Page 39 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

24 Chapter 1

reelection in 1977. Student criticism of the president and his family became “the daily
menu” of many newspapers. Though the regime was now shielded from serious elec-
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toral competition, the print press, giving voice to the students, could still challenge
this claim to uncontested power.
In January 1978, however, student protests culminated in a new crackdown when
the government’s internal security agency, Kopkamtib, disbanded all student councils
and ordered temporary closure of seven campus newspapers and seven Jakarta dailies.
The interim minister of information, Sudharmono [one name], justified the news-
paper closures, explaining that coverage supporting the students threatened to shat-
ter the nation’s stability. The military then occupied universities and arrested more
than two hundred undergraduates. To depoliticize the students for good, the Ministry
of Education introduced a policy called the Normalization of Campus Life, which
severely restricted their rights to engage in political activity and placed all campus
publications under official control.
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To depoliticize the media permanently, Kopkamtib told anxious editors awaiting
word on when they could resume publication that they should “just continue to pray.”
During the crackdown’s third week, the agency summoned chief editors individually
to participate in what Dhakidae calls “a ritual submission to annihilate any remain-
ing pride by forcing them to wait for a turn.” Their submission was cemented with
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signatures on a pledge that they would (1) take responsibility for protecting national
stability and reducing social tensions; (2) protect the authority of the government,
avoiding insults aimed at national leaders or their families; (3) declare their readiness
to carry out introspection, self-correction, and internal reform; and (4) avoid quoting
blacklisted individuals.
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The chastened papers fulfilled the mandate of point three by declaring their will-
ingness, in the spirit of Pancasila, to engage in internal reform through editorials that
demonstrated humility and contrition. Kompas told the government, “We need more
time to learn to walk again.” Although all papers escaped permanent closure, the
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ritual submission, Dakhidae writes, did equal, if not greater, damage to the survivors,
leaving permanent scars. The most debilitating outcome, he continues, was accepting
that their future survival depended on Suharto’s whim. These two journalistic show-
downs of the 1970s, he concludes, “ended an era of Indonesian political journalism.”
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Legitimating Media Controls
As he maneuvered to depoliticize society, Suharto was building a comprehensive
apparatus for media control that included both formal administration and ideological
justification. He constructed a nexus of ministries and regulations that rewarded com-

pliance and punished defi ance while reinventing Indonesia’s past, reviving principles
from the 1945 constitutional debates that valorized cooperation, and invoking the
post-1965 slaughters to stigmatize any form of dissent.
The decade after Malari saw the steady accretion of media controls, greatly nar-
rowing the scope of acceptable public discourse. The four-point pledge signed by chief
editors in 1978 prohibited criticism of national leaders or their families. The acronym
MISS SARA, set out in formal guidelines that same year, specified other areas the
media should avoid: anything seditious, insinuating, sensational, or speculative, or
that might provoke ethnic, religious, racial, or intergroup (class) tensions.
The peak of re-regulation was the overhaul of the 1966 Basic Press Law in
1982. Like the earlier legislation it modified, this revision contained several clauses