Scandal and Democracy

Front matter

Scandal © Democracy

Media Politics in Indonesia

Scandal and Democracy

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note on Spelling and Personal Names xi Introduction: Understanding Democratic Consolidation 1 Chapter 1

Origins of Media Controls 15 Chapter 2

Delegitimating Authoritarianism 33 Chapter 3

Chapter One

There is no power holder who dares to use his power if there is not a people excessively afraid of that power.

—Ignas Kleden, “The Fear of Fighting Fear”

In 1945, sixty-eight of Indonesia’s political leaders met in Jakarta to draft a constitution casting off three centuries of Dutch colonial rule and drawing the archipelago’s seventeen thousand islands and seventy million inhabitants into a unified nation.! Amid contentious debates threatening to divide the delegates over the choice between secular and Islamic principles, Sukarno [one name], a spellbinding speaker who later became Indonesia’s first president, rose to address the assembly.

Meticulously attired in a white colonial suit and black Muslim cap, Sukarno presented a vision bridging the growing rift, offering “a unifying philosophical foundation” they could all accept. “First and foremost,” he asked, with words to defuse demands for an Islamic state, “are we seeking to establish a nation . . . [that is called] Free Indonesia, but in reality is only for elevating one person, for giving power to one wealthy group, for giving power [only] to the aristocracy? Is this our intention?” Answering this question, he said, “It is clear it is not! ... We seek to establish a nation of ‘all for all.’ Not for one person, not for one... ethnic group or group that is wealthy—but ‘all for all.’”*

In an early condemnation of partisan politics, Sukarno warned that this new nation should not espouse Western notions of freedom: “If we create freedom ... based on philosophies as promoted by American and European nations . . . be assured that our hearts will be filled with conflict.” He offered instead a vision centered on indigenous decision-making with Islamic roots, explaining that “the crucial requirement for the strength of the Indonesian state is mutual deliberation [musyawarah].” It is this, he said, “that gives life, namely political-economic democracy that can bring about social justice!”

Embedded in these impassioned statements was not only a unifying rejection of Western democratic precepts but also the espousal of a distinctively Indonesian form of democracy aspiring to a consensual model of governance. In little more than a decade, however, these same constitutional principles would help facilitate a shift from a functioning democracy—with free speech, open elections, and contentious parliamentary debate—to an authoritarian state headed by just two powerful leaders, President Sukarno and his successor, Suharto, for over forty years.

When authoritarian rule began to unravel in Indonesia during the 1997 economic crisis, President Suharto quickly became the target of the country’s burgeoning democratic opposition. Once seen as a welcome change from the unstable and increasingly dictatorial rule of his predecessor, Suharto was now, after thirty-two years in power, the personification of the corruption and authoritarianism that marked his own regime.

But even as the prodemocracy movement railed against him, reformers realized that a true break with the past would reguire not only his removal but also the more daunting task of dismantling his entrenched New Order regime. Further complicating the challenge, the authoritarian controls that defined the New Order were not a simple manifestation of one ruler’s managerial style. Their roots, institutional and ideological, reached back to the origins of the Indonesian republic and were part of a complex structure that had evolved from Dutch rule through the Sukarno era into Suharto’s New Order. Fully assembled by the late 1980s, this structure rested on a foundation of both colonial law and Indonesian political theory inspired by a corporatist, or “integralist,” vision of the relationship between the state and society. It formed an institutional base through multiple bureaucracies overseeing a maze of regulations, licensing, and tightening controls over ownership.

For reformers, the system underlying Indonesia’s authoritarianism was thus elaborate and deeply rooted, requiring bureaucratic change as well as transformation of a larger political culture. Exploring this layered historical legacy, dating back to the country’s first constitutional debates, reveals the weight of the past that confronted the media during the democratic transition over forty years later.

ORIGINS OF AUTHORITARIAN CONTROLS

The ideological foundations of these corporatist political principles can be traced to counter-Enlightenment concepts first articulated by German philosophers in the early nineteenth century. Their embrace by Dutch colonial scholars of the early twentieth century, in turn, strongly influenced the thinking of the Indonesian nationalists who framed the country’s 1945 constitution.*

On the eve of independence, the sense among Indonesia’s young leaders emerging from centuries of colonial rule was that Western liberalism and its accompanying materialism tended to produce greed and exploitation, and they sought an alternative model for their new nation. Their democracy would be based not on an adversarial process, but on governance through consensus and cooperation.

During Indonesia’s constitutional debates, Raden Supomo, a former colonial judge, laid out a frame for this form of governance, calling it “integralism” and invoking the philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.? As scholars of this period have noted, Supomo’s integralism was a form of corporatism— a statist ideology casting society and government as an integrated whole, whether a living organism or a vast family governed by a father figure who embodies the spirit of the people and therefore can divine their greater interests.° In Indonesia, the ideology would incorporate all citizens on the principle of jus soli (right of the soil) and cast the national community as both a body bounded by geography and a vast, harmonious family (a construction dubbed kekeluargaan, or “family-ism”).’

