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Journalist and camerman Jose Bello smuggled videos containing scenes such as this out of |
Sarah Jaensch – Rádio Australia
East Timor has undergone a hectic and sometimes fragile transformation from oppressed colony to emerging democracy. And the experience has proved especially challenging for journalists - both local and foreign.
Now a new documentary, Breaking the News, looks at the work and lives of two of East Timor's most experienced investigative journalists - Jose Belo and Rosa Garcia.
Sarah Jaensch reports for Australia Network's Asia Pacific Focus.
Now a new documentary, Breaking the News, looks at the work and lives of two of East Timor's most experienced investigative journalists - Jose Belo and Rosa Garcia.
Sarah Jaensch reports for Australia Network's Asia Pacific Focus.
JOSE BELO (excerpt from Breaking the News, May 2006): The foreign media (are) very professional media organisations and they have a long history of covering stories around the world. But sometimes if you come into East Timor, East Timor is a new country and East Timor has its own characters. And how people doing their things, they have their own way to do it.
SARAH JAENSCH, REPORTER: It's been a remarkable journey for Jose Belo, one that has seen him report from the front-line on the birth and growing pains of East Timor.
During the Indonesian occupation Belo would go undercover and smuggle videos out of the country, showing the international media what was happening in East Timor.
Today he is a journalist, cameraman and newspaper director.
Rosa Garcia too has been there to chart the trials and tribulations of her young country. As reporter at the East Timor Post she's earned a reputation for uncovering the truth.
Now Belo and Garcia are the focus of a new documentary called Breaking the News, made by filmmaker Nicholas Hansen.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: I think East Timor being such a young country it's a really interesting character, the character of the journalist, to focus on.
SARAH JAENSCH: Breaking the News was filmed over four years beginning during the 2006 crisis when a dispute within the military almost led to civil war and fuelled conflict between people from the east and west of the newly formed nation.
Jose Belo shrugged off the risks to help report on the crisis.
JOSE BELO (excerpt from Breaking the News): I'm a journalist and my name is, my last name is Belo. So Below is identified with the eastern part from Baucau. So they all know where I come from.
They way I communicate with them, I say look, I have nothing to do with you guys. You do your business. I do my job. I'm just a journalist. I am just covering the events going on.
SARAH JAENSCH: Nowadays as well as running local newspaper Tempo Semanal, Belo works as a freelance cameraman and a fixer and translator for foreign media organisations including the ABC.
(Excerpt from Breaking the News):
MAN 1 (in car): What's happened? Can you stop here?
MAN 2 (running towards the car): Loromunu (Westerners)! Good! Loromunu very good!
MAN 2: Jose I need your help with the tripod.
(End of excerpt)
SARAH JAENSCH: Over the past two decades the story of East Timor has been portrayed mainly through the eyes of foreign media.
Breaking the News paints a less than flattering portrait of many of the journalists and photographers who arrived in Dili to cover the 2006 crisis and leaves the viewer wondering whether their presence helped or hindered the situation.
(Excerpts from Breaking the News):
JOURNALIST (in East Timor with burning building behind him): New Zealand has given tens of billions of dollars and the lives of five of its soldiers to prop up East Timor.
TIM PAGE, FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER: It's just getting madder and madder isn't it? It's marvellous. It's not marvellous for them. It's good for us.
WOMAN (from car): These people they also act because you are here and filming them, right? That's also one reason.
MAX BLENKIN, REPORTER, AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS: It was just the 4-wheel drive with a Red Cross on the side saying who knows what, berating the media pack for fomenting all this, with some justification I suspect.
JOURNALIST: It's always the same. When there is no solution it is the fault of the press.
These Australian journalists came in and after they finish the story go. They left the country and they stay there. They're safe.
JOSE BELO: If the Timorese media is doing the story they stay here. They stay here and it's risk for them. It's risk for the journalist. And that's why some of the journalists here are very preventive, very preventive. Very self censorship.
(End of excerpts)
SARAH JAENSCH: Nicholas Hansen also looks at the physical and legal risks facing East Timor's journalists on a daily basis.
During the 2006 crisis Rosa Garcia's newspaper The Timor Post was forced to close after two of her colleagues were badly beaten.
Over the past two decades Jose Belo has been arrested, tortured and imprisoned a number of times.
JOHN MARTINKUS, JOURNALIST: When he was released from prison released from prison throughout the second half of 98 and early 99 before the UN arrived, Jose had to be very, very, very careful because there were still very many people, you know Indonesians, people who sided with the Indonesians, who wanted to kill him.
SARAH JAENSCH: But Hansen says the risks to local journalists and the obstacles to a free media are still apparent a decade after the country's independence.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: Both Jose and Rosa are the first generation of investigative reporters in East Timor. They face many challenges in their day-to-day work.
You know one of them of course is resources or lack of resources. Another is access to information about what's going on in their own country.
SARAH JAENSCH: Breaking the News also takes a close look at the biggest event in the country's recent history - the attempted assassination of president Jose Ramos Horta and the court case that followed.
Jose Belo says the trial raised more questions than it answered.
JOSE BELO (excerpt from Breaking the News): I always criticise my government every week. Every week, every single week my newspaper bang bang on Xanana's head. But it's too much actually, too much for me to do it.
