation and there was “no necessity for New Zealand to become involved …”.
Eight years after Balibo, Norrish was the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and I, as one of his information officers, witnessed deference to Indonesia first-hand. TVNZ’s Mike Valentine wanted to visit West Papua, which Indonesia invaded in 1962. Instead of lobbying Indonesia for a visa as promised, the Asia Division assured the embassy that the ministry would stop the trip, giving me the job of reminding Valentine about the Balibo Five and arguing that the trip was dangerous.
Indonesia had just become the world’s fourth most populous country and was “the next China” trade-wise, my colleagues said. A 2025 MFAT public brief predicts Indonesia to be the seventh-largest economy by 2030 and in the top five by 2050: “For Kiwi businesses, a market of that size, potential and proximity to New Zealand is a tantalising prospect.”
West Papua hosts one of the world’s least-known wars, with Indonesia restricting access to foreign journalists. Small independence groups, collectively called OPM, the Free Papua Organisation, have fought in heavily forested mountains for 63 years.
In 2013, I visited posing as a bird-watcher for my media and communication thesis “Restraints on reporting conflict in West Papua”. The trip researched a $6.34 million New Zealand police-training programme. My reports were published in the Herald in January 2014 under the headings “NZ 6.3m aid plan under fire” and “Kiwis accused of providing ‘aid that kills’”.
Later in 2014, Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully seemed to take a slightly harder line with Indonesia. The next known reporters on a tourist visa were caught by police in August that year, fined US$200 and jailed for two months. McCully said in September that he hoped president-elect Joko Widodo would open West Papua to international media. It was halfway through the prison term of French journalists Thomas Dandois and Valentine Bourrat.
In 2018, Greig Cunningham met McCully in the Beehive. “He listened and was sympathetic. They also showed me some files, but wouldn’t release those relating to Australia.”
Last year, behind the scenes, MFAT diplomats and other officials were assertive in a “patient, persistent approach”, according to one insider, after independence fighters in West Papua captured New Zealand pilot Phillip Mehrtens in February 2023, and torched his plane. He had landed to pick up construction workers in the highlands.
Most details of his negotiated release in September 2024 are secret, although much was revealed by the Herald’s Kurt Bayer in an article in February. The worldwide plethora of players included company executives, academics, human rights workers, senior military officers, journalists, church leaders, MFAT, politicians on both sides of Parliament and, not least, smart work by Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and his office.
From the start, New Zealand urged Indonesia not to use violence, but despite this, a bungled attempted rescue and ambush in April 2023 killed up to nine Indonesian troops, according to conflicting army and separatist claims.
In April 2024, a Papuan intermediary approached me to say the hostage-takers feared Mehrtens would die because of his declining health. Intermediaries distrusted the New Zealand Government, but wanted that message passed on. Threats to kill Mehrtens unless New Zealand advocated for Papuan independence, and Indonesia allowed it, had been dropped. The intermediaries urged fast-track negotiations, a request I ensured reached Peters’ office, without revealing sources.
When I put Cunningham’s call for an apology to Peters last week, he did not issue one, but provided the following statement: “The killing of the journalists known as the Balibo Five remains a terrible tragedy. We acknowledge the pain and grief that is still experienced by these men’s families, loved ones and former colleagues 50 years later.
“The journalists, including New Zealander Gary Cunningham, should not have died trying to tell the truth about what was occurring in Timor-Leste in 1975.
“The families of the men correctly want justice. The New Zealand Government has long held the view that those who were responsible for the deaths of the Balibo Five should be held accountable and brought to justice.
“New Zealand will be represented by its ambassador to Timor-Leste at a service commemorating the Balibo Five and those Timorese who died in the independence struggle, in Balibo, on October 16.”
Paul Bensemann is a Nelson-based freelance journalist who is researching a book with the working title Jailed, Beaten or Killed about journalists targeted by Indonesia.
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