Page 107 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

92 Chapter 5

Reinforcing what now appeared to be a media consensus, TVRI’s 7:00 p.m. news
reported that while thousands of citizens sympathized with the students’ “moral
movement,” “uncontrolled mobs” were engaging in burning and looting. A group
of public figures, including Amien Rais, the report continued, had held a press con-
ference to urge all sides to restrain themselves to prevent more deaths. The head
of the president’s think tank, the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals,
appeared again, urging “all sides, including the mass media, to reassure the pub-
lic because the session’s results have been agreed on and accepted by President
Habibie.” After replaying General Abdul Haris Nasution’s earlier warning against
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“unconstitutional actions,” TVRI closed with a picture of order restored, function-
ally closing the media narrative and ending the crisis. “[T]housands of students,
intermingling with masses” now sat quietly listening to orations outside parlia-
ment. The orderly dispersal of the crowds after this broadcast signaled the end of
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the students’ demonstrations—and their last unified campaign to challenge incum-
bent control over the transition.
Only twenty-four hours after the violence of November 13, it was clear that Habi-
bie, his party, and military supporters had defeated the student-led bid to shift con-
trol over the transition to nonincumbents. The media, primarily television, assisted
the regime in this development, in part by disregarding the demonstrators’ main
contention—that letting the incumbent parliament write the rules for the country’s
next elections was inherently unsound. With limited exceptions, coverage affirmed
the legitimacy of current leaders’ command over the transition, reminding audiences
of the danger that rejecting their leadership would pose to national stability.
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Despite this outcome, the Habibie administration remained critical of TV coverage
and, reprising Suharto’s standard tactic, moved to facilitate a government-led buyout
of SCTV and Indosiar. One official stated that the SCTV takeover would “be carried
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out to restore [the station’s] health.” But SCTV insiders asserted that the move was
punishment for critical reporting on clashes between students and security forces. A
press release reported pressure on the station “to change its news director as a pen-
ance for ‘mistakes’ committed . . . through its news reporting policy.” If this charge
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was correct, the regime was seeking to skew the democratic process further in its favor
by ensuring positive coverage for the president in the lead-up to the coming elections.

Final Negotiations
With the issue of who would decide the transition’s framework resolved, atten-
tion turned to fi nal negotiations over three political bills on elections, parties, and
the legislature scheduled for passage in January 1999. The bills raised a question for
both the media and the public: Would the new rules level the playing fi eld or simply
perpetuate the distortions of the past?
As the majority party in parliament, Golkar dominated the new eighty-seven-
member committee charged with drafting these bills and pressed for an electoral sys-
tem that would advantage its political machine. In negotiating, the party confronted
two main challengers: independent local leaders who could win by name recognition
and minority parties that could aggregate votes at the provincial or national level. By
contrast, opposition parties wanted to maximize their minority status and held mixed
opinions on local politics.
The most contentious issues, however, were the allocation of unelected seats for
the military and the activity of civil servants in political parties, given their access
to the state bureaucracy. A final question was whether to retain proportional
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