Remembering East Timor's Kraras massacre 30 years on

Police, military perimeter guards and the public watch
the 38th independence anniversary parade at the
"widows village" of Kraras. Mobile photo: David Robie/PMC

By DAVID ROBIE in Dili

ON 28 November 1975, Timor-Leste made its fateful unilateral declaration of independence. A week later, a paranoid Indonesian military, fearful of an upstart "leftwing" neighbouring government, staged its brutal invasion and 24 years of repression and massacres followed.

On 17 September 1983, the infamous massacre of at least 300 civilians (probably a far higher number) took place at the village of Kraras and Wetuka River near Viqueque.

This heralded the end of the so-called ceasefire between Indonesian and Falintil forces and led to the long guerrilla struggle against Jakarta's harsh rule.

This week, the people of Kraras - the "village of widows" - proudly hosted the 38th anniversary of Timor-Leste independence; the real date, not the "rewritten" post-UN date. They also honoured the 30th anniversary of the Kraras massacre.

The massacre has been graphically portrayed in Timor-Leste's first feature film, Beatriz's War, and it was fitting that this movie should be screened to thousands of Timorese in an open-air arena at the independence festival this week.

Coup 4.5: Fiji 'democracy defenders' peddle bomber bravado

Coup 4.5 weblog ... television decree regime's latest big stick. Image: CP

By Graham Davis

THERE SEEMS to be no depths to which the depraved denizens of Coup 4.5  - the anti-government website – won’t plunge in their frustration at failing to derail Fiji’s march towards a fairer democracy. These so-called “journalists” are regular purveyors of racism and hate dressed up as respectable analysis but they’ve reached a new low with a link on how to make bombs.

Yes, they’ve carried a comment by someone calling himself/herself Pyro Farf who says:  

“Here’s what I’m reading:
 From a former top explosives expert with the Israeli Army comes a manual that presents ten simple yet powerful formulas for explosives and incendiaries that give the basis for making bombs, booby traps and mines. Learn to obtain or make the needed chemicals, or get substitutes.”

We’re not going to provide the link but it’s all there on Coup 4.5 [link provided reluctantly by CP] – the site that poses as the defender of democracy while purveying racism and, in a fresh outrage, promoting violence with a clear inference that people in Fiji try to dislodge the regime with home-made bombs.

They’ve also launched crude attacks on Professor Yash Ghai, head of Fiji’s Constitutional Commission, with articles casting him as a regime supporter that are a clear attempt to derail the constitutional process. The 4.5 gatekeepers have even allowed a comment posting calling on Professor Ghai to be charged with sedition. Quite on what grounds isn’t made clear but rationality isn’t the website’s strongest point.

The comment comes from a certain Mark Manning, a well known Sydney-based agitator who describes himself as a clinical hypnotherapist. As one correspondent has already quipped on 4.5, he’s clearly in the business of hypnotising himself with the delusion that the good Professor can be charged with anything at all.

Mark Manning is a regular feature at anti-regime rallies organised by the so called Fiji Democracy and Freedom Movement, that rabble of ethno-nationalists, SDL supporters and hangers on who have trouble filling a church hall yet continually cast themselves as credible players in Fiji. He’s also a regular contributor to the Matavuvale website, where these sad characters gather to trade their fantasies and swap their most incisive bon mots. Among Manning’s choicest is to describe Grubsheet in lurid terms as someone who wipes the dictator’s nethers. The imagery is as crude as the language but this is evidently the best this hypnotherapist can conjure up.

Another regular contributor to both Coup 4.5 and Matavuvale is the charmless Ilisoni (Wilson)Tamanikaira, a man now banned from these columns for his overt racism and for urging Fijians (the real ones, of course) to beat Grubsheet to a pulp on sight. He and Mark Manning deserve each other, one a Fijian who appropriately resides in the red neck Australian city of Toowoomba (Pauline Hanson country), the other an Australian who evidently wishes he was Fijian but only if the country is run by people who wouldn’t allow him to be Fijian at all. Strangely, Manning is wedded to the SDL, surely an alliance of the most bizarre kind.

And so we have this gaggle of the politically dispossessed, racial supremacists (or both) plus their assorted camp followers, all quaintly banging their pots and pans offshore in support of a bastardised democracy like a bunch of Argentine washerwomen locked out of a bank. Their desperation is evidently reaching fever pitch as the constitutional process kicks into gear and their dreams of a comeback move further and further out of reach. So perhaps it’s to be expected that their agitation is also reaching fever pitch, whatever rationality they once had dissolving into mass hysteria and a steady stream of idle threats.

Few rational people care anymore about their loathsome politics and racism, not to mention the appalling hypocrisy of one-time coup makers such as Simione Kaitani screaming blue murder about democracy from their cosy perches in Australia.

