Page 160 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 145

and confrontational politics associated with Western democracy and encouraged an
unquestioning faith in those in power. Following Suharto’s ouster, reformasi advocates
were generally successful in repudiating this doctrine, although its tenets retained suf-
ficient appeal to fuel conservative attempts at rolling back media freedoms.
19
Also mitigating retrogressive pressures, the transformative impact of the media’s
new role in Indonesia went beyond the expansion of public discourse, and even
beyond the restoration of uncertainty to political contestation. In any transition, the
media can help ward off reversal in part by reinforcing perceptions among those in
power that a majority of the public, if not unambiguously supportive of democratic
governance, at least would not favor a return to authoritarianism. In post-Suharto
Indonesia, members of the media were often their own best advocates in reinforc-
ing impressions of public support for media freedom. When asked how Indonesians
would respond to a crackdown on speech in 1999, government figures responded that
neither the media nor the “people” would allow it. As the transition progressed,
20
opinion polls periodically confirmed similar perceptions.
21
A case that confirmed ordinary Indonesians’ support for freedom of speech and
their antipathy to laws protecting the powerful culminated in a digital cause célèbre.
In May 2009, a nursing mother of two, Prita Mulyasari, was subjected to three weeks
of pretrial detention after Omni International Hospital charged her with defamation.
Her crime: she had sent an email a year earlier to about twenty friends, complaining
that the hospital’s doctors had badly misdiagnosed her symptoms and given her den-
gue fever shots when she actually had the mumps.
22
While Prita was in jail awaiting almost certain conviction, an angered internet
community launched an intensive online campaign in her defense, establishing a
Facebook group that quickly gained several hundred thousand supporters. Politi-
cians running for office, including former president Megawati, visited her in prison,
and members of parliament pressured the hospital and the public prosecutor for a
quick resolution. When a court fined her nearly $22,000 and sentenced her to six
23
months’ incarceration, supporters formed the Help Prita Movement to collect coins
in a dozen Indonesian cities. Politicians, businesspeople, cab drivers, street vendors,
24
grade-school children, and even scavengers were active in raising money. Through this
unprecedented outpouring of public concern, the campaign collected nearly $90,000.
25
Finally, on December 29, 2009, the Tangerang High Court reversed Prita’s conviction.
After being tried, acquitted, retried, then acquitted again, she became an international
celebrity who eventually brought Omni and its lawyers to their knees, lodging a coun-
tersuit against the hospital for $106 million.
26
Prita’s case resonated with widespread anger at a legal system that, in the words
of one observer, “tends to side with the powerful and crush the weak into pieces.”
27
Support for her provided a vehicle for holding the powerful to account—in this case,
not only Omni but also the police, the courts, and parliamentarians complicit in main-
taining this unbalanced system. Yet in the end, victory for Prita meant defeat in key
ways for freedom of expression. Because of the Indonesian legal system’s ambiguous
sense of precedent, the case overturned Prita’s conviction but spared the country’s
defamation laws. Ultimately, it did not empower her followers so much as drive home
the lesson that freedoms brought by the transition remained tenuous, enforced or
abrogated at the whim of the powerful and still demanding crisis-driven defense via
mass mobilization.
This criminalization of criticism, fostered by collusion in all three branches of
government, was a blow to democratic consolidation, giving the more powerful the