Page 87 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

72 Chapter 4

licenses. Proponents argued that such a mechanism was needed to enforce industry
standards. The Ministry of Trade and Industry then tried to garner support for the idea
by linking it to a proposal to abolish Suharto’s 15 percent tax on newsprint. The plan
sparked a storm of protest from both the wider press community and officials in the
president’s own Supreme Advisory Council and never became policy.
35
Jakarta’s burgeoning civil society also played a critical role in resisting new con-
trols on public speech. On July 24, 1998, soon after the licensing controversy, the
new government issued an emergency decree (No. 2/1998) requiring written police
authorization forty-eight hours in advance for gatherings of more than fifty people
and banning all protests at night or “in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace, mili-
tary installations, places of worship, hospitals, airfields, ports and railway stations.”
36
Heated opposition forced the Habibie government to revoke this decree.
37
Responses to a subsequent attempt at suppression further indicated a changing
power equation between civil society and government. In September, Habibie took
offense at speeches made at a conference, “Dialogue for Democracy,” that had been
held in August. For the first time since taking office, the new president ordered legal
action against his critics, summoning the actress and playwright Ratna Sarumpaet to
appear before the police for insulting the president and “organizing a conference with-
out a permit.” Ironically, Sarumpaet had been one of the last prosecuted for a speech
violation by the Suharto regime, imprisoned for organizing the “People’s Congress,”
which opposed his March 1998 reelection. This time, Sarumpaet ignored the sum-
mons, explaining, “I figured if they really wanted to talk, they could come to me.”
38
In these same weeks, tensions over public speech rose as students returned to the
streets, protesting the upcoming parliamentary session that would establish the legal
framework for the 1999 elections. In early October, angry that these decisions would
be made by Suharto’s handpicked legislature, over a thousand students forced their
way through security cordons onto parliament grounds, repeating their dramatic siege
of May. In other cities, tens of thousands joined concurrent rallies, refusing to accept
the session’s legitimacy. In response, the armed forces commander, General Wiranto,
began pressuring students to end their rallies, and Habibie supporters disseminated
pamphlets calling the movement “Communist-inspired.”
39

Lines in the Sand
In the face of mounting tension, most news outlets set aside caution and tested
the limits of government tolerance—a task critical to maintaining democracy over the
long term. As Jean Goodwin has argued, what we think of as “freedom of speech” has
little to do with the vast majority of public expression. At issue instead are boundar-
ies dividing acceptable speech from that which threatens or off ends. Or as Tempo ’s
40
Bambang Harymurti later said, “Press freedom is a line in the sand.”
41
In Indonesia, pushing such boundaries—in effect, crossing lines to expand the
range of acceptable speech—served the transition by helping secure the media’s right
to impose accountability on leaders and their decision-making. If journalists in a
democracy do not stretch boundaries consistently, such rights become an abstract
principle rather than actual practice. If space for such reporting is not actively asserted
and maintained, the state will gradually narrow the boundaries of permissible speech,
citing national security or privacy or the dignity of the president and others in office.
There is a difference, however, between the noncontroversial coverage that fills
most of a daily newspaper or newscast and reporting that aggressively pushes the