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On Tuesday 1^st December 2009, just hours before the film was due to premiere at the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club, Indonesia’s censorship board, the LSF, banned Robert Connolly's Balibo, the politically sensitive Australian film about the Balibo Five, a group of journalists murdered by Indonesian troops in the East Timorese town of Balibo in 1975.   The decision also meant the film would not be shown at the forthcoming Jakarta International Film Festival.

It was reported that the Indonesian military was instrumental in persuading the LSF to ban the film, which contradicts Indonesia’s official explanation that the journalists were accidentally killed in crossfire.   Earlier in 2009 federal police in Australia announced they would carry out an official war crimes investigation into the incident following the conclusion of a coronial inquest in 2007 that Indonesian soldiers deliberately killed the journalists in an attempt to conceal the country’s invasion of East Timor.

 [ADD]