Page 66 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Delegitimating Authoritarianism 51

Tempo , Dë TIK , and Editor , this sector was still neither big enough nor rich enough to
launch a serious challenge to Suharto’s New Order.
Nor is it clear that, before the crisis, the middle class had sufficient will to try.
As late as August 1996, after a regime crackdown on demonstrations in support of
opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, Goenawan Mohamad was still pessimistic
over whether any group in Indonesia was willing, much less able, to sustain a reform
movement. He felt the middle class was too enamored with the country’s new, ram-
pant materialism to become the base of such a movement. It took an economic
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crisis a year and a half later to jolt a dormant, scattered opposition into action. As
Vince Boudreau argues, it was the fiscal crisis, specifically the 1997 currency devalua-
tions, that “produced what no opposition had so far achieved: coordinated and multi-
sectoral grievances across Indonesia.”
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Nevertheless, the regime’s bans sparked a movement focused on media freedom
and independence that would significantly influence an emerging anti-Suharto oppo-
sition and, in turn, the character of the transition that followed. The bans forged a
new solidarity between the shuttered publications and the public they had served.
Mobilization continued through the fledgling AJI, whose members defied the govern-
ment prohibition of alternative professional associations and continued to influence
the reform process after Suharto’s fall. Equally important, Tempo ’s lawsuit opened
government policy to unprecedented legal scrutiny that posed a new challenge to one
pillar of the regime’s legitimacy—its claim to the rule of law. The two court rulings
for the plaintiffs, in turn, were a surprising break from the predetermined outcomes
characteristic of the country’s judicial process. Though the regime ultimately won
the case in the Supreme Court, the lower court verdicts were, in effect, the most pub-
lic defiance of the fixed contests of authoritarianism in decades. These verdicts also
foreshadowed protests against the engineering of the 1997 national elections and the
subsequent demonstrations that pushed Suharto from power.
Perhaps the most significant unexpected development, however, was the refusal
of Tempo and Dë TIK to accept the government’s terms for reopening, eschewing the
corrupt bargain of engineered contestation in yet another arena—the country’s pro-
tected media market.
These decisions, moreover, established an important precedent in the press com-
munity as Tempo and Dë TIK owners gave up a share of that market to lay bare the
unspoken reality of media ownership: survival, with its lucrative rewards, required col-
lusion. Democratization, by contrast, would require independence. Tempo and Dë TIK ,
along with the members of AJI who risked blacklisting and prison, set a standard for
both owners and journalists, eroding the rationalizations that had made capitulation
in the name of survival acceptable.
The legal dramas that followed also shook the regime and subjected its media
controls to unprecedented scrutiny. Over time, the lawsuits gave a nascent democratic
opposition the opportunity to develop both a reform agenda and a coherent critique
of the regime’s use and abuse of the law. The sustained resistance of the new activists
mobilized by the 1994 bans also influenced later events, helping normalize and even
legitimate dissent. Even before Suharto stepped down, it was already unfashionable
to be anti- reformasi . By the time Suharto’s successor, B. J. Habibie, began arresting
demonstrators in late 1998, serving time in jail had become a badge of honor, making
this new repression unsustainable. Moreover, groups fighting for media reform allied
with other activist networks, including student supporters of opposition figures. Sig-
nificantly, when students began the demonstrations that evolved into a broad-based