Page 49 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

34 Chapter 2

However, in 1987, Suharto approved a program of economic opening to attract
foreign investment, bringing unanticipated consequences as this liberalization slowly
extended into the media. When he reversed course with new press bans in 1994, this
political trend ended abruptly. Reverberations from this brief liberalization, particu-
larly within the media, would play a crucial, though often invisible, role in eroding
acceptance of authoritarian rule and ultimately setting a specific course for the coun-
try’s democratic transition.
In this same period, a deeper critique of Suharto’s use of integralism to legiti-
mate his authoritarian rule began moving from the private to the public sphere,
culminating in a major confrontation with the regime. During the decade before
Suharto’s fall, this critique, progressively widening the scope of dissent, emerged
in four significant arenas of public discourse: discussions in intellectual circles,
new trends in the print press, political talk shows in the broadcast media, and an
unprecedented public trial in the legal arena. Each manifestation posed a significant
challenge to the regime’s legitimating rhetoric and functioned at a deeper level,
disrupting the placid exterior of New Order Indonesia by unsettling its imposed
certainties and collusive pacts.
The first level of critique had roots in private conversations among intellectu-
als who began interrogating the political order, particularly the regime’s authoritar-
ian ideology. By the early 1990s, several newsweeklies with an urban middle-class
readership were challenging the regime more directly through investigative reporting,
critical interviews, and provocative commentary. Broadcast “infotainment” programs,
including political talk shows, also emerged to stretch the bounds of permissible dis-
course, challenging the New Order’s integralist norms of public conversation.
As demand rose for more varied media fare, democratic space opened and criti-
cism of the regime grew more overt. Seeking to check these changes, Suharto cracked
down on three of the boldest publications, effectively reversing liberalization in the
print press. While the bans intensified a climate of fear in surviving newsrooms, they
also inspired defiance when two publication owners refused the chance to reopen
under conditions set by the regime. Owners, editors, and journalists then used
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another byproduct of political opening, a new court that allowed challenges to gov-
ernment decisions, to pursue a landmark lawsuit against the minister of information.
The unprecedented public trials that followed fractured the manufactured consensus
of the New Order, prompting an implicit repudiation of print press licensing by two
courts. In a surprising break from the past, Suharto failed to engineer a predetermined
outcome, thereby unleashing an uncontrolled narrative and inspiring a resistance
movement that would outlive the regime.

Interrogating Integralism
One of the earliest challenges to the regime’s ideological underpinnings emerged
among academics. By the 1980s, despite multiple press bans and policies to depoliti-
cize universities, critiques of the New Order were percolating in intellectual circles.
Their influence was narrow but significant, not fanning public dissent but slowly dis-

crediting the regime’s justifications for its system of control.

This discourse took particularly salient form in an academic thesis by Marsillam
Simanjuntak, a medical doctor and former student activist. Submitted to the Univer-
sity of Indonesia Faculty of Law in 1989, the thesis probed the corporatist founda-
tions of integralism, the statist ideology first articulated by Supomo during the 1945