Page 48 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Chapter Two

Delegitimating

Authoritarianism

We know that when conversation, or the lack of it, becomes a function of total
power, words become victims of sacrifi ce. They may sound free or untied, like
sacrifi cial horses in ancient India, but actually they are guarded and sent roam-
ing to mark out new borders of colonization. And at the end they are slaughtered
like any other victim to appease the gods controlling the terror.
—Goenawan Mohamad, “A Kind of Silence,” closing remarks at
“Pramoedya Unbound,” Asia Society, Jakarta, April 22, 1999

On June 27, 1994, some three hundred demonstrators arrived at the National
Monument in downtown Jakarta, demanding the Indonesian information minister’s
resignation and the end of print press licensing. The square was full of riot troops
dressed in T-shirts bearing the words “Operasi Bersih” (Operation Cleanup). When
the demonstrators reached the Ministry of Information, troops suddenly attacked
with riot sticks—bloodying heads, breaking bones, and beating people senseless. As
the protestors fled, the troops followed, randomly pummeling those within reach. In
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this twenty-eighth year of Indonesia’s “Pancasila democracy,” protestors were calling
for neither a religious revolution nor sweeping change but, very specifically, freedom
of speech—a demand that would become a defining issue for the reform movement
that ultimately ousted President Suharto.
In studying democratic transitions, an initial problem lies in identifying, in ret-
rospect, their genesis in developments often unfolding years before a regime’s actual
fall. Understanding the media’s role in democratization requires first examining pre-
cursors of change. In Indonesia, well before the economic crisis and mass demonstra-
tions that forced Suharto from power in May 1998, numerous events took place that
would influence the character of the country’s later transition. Among these, the sud-
den ban of three newsweeklies in 1994 was a transformative event for the media and
the country that both anticipated Suharto’s eventual fall and shaped the agenda of the
prodemocracy movement.

The Era of “Opening”

By the late 1980s, after a quarter century of deepening authoritarianism, the
Suharto regime had absorbed nearly all competing centers of power into a corporatist
apparatus and had transformed the national ideology, Pancasila, into a tool for stifl ing
dissent. Ongoing newspaper bans—notably the closure of the country’s last indepen-
dent daily, Sinar Harapan , in 1986—left a print media paralyzed by self-censorship and
onerous regulation.