It’s been 50 years since the Balibo 5 were killed in Timor-Leste. No one’s been held accountable

Fifty years after the brutal killing of the Balibo Five and journalist Roger East during Indonesia's invasion of Timor-Leste, justice remains elusive-no one has ever been held accountable.

On October 16, 1975, five journalists were killed in the remote Timorese town of Balibo. To this day, no one has been charged with their deaths.

Known as the "Balibo Five", the men were reporting on the covert Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste. They were Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart from Australia, Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters from the United Kingdom, and Gary Cunningham from New Zealand.

Several months later, another Australian journalist, Roger East, who went to investigate their disappearance, was executed. His body was never recovered.

Fifty years on, the case remains one of the most egregious examples of atrocities committed against war correspondents. It's also a chilling case of a state failing to prosecute the murder of its own citizens.

The 1975 invasion

In 1975, Portugal abruptly decolonised Timor-Leste. The left-leaning FRETILIN party declared Timorese independence that November.

Indonesia, motivated by high estimates of oil and gas in the Timor Sea, launched a covert invasion under the pretext of anti-colonial stability.

Indonesian authorities felt they could operate with impunity because of the country's strategic importance to the West's fervent anti-communism agenda.

Indeed, it had done so in the previous decade, with mass killings of political dissidents in the 1960s.

It's against this backdrop that the journalists, or the "Mártires de Balibo" (the Martyrs of Balibo), as they're called in Timor, arrived to report on the illegal incursion of Indonesian forces. They had been guided to the town by the current Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta, then in his 20s.

They famously painted the Australian flag on a nearby building they took shelter in, hoping it would protect them from attack. This failed plea remains in Balibo today.