"The Year of Living Dangerously" was a big movie, and a big success, though there were many who thought it slighted history. But 16 years later, a young reporter started to live the same story and was maimed and killed. PNS contributor Eve Pell is a longtime writer for Pacific News Service.

This fall, Indonesians finally got a chance to go into a theater and see "The Year of Living Dangerously," a film banned by their government for 17 years.

In the movie, an Australian journalist played by Mel Gibson -- looking startlingly young -- is assigned to cover Indonesia in 1965, just as the dictator Sukarno was overthrown in a coup and armed troops terrorized the nation.

The country was in turmoil. Indonesian soldiers hated Westerners, the population was impoverished and oppressed. Within a week, the reporter -- outdoing other journalists stationed there -- braves threats to his life in pursuit of a story, dodges bullets, is smashed in the face by a soldier's rifle butt, gets the story, runs his car through a couple of military roadblocks, and escapes on the last plane out with the gorgeous Sigourney Weaver.

Ah, the movies. In real life, a handsome young Dutch reporter named Sander Thoenes played out a version of Mel Gibson's role, but there was no Hollywood ending. He arrived in East Timor in what could rightly be called its time of living dangerously -- September, 1999, as it was breaking free of Indonesian occupation. Intent on getting a story, Thoenes got the jump on his fellow journalists and roared off on a motorcycle taxi.

A few miles along the road, he and his driver encountered a roadblock. They turned back, but were pursued by soldiers firing at them; the motorbike fell over and the driver ran off. One eyewitness said that as Thoenes lay on the ground, soldiers mutilated his face and cut off his ear before executing him.

The parallels between the stories are striking: both take place amidst political turmoil in Indonesia, with the military using terror to stifle democracy, repress civilians, and intimidate the press.

In the movie, the escaping reporter witnesses soldiers massacring civilians. In real life, soldiers massacred hundreds of East Timorese.

In the movie, a half-Chinese cameraman (played by Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar for her performance) thinks out loud as he watches the young reporter walk into a bar where reporters hang out. "You're an enemy here, like all Westerners."

In real life, an Indonesian government spokesman warned the United Nations in September, 1999, not to send "white faces" into East Timor because they would not be "palatable."

But the endings, alas for the young Dutchman, could not have been more different.

In fact, while the fictional adventure is over, the young man's story, even though he is dead, has another chapter and there could yet be some kind of conclusion.

A sort of detective story has begun to unfold, with events out of sequence -- and now at a standstill.

Different investigators tried to find the killers of the Dutch journalist. All signs pointed to Indonesia's infamous Battalion 745, which went on a murderous rampage the day Thoenes died.

Cameron Barr, of "The Christian Science Monitor," wrote a series of reports based on interviews with eyewitnesses. Barr documented the battalion's lethal activities during that period, which included several shootings of civilians, the narrow escape of two Western journalists, as well as the shooting of Thoenes.

A Dutch policemen and an Australian from the United Nations flew to East Timor to conduct official interviews and gather evidence. The Dutch Union of Journalists sent a representative, Kees Schaepman, to investigate.

The Dutch/UN team wrote a report, naming possible suspects. It was submitted to the United Nations and the Indonesian government, but the Indonesians have failed to take any action on the case.

According to Schaepman, "The Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs promised to help with the international investigation but never lived up to his promise. A list of suspects of atrocities in East Timor was published by the Indonesian prosecutor, but the names of Sander's killers were not on the list. Nothing is happening."

The next chapter of the story has yet to be written. Will Indonesia's weak, troubled civil authorities dare to take on rogue elements in the military forces? Can governments and international organizations put diplomatic and economic pressure on the Indonesian government to get the case moving?