Page 65 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

50 Chapter 2

to the government’s ability to circumvent due process, sparking criticism that the
regime had bypassed the courts and disregarded the National Press Council. All these
accusations discredited New Order claims to have developed Indonesia into a negara
hukum , or “country based on the rule of law.”
The government’s unity rhetoric began generating an increasingly articulate
counterdiscourse that subverted the integralist “Pancasila jargon” used against free
speech. One commentator asked, “In a country of Pancasila democracy, why is
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speaking the truth outlawed?” Others challenged the claim that bridling the media
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was necessary to national stability, and some charged the government with undermin-
ing the very stability it claimed to protect.
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Though cautious, these statements resonated with the unspoken hypothesis devel-
oping among elites that the bans signaled the beginning of the New Order’s decline.
Some anticipated that a stifled media would allow increased corruption, which in turn
would weaken the government. Taking a broad view, historian Onghokham warned
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that the closures would discourage investment and thus damage economic develop-
ment, an important pillar of Suharto’s legitimacy. The most explicit prediction of
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the regime’s decline, however, came from columnist Julia Suryakusuma, who warned,
“Fear generates fear. The need to revitalize fear through bannings and beatings indi-
cates that the powers that be are beginning to fear their own shadows. In the end, the
bannings are a tacit recognition of the power of the word, and a tacit admission of the
fragility of power, in an era of succession in Indonesia.”
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In hindsight, it is tempting to view Suharto’s fall in 1998 as the realization of such
predictions. However, if we examine the interval between the Supreme Court ruling
against Tempo and Suharto’s resignation two years later, any causal links between the
media bans and the regime’s downfall seem tenuous. After the Asian fi nancial crisis
undermined Suharto’s legitimacy, the triumph of the reformasi movement might seem
a logical consequence of the country’s growing rejection of New Order repression and
the regime’s own internal decay. The 1994 bans did contribute to both, sparking new
opposition to authoritarian controls and accelerating this decay after the media lost
virtually all ability to impose accountability on public offi cials. “Suharto lost power
in May 1998 partly as a result of his failure to listen to criticism and his intolerance
of dissenting voices,” argues Duncan McCargo. “The policy of ‘killing the messenger’
seen in the 1994 bannings marked the beginning of the end for Suharto and the New
Order.”
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Growing access to foreign broadcasts and the privatization of television also
helped undermine the regime’s system of control. The new genres of this period, from
soap operas to political talk shows, contradicted the New Order’s integralist vision by
challenging its immersion of individuals into a collective national body, its celebration
of the family as a harmonious microcosm of the nation, and its assertion of consensus
as the aim of all public conversation. These challenges helped unravel the regime’s
tidy integration of individual, family, and nation.
On the other hand, Suharto had already survived three decades of rising cor-
ruption, low transparency, and periodic surges in opposition. During Asia’s finan-
cial boom before 1997, even with high levels of graft, wealth in Indonesia increased
and the middle class grew, reinforcing the regime’s legitimacy. Its success over three
decades in absorbing independent civil institutions also left would-be reformers with
few channels for protest. While frustration among Indonesia’s media-oriented middle
class did explain, in part, the unprecedented public protest against the closures of