Most importantly, in Supomo’s words, an integralist state is one “that is united with the whole of the people, transcending all groups in all sectors.”8 Such a state does not stand outside the people but is the people, led by a head of state who is also one with the people and therefore attuned to their aspirations. In short, unlike Western democracies, filled with discord and self-interest, Supomo’s vision was of a unitary state governed through consensual deliberation free of political conflict. Offering evidence that Indonesia could establish such a democracy, fellow framer Muhammad Yamin invoked a golden era of village-centered collectivism traced back to the Majapahit era. Sukarno’s model of decision-making—inclusive mutual consultation

(musyawarah) leading to a consensus (mufakat) articulated by a wise leader—was central to this imagined past.”

Three days later, in a riveting address to the assembly, Sukarno made his own contribution to Indonesian political theory with his formulation of the Pancasila, a doctrine that would become the defining principle of the Indonesian state. Its five “pillars” were (1) belief in one supreme God, (2) justice and civility among peoples, (3) the unity of Indonesia, (4) democracy through deliberation and consensus among representatives, and (5) social justice for all.!° With deliberations deadlocked, Sukarno’s Pancasila appealed to all factions, encompassing and subordinating their competing visions of the state. The word “integralism” never entered the constitution, and the five pillars did not necessarily preordain the rise of any particular political system. But over time the Pancasila doctrine came to be seen, in the words of Adam Schwarz, as “synonymous with and justification for an integralist view of the state” —ultimately serving as the ideological foundation of Suharto’s authoritarian order."

How did Sukarno’s diffuse doctrine, seemingly compatible with a working democracy, later justify integralist views and facilitate authoritarianism? And how did it legitimate the accretion of controls that stunted the development of a democratic media? The answer lies partly in the third pillar’s focus on “unity,” a term easily invoked to justify suppression of dissent. But the regime also reinterpreted Pancasila’s fourth pillar to further the concentration of power by focusing overwhelmingly on consensus. While the pillar itself seems to promise an inclusive and egalitarian form of democracy—mandating mutual deliberation to reach unanimous consensus—in Suharto’s Pancasila democracy, the ideal of musyawarah untuk mufakat was replaced in practice by a premium on closure, with consensus redefined as acquiescence rather than agreement.

Articles within the 1945 constitution also stipulated that decisions be made through consensus-oriented mutual deliberation—more specifically, through consultation between the head of state, envisioned in these debates as a “just king” (Ratu Adil), and members of a quasilegislative body representing all sectors of society. Significantly, the framers named this supreme body the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), underlining its advisory character in ways that predicted the limited role it would later play.

The more proximate reason that this plenary parliament and one of its two chambers, the People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), became rubber stamps for executive policy rather than constituting an independent legislature is that the 1945 constitution lacked provisions for the separation of powers. It instead stipulated that different branches of the national government would share responsibilities and engage in mutual support and consultation, miming the imagined cooperation of Indonesia’s village councils. In practice, this fluid sharing of functions, particularly through provisions empowering the president to legislate, led to unilateral decision-making and executive concentration of power.

Though Supomo’s vision, emphasizing consensus and repudiation of individual rights, had strong proponents in the assembly, several framers expressed concern over its potential to justify the abuse of power. Notably, the future vice president Mohammad Hatta, backed by Muhammad Yamin, fought for provisions protecting civil rights, particularly freedom of speech. But both Sukarno and Supomo argued that such individual protections would go against kekeluargaan and lead to conflict sparked by greed and self-interest. Hatta countered that without free speech, “the shape of the nation may become ... one we cannot agree with.” Hatta supported a state of corporatist leadership (negara pengurus) but argued such power must be checked by “an article [ensuring] that every citizen will not be afraid to express an opinion . . . [and guaranteeing] the right to assemble, to convene, to write.” 1?

Supomo and Sukarno ultimately did concede to Article 28, which appeared to protect free speech through a statement that the freedom “to express thoughts orally and in writing and so forth shall be determined by legislation.” Yet by granting government the power to determine the boundaries of free speech without delineating such boundaries, Article 28 effectively affirmed the opposite: to comply with the imperatives of the constitution, the state will make laws that regulate speech, potentially circumscribing it. Ironically, through this apparent concession to individual rights, the framers created a constitutional clause formalizing the state’s authority to abridge rights, including freedom of speech, and thereby limit society’s ability to check the abuse of power.

GUIDED DEMOCRACY AND A GUIDED PRESS

Following four years of armed struggle against the Dutch, Indonesia’s revolutionaries won formal independence in 1949. They ratified the original 1945 constitution but soon replaced it with two interim documents that created a more autonomous parliament and stronger protections for civil rights, including freedom of speech. In 1954, leaders of the new republic demonstrated further commitment to press freedom by nullifying a regulation identified with Dutch repression called the Persbreidel Ordonnantie, or the Press Muzzling Ordinance, that allowed the government to ban publications viewed as threats to public order.'? With this nullification and the more liberal interim charters, Indonesia enjoyed a decade of parliamentary democracy under its first president, Sukarno, marked by competitive multiparty elections and a print press that was, by most accounts, outspoken and critical of the government.

