Page 84 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Reformasi 69

the events of the previous months. The regime that had ruled unchallenged for three
decades had crumbled, and leadership no longer revolved around the dictates of one
man but instead had to accommodate a multitude of competing factions, all claiming
to be pro- reformasi . The same parliament that had voted unanimously in March to
grant Suharto a seventh term had discovered, in the general’s last weeks, the cour-
age to act as an independent branch of government. Even the once infallible “father
of development” appeared chastened, offering in his resignation speech a remarkable
apology for all his “mistakes.” His successor, President Habibie, promised to repeal
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repressive laws, allow opposition parties, hold new elections, and—in keeping with
reformasi rhetoric—rid the country of corruption, collusion, and nepotism.
14
Indonesia was also transformed by the sudden expansion in political participa-
tion. Student protests had forced open the public sphere to a degree not seen for
decades, and by the time the students allowed soldiers to escort them from parliament
grounds, their boldness had infected most of the country. In the following weeks,
a figurative dam burst as people of all backgrounds openly participated in political
conversations. Most visibly, the media moved quickly to exploit the postauthoritarian
climate, casting off layers of taboo to publish ever more sensational stories on every-
thing from financial corruption to the plight of political prisoners.
Aware of the fragility of this political moment, representatives of print and broad-
cast media moved immediately to secure legal protections for their new freedom and
overhaul the New Order’s apparatus of regulatory controls. After organizing under-
ground for nearly four years, media reformers were prepared to articulate a clear
agenda. Within a week of Suharto’s fall, a group of journalists, editors, and newspaper
owners staged a protest before the Ministry of Information, ready to confront Habi-
bie’s new minister of information, Lieutenant-General Muhammad Yunus Yosfiah,
with demands for three major reforms: abolishing the press licensing system; allow-
ing journalists to form their own associations free from mandatory membership in
the government-sponsored Indonesian Journalists’ Association (PWI); and permitting
blacklisted reporters to write under their own names.
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Yosfiah was a controversial figure whose military affiliation alone justified wari-
ness from the delegates. He also had led security in Balibo, East Timor, during Indo-
nesia’s 1975 invasion, when five Australian journalists were killed in what was later
determined to be a military-sanctioned assassination, earning Yosfiah the nickname
“Butcher of Balibo.” Yet on this day in 1998, he invited the delegation into the Min-
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istry of Information and responded affirmatively to nearly everything they said.
Yosfiah’s positive response may have reflected deference to the Habibie adminis-
tration’s professed support for free speech, but he later articulated deeper personal
beliefs. While he had been studying at the US Army Command and General Staff
College in Fort Leavenworth in the 1980s, a course on US First Amendment law con-
vinced him of the importance of a free news media in developing Indonesia into an
advanced society. In his first year as information minister, he repeatedly paraphrased
Thomas Jefferson’s famous statement, “[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we
should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,
I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
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Yosfiah acted on this conviction by abolishing the notorious 1984 decree that had
empowered the government to revoke a publication’s business license at will. In its
place, he issued a new decree on June 5, 1998, barring license revocation except via a
court of law. The decree also eliminated the state’s onerous requirements for obtain-
ing a publishing license; what had taken years, connections, and costly fees was now