Page 119 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

104 Chapter 5

i.e., neither a member on the board of parties nor a party candidate in the general
elections.” In practice, the two groups were far from nonpartisan.
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Two months after the election, officials still had no clear criteria for choosing the
two hundred representatives, much less a formula to ensure their neutrality. Election
commissioners were considering two alternatives for deciding the 135 provincial rep-
resentatives, and both favored Golkar. By August, it became clear that the process
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for selecting the sixty-five sectoral members was strongly weighted toward the ruling
party.
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As the media remained quiet on these critical issues, the only protest came from
a group of some two hundred student demonstrators who rallied on August 9 outside
the KPU headquarters over the selection of sectoral representatives, slaughtering a
white goat with the initials “KPU” painted on its side. The students demanded that
the commission dissolve the “Team of Fifteen” selecting the sixty-five interest-group
delegates, charging that it lacked independence and that members were abusing their
authority to serve partisan interests.
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Press in Parliament?
Ironically, even as news outlets downplayed electoral manipulation, leaders of the

twenty journalists’ associations were fighting to protect their industry’s new indepen-
dence. Among the sixty-fi ve interest-group seats in the MPR, the KPU was planning
to reserve at least one for “the press.” As Golkar maneuvered to increase seats for its
loyalists, the Indonesian Journalists’ Association (PWI) put forth their Jakarta branch
head, Tarman Azzam, a Golkar supporter who had helped blacklist members of the
Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) after the 1994 bans.
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In response, AJI head Lukas Luwarso expressed hope that his organization would
also win one of the sectoral MPR seats. But when AJI convened a meeting with four
other journalists’ associations, all present concluded that they should oppose the
appointment of any member of the media to parliament. Somewhat unexpectedly,
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the group that articulated the winning argument against media representation was
the Indonesian Television Journalists Association, whose head, Haris Jauhari, was a
lead contender for one of the sectoral posts. Jauhari argued that MPR membership
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would compromise the standards of professionalism that his association espoused.
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How could the media report objectively on the MPR if they became part of the MPR?
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Other attendees agreed that the media should not be represented in the legislative
body that decided the next president.
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In an effort to block a seat for the pro-Golkar PWI, Jauhari, host of the talk show
Partai-Partai , invited the main actors to discuss the issue before a live audience. By
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the end of a spirited debate, opponents of media representation made it clear that
such participation in government would compromise media independence. Two days
later, the television journalists’ association and AJI invited all twenty new journal-
ists’ associations to a meeting that ended in unanimous opposition to any media
representation in the MPR. The next day, August 11, their leaders appeared before
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television cameras to present their rejection of media representation to the chair of
the KPU. “[Since] journalists are required to always guard [their] independence,” the
statement said, “with involvement in the MPR it is feared that journalists will become
caught up in politicking that could undermine their independence.”
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A week later, KPU members favoring media representation fought to appoint a
PWI delegate to what was now the only sectoral seat for the media. “Fortunately,”