I've been living here for 38 years. I myself doesn't understand yet the whole context of this country. I'm trying to understand.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: Journalists with the depth of experience of Jose and Rosa are extremely important to East Timor's development.
I mean it's young country with fairly young institutions. By that I mean the court system and the civil bureaucracy.
So that I think that journalists and certainly when Jose is breaking news and receiving the leaks and breaking this information, I think that he's acting very much as one of those pillars of society, you know that journalism and journalists across the world probably aspire to.
JIM MIDDLETON: Sarah Jaensch reporting.
SARAH JAENSCH, REPORTER: It's been a remarkable journey for Jose Belo, one that has seen him report from the front-line on the birth and growing pains of East Timor.
During the Indonesian occupation Belo would go undercover and smuggle videos out of the country, showing the international media what was happening in East Timor.
Today he is a journalist, cameraman and newspaper director.
Rosa Garcia too has been there to chart the trials and tribulations of her young country. As reporter at the East Timor Post she's earned a reputation for uncovering the truth.
Now Belo and Garcia are the focus of a new documentary called Breaking the News, made by filmmaker Nicholas Hansen.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: I think East Timor being such a young country it's a really interesting character, the character of the journalist, to focus on.
SARAH JAENSCH: Breaking the News was filmed over four years beginning during the 2006 crisis when a dispute within the military almost led to civil war and fuelled conflict between people from the east and west of the newly formed nation.
Jose Belo shrugged off the risks to help report on the crisis.
JOSE BELO (excerpt from Breaking the News): I'm a journalist and my name is, my last name is Belo. So Below is identified with the eastern part from Baucau. So they all know where I come from.
They way I communicate with them, I say look, I have nothing to do with you guys. You do your business. I do my job. I'm just a journalist. I am just covering the events going on.
SARAH JAENSCH: Nowadays as well as running local newspaper Tempo Semanal, Belo works as a freelance cameraman and a fixer and translator for foreign media organisations including the ABC.
(Excerpt from Breaking the News):
MAN 1 (in car): What's happened? Can you stop here?
MAN 2 (running towards the car): Loromunu (Westerners)! Good! Loromunu very good!
MAN 2: Jose I need your help with the tripod.
(End of excerpt)
SARAH JAENSCH: Over the past two decades the story of East Timor has been portrayed mainly through the eyes of foreign media.
Breaking the News paints a less than flattering portrait of many of the journalists and photographers who arrived in Dili to cover the 2006 crisis and leaves the viewer wondering whether their presence helped or hindered the situation.
(Excerpts from Breaking the News):
JOURNALIST (in East Timor with burning building behind him): New Zealand has given tens of billions of dollars and the lives of five of its soldiers to prop up East Timor.
TIM PAGE, FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER: It's just getting madder and madder isn't it? It's marvellous. It's not marvellous for them. It's good for us.
WOMAN (from car): These people they also act because you are here and filming them, right? That's also one reason.
MAX BLENKIN, REPORTER, AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS: It was just the 4-wheel drive with a Red Cross on the side saying who knows what, berating the media pack for fomenting all this, with some justification I suspect.
JOURNALIST: It's always the same. When there is no solution it is the fault of the press.
These Australian journalists came in and after they finish the story go. They left the country and they stay there. They're safe.
JOSE BELO: If the Timorese media is doing the story they stay here. They stay here and it's risk for them. It's risk for the journalist. And that's why some of the journalists here are very preventive, very preventive. Very self censorship.
(End of excerpts)
SARAH JAENSCH: Nicholas Hansen also looks at the physical and legal risks facing East Timor's journalists on a daily basis.
During the 2006 crisis Rosa Garcia's newspaper The Timor Post was forced to close after two of her colleagues were badly beaten.
Over the past two decades Jose Belo has been arrested, tortured and imprisoned a number of times.
JOHN MARTINKUS, JOURNALIST: When he was released from prison released from prison throughout the second half of 98 and early 99 before the UN arrived, Jose had to be very, very, very careful because there were still very many people, you know Indonesians, people who sided with the Indonesians, who wanted to kill him.
SARAH JAENSCH: But Hansen says the risks to local journalists and the obstacles to a free media are still apparent a decade after the country's independence.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: Both Jose and Rosa are the first generation of investigative reporters in East Timor. They face many challenges in their day-to-day work.
You know one of them of course is resources or lack of resources. Another is access to information about what's going on in their own country.
SARAH JAENSCH: Breaking the News also takes a close look at the biggest event in the country's recent history - the attempted assassination of president Jose Ramos Horta and the court case that followed.
Jose Belo says the trial raised more questions than it answered.
JOSE BELO (excerpt from Breaking the News): I always criticise my government every week. Every week, every single week my newspaper bang bang on Xanana's head. But it's too much actually, too much for me to do it.
I've been living here for 38 years. I myself doesn't understand yet the whole context of this country. I'm trying to understand.
NICHOLAS HANSEN: Journalists with the depth of experience of Jose and Rosa are extremely important to East Timor's development.
I mean it's young country with fairly young institutions. By that I mean the court system and the civil bureaucracy.
So that I think that journalists and certainly when Jose is breaking news and receiving the leaks and breaking this information, I think that he's acting very much as one of those pillars of society, you know that journalism and journalists across the world probably aspire to.
JIM MIDDLETON: Sarah Jaensch reporting.
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