A Prominent human rights group has condemned as "inexcusable" the inconclusive findings of an Australian report into the killing of five journalists when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975.
The report - presented in the Australian parliament by the Foreign Minister, Mr Alexander Downer - stops short of finding that the present Indonesian Information Minister, Mr Yunus Yosfiah, ordered the killings, as a special forces commander.
It has been long believed the journalists were killed because they were about to broadcast news of the invasion that they were witnessing. Successive Australian governments have accepted Indonesia's explanation that the five were caught in a crossfire between rival East Timorese factions, citing a lack of evidence to the contrary.
The inquiry by Mr Ben Sherman, a former head of the National Crime Authority, was commissioned by the Australian government. Mr Sherman was ordered to reopen his original 1996 inquiry after a witness, Mr Olandina Guterres, made the allegation against Mr Yosfiah on Australian television last year.
Mr Sherman refused to accept Mr Guterres account because of a lack of corroborative evidence.
"As to Yunus Yosfiah, I believe that there is sufficient evidence to link him to the command of SUSI [the attacking force] and therefore to the command of the group of attackers most likely to have killed the journalists," he said.
"But I am not prepared to conclude that he did . . . what Olandina Guterres claims in the absence of corroborative evidence," said Mr Sherman.
Ms Carmel Budiardjo, of Tapol (political prisoner), the London-based Indonesian Human Rights Association, said yesterday the long-awaited Sherman report was basically saying "this was not a murder but a blunder. It gives the Indonesians a complete defence". She said she agreed with Ms Shirley Shackleton, the widow of Greg Shackleton, one of the Australian journalists, that there would be no truth about this incident until a judicial inquiry - rather than a "loosely based" inquiry such as this one - was undertaken with the collaboration of the Indonesians. Jakarta had refused to allow Mr Sherman access to the site in East Timor, said Ms Budiardjo. Mr Sherman had said: "I don't believe that further accounts will necessarily cast clearer light on this matter."
Such an approach was "ridiculous", said Ms Budiardjo, a veteran human rights campaigner.
Mr Sherman said the information on the deaths was inconsistent, despite at least three people claiming to be eye witnesses to the killing of at least one of the five.
Mr Sherman said that in 1996 he had two witnesses to the Dili seafront murder of Roger East, an Australian journalist, and concluded that he was shot dead by an Indonesian soldier. This summary execution is graphically described in the novel Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Moo.
The TV journalists - Australians Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britons Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters, and New Zealander Gary Cunningham - were killed at Balibo in the west of East Timor on October 16th, 1975.