Page 69 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

54 Chapter 3

the movement also made fair elections a primary focus for students and other reform
leaders. Through these relationships, both freedom of expression and transparent
electoral contests became key objectives for the emerging reformasi movement—clear
priorities that carried over into the postauthoritarian period and had a significant
impact on the trajectory of the transition.

Movement Before the Movement
In the early 1990s, national debate over the media’s proper role in a specifi cally
Indonesian democracy regained prominence; it was then silenced in the crackdown
following the 1994 bans. With the approach of the 1997 parliamentary elections,
repression escalated to include raids on public gatherings, particularly those related to
election monitoring, human rights, and the opposition leader and daughter of Presi-
dent Sukarno, Megawati Sukarnoputri. A pro-Megawati speech at one demonstration,
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for example, brought a member of parliament nine months in prison for “insulting the
President, armed forces and other public institutions.” Such prosecutions were also
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noteworthy for reviving the draconian antisubversion law banning “any activity which
directly or indirectly can influence state policy and its implementation.”

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In this climate, the most visible mediators of public discourse—the news outlets
that had survived the bans—became cautious to the point of a painful self-censorship.
Following the bans, Tempo ’s editor in chief, Goenawan Mohamad, had foreseen a process
of “forgetting”—that is, widespread acceptance of a corrupt bargain that would “make
the victims lose their will to say ‘no’ to the injustice” of the government’s actions. “High
wages, job security, opportunities to advance—along with fear—can indeed mesmer-
ize,” he said, “until the victims themselves lose their perspective as victims, until what’s
fair and unfair get mixed up in their heads, until they themselves become irritated at
being reminded of how important self-worth, solidarity and freedom are for humanity.”
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Indeed, the bans quashed the critical reporting fostered by the regime’s earlier opening,
and much of the media continued on as if nothing had changed.
But beneath this surface of compliance, journalistic resistance continued in ways
both symbolic and concrete to shape future events. In concrete terms, such dissent
enlarged the activist community who first articulated the civil rights discourse that
would be critical to the later transition. The defiant stance of this community had
symbolic import that valorized individual sacrifice and risk-taking in the name of a
greater cause—freedom of speech—and elevated that cause to become a defining issue
of the emerging, student-led reformasi movement.
Much of this valorization came through ascent of a rhetoric of political martyrdom
introduced by victims of the media bans and later picked up by students and main-
stream media. First voiced in street protests, this discourse grew in reach and force
during Tempo ’s protracted legal battle to reverse revocation of its license. Ultimately,
through language and symbolic action, Tempo ’s advocates transformed an impersonal
institution, a suppressed newsweekly, into a still-warm body that represented the
hope of greater democracy. In effect, they transmuted a banned magazine into a
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national martyr.
With ritual and rhetoric, the press community mourned Tempo as an anthropo-
morphized icon of media freedom. The journalist Ahmad Taufik, for example, called
the ban “murder” and convened funeral rites for the newly embodied victim, using the
Islamic prayer Salat al-Janazah in a public ceremony. Media activists, students, and
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artists also incorporated rituals of mourning into protest activities, such as carrying