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Delegitimating Authoritarianism 41

conventions of the show, Ajidarma still avoids any direct challenge to the Suharto
regime. For viewers asking whether he wrote the story to condemn either the military
or government censorship, his answer is simply that he was inspired by the oddity of
the situation. “So there are people who like to cut off ears, what does this mean?” the
writer asks. “What’s the point? [Do they] think people whose ears are cut off like it?”
He ends by saying: “I was amused by this, amused by sadism, by cruelty. And so this
story.” Witoelar responds: “So, humor then.”
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As Witoelar closes with the simple word, “humor,” sidestepping the author’s
political agenda, the viewer is left with unanswered questions about ears and blood.
Are soldiers committing atrocities? Is information being censored? What is it the gov-
ernment does not want the East Timorese, or other Indonesians, to hear?
At this juncture, the interview is producing an effect similar to that created by
Goenawan Mohamad in his Tempo essays, raising serious questions but leaving them
unanswered. But then Witoelar goes further. With these disturbing implications still
in the air, the discussion takes a new turn as he asks Ajidarma about freedom of
speech—another subject that would have been particularly touchy at that time. “We
are already free,” Ajidarma says in a surprising reply, and therefore “do not have to ask
for freedom.” In this simple statement he takes the conversation in a philosophical
but fundamentally subversive direction, casting freedom as a natural right, not some-
thing to be sought in increments from a controlling government. He is challenging
the Suharto regime’s preferred understanding of freedom as conditional, a privilege
to be granted or revoked. He then raises the stakes even higher by saying, “We earn
our freedom as far as we struggle for it”—words that could almost be a call to arms.
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Just when the conversation seems headed toward a controversial debate over
“asking” versus “struggling,” Witoelar suddenly, cheerfully, pauses for commercials,
promising to pick up the same point after the break. Arguably a more natural break-
ing point would have been just after his concluding statement on Ajidarma’s severed
ear story: “So, humor, then.” As in other interviews, however, Witoelar pauses in the
middle of an intensifying discussion, a choice that no doubt served SCTV’s economic
imperative to hold the audience through the commercials. But then he never returns
to the original subject, and therefore never finishes the conversation.
Why? Fear of government ire is plausible, but insufficient, given the temerity
of the entire interview. Witoelar has offered another explanation for such decisions.
In his memoir Stealing Clarity from Confusion , he says he would consciously steer his
interviews away from conclusion so as “not to claim the guest/host was smarter than
the viewer.” Rather than delivering answers, he sought to encourage viewers to think
for themselves. “Otherwise,” he explains, the show “would become indoctrinating.”
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As with Mohamad’s column Sidelines, the unanswered questions became threads left
dangling in the country’s public discourse rather than tied neatly back into the state’s
ordered construction of social reality.

Opening’s Closure
While political opening in the early 1990s helped transform public conversa-
tion from scripted to unpredictable, the regime’s tolerance for this transformation
was short-lived. In September 1995, upon learning Witoelar’s next guest on Per -
spektif would be Mochtar Lubis, the publisher of the banned newspaper Indonesia Raya ,
government officials forced SCTV to cancel the entire program. A key factor was the

topic of the off ending interview: a crackdown on the print press that had begun the