Sir, - What Maggie O'Kane says about risk-taking journalists and particularly cameramen, is very true - the work they do can make a difference (May 27th).
As someone closely connected with East Timor, I very much appreciate their work. I also appreciate the fact that Max Staal and Marie Colvin were not the only "believers" in East Timor, as O'Kane implies.
When "the pack of journalists panicked and departed", as O'Kane puts it, more "non-names" than big names in the world of journalism actually stayed on under siege in the UN compound in Dili to keep feeding stories and pictures to the world as best they could.
Six of them were back in Dili when I went there last Christmas; people like the Australian, Heather Paterson, working as a freelance, the Japanese photographer, who lamented (correctly) the slowness and apparent lack of commitment on the part of the Australian army and the UN to cleaning up the devastated town and stimulating rebuilding, and others. They had returned to report the peace which they felt they had a small part in making.
And let's never, ever forget the East Timorese, who had at that time already lived as hunted animals and survived by their wits and sheer courage for years and recent months as the killings escalated. They hosted, interpreted for, drove, and led the foreign journalists to stories and protected them. They allowed themselves to be interviewed openly, in the full knowledge of the peril in which they placed themselves. Without them, the journalists who flew into East Timor from around the world would have found it difficult to get their stories.
Most of these East Timorese were left behind in the end to the mercy of the bloodthirsty Indonesian army and its militias. I met some of them in Dili at Christmas. Some I could not meet, because they are dead, tortured, hacked to death and their bodies dumped in some unknown site. I could not even visit their families in some cases because they are dead too. - Yours, etc.,
Geoffrey Heard, Mentone Vic 3194, Australia.