Page 104 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media in Retreat 89

Leading up to the session, print and broadcast coverage cast students as a moral
force performing their historic role as the nation’s conscience. After the session
began, however, coverage of the students’ standoff with security forces began to shift,
particularly on television. Commentary and visuals combined to portray the students
as unreasonably pushing the military into a corner. In this view, the problem was not
that the country was already facing a crisis because current leaders were biased, but
that students were creating a crisis by forcing their demands.
In the first shift, television newscasters began describing the military and police
as public servants doing their jobs while falling victim, along with the students, to
growing violence. Sympathy for security forces first emerged on the television station
RCTI, partly owned by Suharto’s oldest son, and on the government-run TVRI. It was
clearest in the November 11 reports on the military assaults on students and three
photojournalists described in chapter 4 . SCTV and ANteve led their evening news-
casts with the assaults, interviewing victims who gave gripping descriptions of sol-
diers beating students like “animals” and battering journalists with riot sticks before
smashing their cameras. But RCTI and TVRI coverage was cursory, stating only that
journalists “had been struck” before reporting at length on the soldiers’ injuries.
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By November 12, sympathy for security forces increasingly dominated all televi-
sion stations, marking the second shift, and was most obvious in coverage of a sit-in
protesting the assaults on journalists the previous day. On SCTV, the Antara state
news agency’s Parni Hadi called for sympathy “yes, for the journalist and student
victims, but also for [the military].” On RCTI, Desi Anwar, sister of presidential
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spokeswoman Dewi Fortuna Anwar, encouraged Hadi to repeat this plea for broader
sympathy but then pressed him, using leading questions, to shift blame for secu-
rity force violence onto the journalists themselves. Through a convoluted exchange,
Anwar led Hadi to the desired, exculpatory conclusion that the shooting “was indeed
a pure accident.” Anwar then pushed this interpretation of events further, asserting
that the military was “cornered” both by the MPR fight over their parliamentary seats
and “by public pressure from the military’s negative image.”
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That evening, three student protesters died in clashes with security. The next
day, November 13, newscasts were a jumble of breaking reports on developments
inside and outside parliament, marking the third shift in the narrative. By midafter-
noon, tens of thousands of people had poured into Jakarta streets to join the students
pushing their way toward parliament. Inside the main building, the five commissions
worked to finalize the twelve decrees that would set the government’s agenda for the
rest of Habibie’s term.
The commissions were deciding several contentious issues, and resolutions
included limited victories for reformers. The decision to name Suharto in a decree on
corruption, though short of ordering an investigation into his wealth, still represented
a clear win over conservatives on a key issue. Likewise, a decree mandating “gradual”
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elimination of the military’s appointive seats constituted a concession to the Ciganjur
signatories, who had proposed a six-year phaseout. Yet the compromises did little to
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appease student demonstrators, particularly those demanding the military’s immedi-
ate removal from parliament.
As pressure built, rumors began circulating that unnamed parties planned to
use the students to unseat Habibie and install a military junta, making the students
unwitting puppets in an extraconstitutional maneuver. That afternoon, security
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forces fired into the crowds, killing three more students and injuring dozens.
Six months earlier, the shootings of four students at Trisakti University had so
shocked the nation that even reporting by the television stations owned by Suharto’s