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Origins of Media Controls 19

Sukarno declared an official state of emergency as he stepped up the campaign against
these secessionist movements, leaving news outlets with little recourse. Protections
18
for the media were overridden by government imperatives, and further reforms that
might have eradicated the Dutch legacy were repeatedly preempted by fears over the
perceived fragility of the new republic.
In 1959, as political divisions deepened and negotiations over a permanent con-
stitution became deadlocked, Sukarno dissolved the constitutional assembly and
declared Indonesia’s democracy a failure. He then discarded the provisional constitu-
tion of 1950 and reinstated the 1945 charter, removing checks on executive authority,
and transferred patronage power from political parties to the president.
This constitutional crisis marked the beginning of Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy”
that was, as Schwarz observed, “a return to a system of personal rule more reminiscent
of Javanese feudalism than the chaotic democratic experiment of the 1950s.” For the
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first time, the 1945 constitution became a living document for realizing Sukarno and
Supomo’s original corporatist vision. Consistent with this ideology, Sukarno origi-
20
nally conceived Guided Democracy as a government in which the opposition would
“disappear.” There would still be “differences of opinion” in government, but they
“will bring us to progress” because “deliberation, musyawarah, will go hand in hand
with the family principle.” But when legislators refused to pass his budget in 1960,
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Sukarno replaced them with an appointed parliament, a body beholden to him that
preserved the veneer of decision-making by mutual consultation.
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Guided Democracy also meant a guided press. The new regime was nominally
committed to media freedom but imposed restrictions aimed at upholding the public
interest, the nation’s character, and respect for one God. New regulations from the
military added to these restraints. Publishing bans became regular occurrences as
regulations multiplied, each enumerating in greater detail not only restrictions but
also the media’s responsibilities as an “instrument of national struggle.”
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In addition to regulations and decrees, the Sukarno administration introduced
licensing to control the media, the signature mechanism of the later Suharto period.
In 1958, the regional military command began using licensing in Jakarta to eliminate
publications that were considered sensational or dangerous to morality. One historian
emphasized the significance of this development by noting that even the Dutch had
never used this form of media control. A 1963 presidential decree then elevated
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licensing to national policy.
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Sukarno also established the agencies that Suharto would later use to discipline
the media, including the Ministry of Information and the National Press Council,
charged with controlling financial subsidies and monitoring publications for dissi-
dence. Finally, government interference in the internal affairs of the Association of
Indonesian Journalists (Persatuan Wartawan Indonesia, PWI), also began long before
Suharto took power, making the organization a key means of drawing the media under
state control and banishing independent journalists from the profession.
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The Sukarno era also left a memory, carefully cultivated by Suharto’s New Order,
of democracy as a failed experiment—a form of government ill-suited to Indonesian
society. The initial weakness of Indonesia’s political institutions, compounded by con-
fusion over what kind of state it should be, exacerbated the instability of the repub-
lic’s first years. Benedict Anderson has characterized the political environment of the
1950s as “a kind of round-the-clock politics in which mass organizations competed
with each other at every conceivable . . . level without there being any real resolu-
tion.” Similarly, Robert Cribb and Colin Brown describe political parties as sliding
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