But when the “journalists” at Coup 4.5 start issuing instructions about how to make home-made bombs -presumably to be detonated in the country they claim to love – it’s a bridge too far and let’s call it what it really is: criminal and sick.

Independent Fiji-born journalist Graham Davis publishes the blog Grubsheet.

• Coup 4.5
• Coup 4.5 - the politics of hate

Gang members kidnap, rape Indian journalist's niece

Indian troops guard the entrance to the AMIC media and globalisation conference in Hyderabad, India. Below: Assaults on the media in India featured on CBS-IBN. Photos: David Robie

BARELY had Café Pacific returned to its more tranquil Waitemata waters after the stimulating AMIC media and globalisation conference in Hyderabad, India, than Reporters Sans Frontières has issued another communique about a shocking development on the subcontinent. RSF reports that it is

... appalled to learn that the niece of a journalist based in Bulandshahr, in the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh, was kidnapped for three days and raped by gang members, who mistook her for his daughter.

The police have arrested a member of the gang, which had reportedly threatened the journalist over his reporting and wanted to deter him from testifying in a murder case. The journalist, who reports for a TV news channel and edits a monthly called Jungsatta, has been identified only by the name of "Rizwan".

"We express our full support for Rizwan, his niece and his family," Reporters Sans Frontières said. "This barbaric violence must not go unpunished. In his reporting and the evidence he gave to the judicial authorities, he courageously fulfilled his journalistic and civic duties. The Indian authorities must now do their duty by bringing this wretched crime's perpetrators and instigators to justice and by providing the journalist and his family with effective protection."

The press freedom organisation added: "If the authorities take no measures to punish those responsible, other journalists will be afraid to continue covering criminal cases or any story remotely linked to the underworld and organised crime."

Yasin Bhatola, a known member of a Bulandshahr-based gang led by Mehboob Pandey, was arrested in New Delhi on July 1 on information provided by the Bulandshahr police. Police say Bhatola has admitted to being a member of Pandey's gang.

The Times of India quoted deputy police commissioner Arun Kampani as saying: "[Rizwan] was a witness in double murder case (. . .) in which Mehboob Pandey was an accused. Pandey and his associates threatened him with dire consequences if he continued to testify."

The abduction and rape was allegedly carried out by Pandey, Bhatola and three other members of Pandey's gang. Rizwan's family is reportedly now being protected by the Bulandshahr police.

The news of the Uttar Pradesh case has emerged just three weeks after Jyotirmoy Dey, an investigative reporter for the newspaper MidDay who specialised in covering organised crime, was gunned down by three men on 11 June in Mumbai.

This assassination was featured in the last report on Café Pacific.

After initially arresting a single suspect, police arrested seven more suspects on June 27. Mumbai joint police commissioner Himanshu Roy said they were hired by underworld don Chhota Rajan.

Dey was the second journalist to be killed this year in India. The first was Umesh Rajput, a reporter for the newspaper Nai Duniya, who was gunned down by two masked men on a motorcycle in the east-central state of Chhattisgarh on January 23.

Reporters Sans Frontières released a report on February 24 about global organised crime and the fact that it now poses one of the biggest threats to media freedom.

These events, of course, put things in perspective in the South Pacific where media freedom is a catchcry but where the risks are relatively mild in the global stakes apart from the occasional roughing up, such as in Vanuatu, and unsavoury state censorship, as in Fiji. (Incidentally, Café Pacific deplores the appalling non-sentence handed out to minister Harry Iauko for the recent assault on Daily Post publisher Marc Neil-Jones). It only takes a brief trip to India, Pakistan, Philippines - or across the border from Papua New Guinea into Indonesian-ruled West Papua - to get a rude awakening on the realities over media freedom.

Meanwhile, the global credibility of news media has taken a king hit with the closure of the 168-year-old News of the World amid the newspaper's phone hacking and alleged police corruption furore that is shaking the Murdoch media empire to its foundations. Café Pacific regards the collapse to the world's biggest selling Sunday as no real loss - it was a scurrilous rag anyway. But the ramifactions from this scandal for professional and ethical media globally is likely to be dire.

The British government insists that media self-regulation itself has "failed". Many other governments are bound to share that sentiment and use the NOTW debacle as an excuse for harsher media laws.

For those in the Pacific, it is sobering to reflect on the performance of another (then and albeit tiny) Murdoch paper, The Fiji Times, during the Coalition Labour government's one year in office in Fiji after a landslide election win in 1999 and the George Speight coup in May 2000. Allegations of bias and lack of professionalism were rife at the time and much has been written since.

