Page 83 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

68 Chapter 4

Initial Challenges
With Suharto’s fall, the challenge for the entire reformasi movement, including
media reformers, was to carry their agenda beyond this initial victory. Despite the
installation of a new president, it was diffi cult to know where the transition would
lead. Initially, there was considerable cause for cynicism. Unlike other ousted dicta-
tors faced with a choice of death or fl ight, Suharto placed his cronies in the cabinet,
picked a loyal successor, and retired to his luxurious compound in Central Jakarta. As

Jeffrey Winters noted, with Habibie’s inauguration, Indonesia’s reformasi movement
“both peaked and collapsed on the same day”—removing Suharto, but resigned to a
successor regime that was “a continuation of the same government.” In the same
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vein, Todung Mulya Lubis declared the Habibie administration “the New Order minus
Suharto.”
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At numerous points throughout this first year, the nation’s stability also appeared
at risk, creating ample pretext for reimposing authoritarianism. The most immediate
challenge came from the economic crisis that had undermined Suharto’s legitimacy
but did not end with his resignation. Instead, circumstances for millions of Indone-
sians continued to deteriorate, creating conditions ripe for unrest. “In hardly more
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than a year,” reported the Los Angeles Times , a nation that had been “a star performer”
among Southeast Asia’s economies now found that “a generation of growth [had]
simply been wiped away.” By mid-1998, the crisis had forced more than twenty mil-
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lion people out of work, with millions more likely to follow by year’s end. By Sep-
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tember, inflation approached 80 percent, a twenty-three-year high, while seventeen
million families faced “dire food shortages” and workers were losing jobs, by one
estimate, at a rate of fifteen thousand per day.
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Economic desperation converged with the government’s weakened social con-
trols, producing 1,714 demonstrations and 69 “riots” in the first four months of the
new era. In rural Indonesia, Forbes magazine reported, “hungry Indonesians have
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taken to raiding food warehouses, shrimp farms and paddy fields.” On Java, rov-
8
ing gangs plundered coffee plantations while another group hauled fifteen thousand
chickens away from a farm. Elsewhere, people were ripping up Chinese graves to
steal jewelry from the corpses and, in some cases, the teak coffins. Farmers in one
town “chased a group of golfers off the ninth green with hoes and axes and began
planting vegetables.” Loekman Soetrisno reported, “After two months, the rural
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reform movement mysteriously stopped and plundering began. For the urban poor
and village landless, reformasi means plundering. This could destroy all that has been
achieved.”
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The country’s leadership also posed problems during the transition. Habibie
faced challenges overwhelming for even the most dedicated proponents of reform.
But the administration’s commitment to meaningful change seemed tenuous, a reality
underscored by early moves to punish critics and reassert control over public speech.
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Compounding this dubious turnover in leadership, the new era left all the old
institutions firmly in place. Particularly relevant to media reform, the notorious Min-
istry of Information retained jurisdiction over the mass media. While the public mood
restricted officials’ actions, the ministry retained all its mechanisms for media control,
including the restrictive SIUPP licensing system that, as one editorial suggested, still
hung like “the sword of Damocles” over editors’ heads.
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Nevertheless, by the time Jakarta cleared away the broken glass and skeletons of
burned-out cars, the country’s political landscape had been altered substantially by