Page 92 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Reformasi 77

be [that] a law is made specifically to curtail freedom of the press, as was done by
the New Order.” Consequently, Hendratmoko and other reformers turned to over-
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hauling the country’s convoluted media laws through the Indonesian Press Society, a
consortium dedicated specifically to such reform and comprising representatives from
several professional associations.
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After the November session, reformers and sympathetic legislators felt renewed
urgency to institutionalize the media’s new freedoms before pressure for reversal
could build. The promise of national elections in 1999 only added to the urgency by
producing uncertainty, reformers reasoned, that could prompt the Habibie govern-
ment to reinstate media controls to guarantee victory. The administration’s draft of a
new bill, in fact, contained numerous articles empowering it to regain control over the
media. The Indonesian Press Society therefore stepped up efforts to perfect its own
draft press law quickly, while fashioning separate bills for broadcasting and film. The
good news was that legal reform advocates, bolstered by international prodemocracy
programs and sympathetic parliamentarians, now wielded considerable influence over
the policy agenda for their industry.

The Smoking Tape
By late 1998, the campaign to legalize media freedoms was gaining momentum.
Most critically, the information minister, Muhammad Yunus Yosfi ah, continued to
defend the industry’s liberalization, even debating critics on live television about the
media’s role. Yet there still had been no test of the media’s legal rights in a direct
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confl ict with the president.
Then, in February 1999, the news magazine Panji Masyarakat published a report
embarrassing the Habibie administration, prompting the president to threaten a law-
suit and launch an investigation of the magazine’s sources. The report damaged the
standing of the ruling party, Golkar, in the run-up to the June elections, forcing the
party to confront the prospect of losing to a challenger after decades of assured land-
slides. Considered among news outlets as a “test case” of both media freedom and
journalistic solidarity, the confrontation that followed was the first time that news
outlets were seen behaving collectively as an independent fourth estate instead of the
rent-seeking and generally self-serving businesses they had become under Suharto.
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Through the politics it unleashed, the unity it produced, and the principles it high-
lighted, the case became the most important media controversy in the transition’s
first critical year.
The case began in January 1999, when a number of Jakarta’s news outlets acquired
a cassette containing a wiretapped telephone conversation between two voices that
sounded like those of the attorney general, Andi Muhammad Ghalib, and President
Habibie discussing the government’s investigation of Suharto’s fortune. In this
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exchange, allegedly a day after Suharto had visited the attorney general in November
1998, the speakers pondered how long Ghalib should question the former president
about his assets to avoid the impression that the government’s inquiry was a sham. In
one revealing quote, the voice attributed to Ghalib explained that he had interviewed
Suharto for three hours because “if [it] had been only two hours, then later people
[would say], oh, this is just another charade.”
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The exchange revealed a careful plot to fool the public, or at least an inside
joke at the public’s expense. After Habibie asked how Suharto’s case was going, the
attorney general replied that summoning the ex-president had mollified the public,