Fiji blog cops a blast over 'treason' law makeover misrepresentation

BLOG COUPFOURPOINTFIVE has had its credibility challenged over a report claiming any "Negativity against regime treated as treason". The shallow item was attributed in the first paragraph to "sources". Former University of the South Pacific development studies academic Crosbie Walsh, whose own Fiji blog is increasingly looked to for informed and accurate analysis, has condemned the website, run by journalists, for misrepresentation. The original "treason" blog posting has now had a hasty title change to "New Criminal decree brings worry". (But the blog also later partially made amends by adding a rather more informative posting about the "sedition and incitement" clauses as well as treason.) Read on...

Negativity is Treason: Blog Misunderstands or Deliberately Distorts New Crime Decrees

By Crosbie Walsh

The story posted by the anti-government blogger Coupfourpointfive under the heading "Any Negativity Against Regime Treated as Treason" is factually incorrect and, one must assume, deliberately misleading. I consider this the most blatantly biased, damaging -- but most easily refutable -- release so far by Coup4.5. Their general credibility is now in serious doubt.

If the mainstream print and radio media report this blog story without first checking the facts against Fiji's old and new laws, they are a party to the blogger's action, whether intended or not. Sloppy journalism becomes a weapon in politically delicate situations.

Coup 4.5 reports that "one part of the decree limits what the Fiji media can report on a criminal case". The inference is that this is a new provision, limiting freedom of the press. This is not so.

The provision of the Criminal Procedure Decree prohibits reporting on criminal cases "until the conclusion of the trial" (section 201). It applies only to offences to be tried before the High Court such as rape and murder. And the provision is identical to section 236 of the repealed Criminal Procedure Code that has been Fiji law since about 1948.

The blog then states: "Under subsection 65 Part 2 individuals and NGO's criticising Frank Bainimarama's regime are deemed to have committed treason and this is punishable by life imprisonment."

In fact, section 65 of the new Decree is section 65 of the old Penal Code, which defined a seditious (sic!) intention as an intention, inter alia, to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of the population of Fiji. Section 66 of the old Penal Code created the offence inter alia of "printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, or reproducing any seditious publication" which offence was punishable with two years imprisonment and/or a fine of $200 on a first offence and three years on a subsequent conviction.

So the offence in the decree is not new and arguably blogsites which promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between classes of the population have already been guilty of the old section 66! Only the name and the penalty has changed. The offence is now called "inciting communal antagonism" and the maximum penalty is now 10 years imprisonment. The offence is not called treason.

Treason is a separate offence under section 64 and it re-enacts the old common law definition of treason - as used in the trials of Timoci Silatolu and George Speight [pictured above]. It includes acts of killing the President or the Prime Minister or causing them harm and also includes levying war against Fiji. In fact, the new definition adds nothing to the common law definition of treason, nor does it dilute it.

Last year's Abrogation of the 1997 Constitution made it necessary to replace laws existing under the Constitution. For the most part, the decrees that replace them replicate, clarify and update the old laws. No new "draconian" sections have been added.

Readers wishing to read the new Crime Decree and Criminal Procedure Decree may click on these links to Mediafire, and download them from there.

The Media Decree is still being drafted.

• Radio Australia's Pacific Beat reporter Bruce Hill has hosted emeritus professor Croz Walsh and Auckland-based Coalition for Democracy in Fiji spokesperson Nik Naidu on a "future" debate:
• Pros and cons of the Fiji sanctions - Podcast
• Crimes Decree 2009 vs repealed Penal Code
  

Public right to know - from Possum to the Pumpkin

MAKE sure you get hold of the latest Pacific Journalism Review, due out next week. With the theme "The Public Right to Know - Reporting Futures", this edition has a host of interesting articles. Among them is Chris Nash's fascinating insights into political blogger Possum Pollytics and the critical impact he had on the reportage of last November's Australian federal election. (Check out his new blog). Too bad we don't seem to have a blogger in his league in New Zealand as we approach our own election on November 8. Tony Maniaty has an article analysing the impact of the evolutionary technologies and breathtaking media change on television war reporting:

The fall of free-to-air ratings continues apace, and, with it, the vast resources needed to deploy large teams into the battlefield to mount comprehensive audience-gripping coverage. This relentless quest for real-time war drama has much to answer for, shifting increasingly precious resources away from more nuanced and informative reportage.

In Maniaty's view, "big" media is struggling to sustain "comprehensive coverage". He reckons the "smaller-scale, independent output of video journalists" is becoming the new trend-setter.

In other content in PJR, Robbie Robertson reviews two new challenging books on the Pacific (and Asia) media, which should have the flacks talking, while Sarah Baker and Jeanie Benson offer a refreshing take on NZ media reporting of Asian crime - "The suitcase, the samurai sword and the Pumpkin". The edition is jointly published with the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ).

• ACIJ
• Pacific Journalism Review
• Possum's old website
• Pollytics on Crickey.com