Page 96 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Reformasi 81

The minister of justice was already threatening to use state security laws against
those responsible for the wiretap, any of which could have been invoked against out-
lets airing the tape. President Habibie also accused Panji of violating his “human
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rights” by invading his privacy, declaring this breech an “intellectual criminal act that
cannot be tolerated.” What if, he asked, cabinet discussions or other important tele-
phone conversations were also being tapped? “What if [conversations between] wives
speaking with husbands about their families are then tapped?”
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Rebutting both the national security and privacy charges, Panji ’s defenders noted
that the magazine had published the wiretapped conversation after the tape had been
circulating for months and its contents were no longer a “secret” of any kind. Panji ’s
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attorney, Adnan Buyung Nasution, also challenged the national security claim at its
foundation, arguing that Indonesia could not leave it to those in power to decide “arbi-
trarily” what was a state secret “lest all crime, dishonesty, corruption, collusion and
nepotism, everything that harms the public, is covered up on the grounds of [being]
a state secret.” In a forum on the case, AJI members determined that no “national
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secret” had been revealed, nor had anyone’s privacy been violated. The issues in the
tapped conversation were public, not private. But as one member pointed out, public
figures in Indonesia were not yet considered “public property,” and an Indonesian
public figure’s right to privacy was more protected than that of ordinary citizens.
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Impact of the Wiretap Scandal
This debate was a reminder that, eight months after Suharto’s fall, there was still
no clear statutory basis in Indonesian law for distinguishing speech that was sim-
ply inconvenient for those in power from speech that constituted either a threat to
national security or an invasion of privacy. Nor was there a body of case law off ering
applicable standards for resolving such issues. Had the wiretap case gone to trial, as
many advocated, this situation might have changed. But it never reached the courts,
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leaving the legal arena a potential minefield for journalists reporting controversial

information. The wiretap’s revelations also did little to advance the reform move-
ment’s agenda of seeing Suharto stand trial.
Nevertheless, the Panji Masyarakat report and its aftermath furthered the demo-
cratic transition in multiple ways. The debate over the case transformed a passing
political crisis into an enduring legal principle. Five months after the scandal had pit-
ted the public’s right to know against the government’s invocation of national secu-
rity, reformers achieved passage of the 1999 Press Law, supplanting the New Order’s
Basic Press Law that had been used by the information minister, Harmoko, to close
down Tempo , Dë TIK , and Editor in 1994.
The new law did not directly address the question of privacy, and the hak tolak was
still readily overridden by the invocation of national security or public order. Despite
these limitations, the law marked a clear break with the past, inspired in part by the
wiretap controversy, by explicitly recognizing the public’s right to know, a principle
absent from previous legislation. Significantly, this right is a central theme of the new
law, which not only enshrines the principle, but cites it four times. The wiretap case
thus provided an opportunity to form a consensus leading to legal protection for the
right to know against the invocation of national security and public order, the corner-
stones of the New Order’s media controls.
At an industry level, the case’s de facto resolution in Panji ’s favor also confirmed
that, in the context of political transition, the conversion of private rumor into public