Page 62 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Delegitimating Authoritarianism 47

by attempting to ostracize all those associated with AJI—evicting thirteen journal-
ists who had signed the Sirnagalih Declaration from its Jakarta branch and creating
a blacklist of those associated with the three banned publications. Within a few
days, the PWI’s Jakarta branch summoned editors from eight publications deemed
“critical” to demand that they fire the thirteen journalists it had just expelled. As
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this pressure forced AJI members from their jobs, a new slang word, mengAJIkan
(to AJI-fy), gained currency as a term for blacklisting someone for defending freedom
of the press.
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Landmark Lawsuit
Under these pressures, support for AJI moved deeper underground. Simultaneously,

however, the movement began fighting on another front: in open confrontation with the
regime through the courts. The challenge began in September 1994, when Goenawan
Mohamad and forty-three Tempo journalists used a new state court, the Pengadilan
Tata Usaha Negara (PTUN), to sue the minister of information for damages from the
arbitrary revocation of their license. A few weeks later, more than a thousand media
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employees, newsagents, and subscribers fi led their own class-action suits at the Cen-
tral Jakarta District Court, calling for judicial review of the 1984 licensing decree on
the grounds that it confl icted with the Basic Press Law. The fi rst suit was lodged by
more than thirty nonjournalist employees of Tempo , joined by several newsagents and
street hawkers, demanding compensation for two years’ lost income. The second
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group consisted of nearly one thousand former subscribers and 121 journalists who
had worked for the closed publications. The subscribers complained that the bans had
robbed them of “the right to obtain objective, quality information,” and the journal-
ists argued that they had lost their ability “to fully pursue their function as agents
of social control (over government), as is demanded by the Basic Press Law.” In
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addition to their call for judicial review of the 1984 licensing decree, this group also
demanded nullifi cation of the 1994 decree revoking the licenses of Tempo , Editor , and
Dë TIK .
The Central Jakarta District Court refused to hear any cases, but the PTUN—
a court created specifically to allow citizens to challenge government decisions—
accepted the Tempo journalists’ suit. News outlets barred from reporting on street
protests now moved to cover this developing story. As public attention shifted to the
suit, the case became a “national obsession.”
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The Tempo journalists protested lost income and arbitrary decision-making that
ended their jobs without due process. But they also claimed damages from less tangible
losses, including their constitutional right to freedom of expression, “the opportunity
to enrich the life of a nation,” and loss of a forum “to disseminate objective informa-
tion, channel the public’s aspirations, and [impose] constructive social control.”
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Plaintiffs were further emboldened by the moral imperative of their cause. In
a collection of essays explaining the decision to sue, Ahmad Taufik, one of the AJI
members later sentenced to three years in prison, explained, “Maybe because my
hopes were wrong, anger in me burst forth like a tidal wave. . . . Banning is the mur-
der of press creativity, the revocation of information choice needed by the public.”
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Although several expressed an almost quixotic faith in the courts, many plaintiffs
insisted that winning was not what mattered, with larger principles at stake. Most
wanted merely to demonstrate that the government could no longer “make decisions
as they please, without going through legal channels.” One editor joined the suit to
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