Yet the new government also retained several other laws giving the state broad discretion to punish speech. By force of legal continuity, the sections of the criminal code known as the lése majesté articles that had protected Dutch colonials from disrespect survived independence to outlaw any speech that might offend the new republic's president, vice president, or other officials.'* Another Dutch legacy, the haatzai artikelen, or “hate-sowing articles,” criminalized spreading animosity in society or contempt toward the government and remained part of Indonesia’s legal code for the next half century.

Thus even in this democratic era, we see the foundations for the later suppression of speech under Suharto. Tolerance among the nation’s first leaders for Jakarta’s vociferous print press was also surprisingly brief. By 1953, the Ministry of Information was threatening to sanction any media outlet giving a “false picture” of the nation’s affairs. Soon after, the attorney general ordered the media to refrain from any reporting on government matters that might be inflammatory or highlight disagreements.'® In 1956, the army’s chief of staff issued a new, more draconian regulation to prohibit virtually all speech critical, degrading, or suspicious of public officials. Borrowing almost verbatim from the Dutch haatzai artikelen, the new regulation also outlawed writings that could give rise to “expressions of antagonism, hatred, or contempt” among or toward societal groups, or that contained information able to produce a public sensation.!” Although protests soon forced the government to revoke this regulation, within a year, the imposition of martial law to suppress revolts in the outer islands allowed even more severe strictures on news outlets. That same year,

Sukarno declared an official state of emergency as he stepped up the campaign against these secessionist movements, leaving news outlets with little recourse.'® Protections for the media were overridden by government imperatives, and further reforms that might have eradicated the Dutch legacy were repeatedly preempted by fears over the perceived fragility of the new republic.

In 1959, as political divisions deepened and negotiations over a permanent constitution became deadlocked, Sukarno dissolved the constitutional assembly and declared Indonesia’s democracy a failure. He then discarded the provisional constitution of 1950 and reinstated the 1945 charter, removing checks on executive authority, and transferred patronage power from political parties to the president.

This constitutional crisis marked the beginning of Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy” that was, as Schwarz observed, “a return to a system of personal rule more reminiscent of Javanese feudalism than the chaotic democratic experiment of the 1950s.”!° For the first time, the 1945 constitution became a living document for realizing Sukarno and Supomo’s original corporatist vision.*° Consistent with this ideology, Sukarno originally conceived Guided Democracy as a government in which the opposition would “disappear.” There would still be “differences of opinion” in government, but they “will bring us to progress” because “deliberation, musyawarah, will go hand in hand with the family principle.” But when legislators refused to pass his budget in 1960, Sukarno replaced them with an appointed parliament, a body beholden to him that preserved the veneer of decision-making by mutual consultation.”

Guided Democracy also meant a guided press. The new regime was nominally committed to media freedom but imposed restrictions aimed at upholding the public interest, the nation’s character, and respect for one God. New regulations from the military added to these restraints. Publishing bans became regular occurrences as regulations multiplied, each enumerating in greater detail not only restrictions but also the media’s responsibilities as an “instrument of national struggle.”

In addition to regulations and decrees, the Sukarno administration introduced licensing to control the media, the signature mechanism of the later Suharto period. In 1958, the regional military command began using licensing in Jakarta to eliminate publications that were considered sensational or dangerous to morality. One historian emphasized the significance of this development by noting that even the Dutch had never used this form of media control.4 A 1963 presidential decree then elevated licensing to national policy.

Sukarno also established the agencies that Suharto would later use to discipline the media, including the Ministry of Information and the National Press Council, charged with controlling financial subsidies and monitoring publications for dissidence. Finally, government interference in the internal affairs of the Association of Indonesian Journalists (Persatuan Wartawan Indonesia, PWI), also began long before Suharto took power, making the organization a key means of drawing the media under state control and banishing independent journalists from the profession.*®

The Sukarno era also left a memory, carefully cultivated by Suharto’s New Order, of democracy as a failed experiment—a form of government ill-suited to Indonesian society. The initial weakness of Indonesia’s political institutions, compounded by confusion over what kind of state it should be, exacerbated the instability of the republic’s first years. Benedict Anderson has characterized the political environment of the 1950s as “a kind of round-the-clock politics in which mass organizations competed with each other at every conceivable ... level without there being any real resolution.”” Similarly, Robert Cribb and Colin Brown describe political parties as sliding

“between fluid, self-serving factionalism and rigid ideological polarisation.”? Even after the 1955 election, widely regarded as free and fair, faith in the parliamentary system was faltering. As the economy deteriorated, public tolerance for the unpredictability of the democratic process declined.”

The extent of liberal democracy’s “failure” in Indonesia during the 1950s is still a matter of debate.*° Whether elites abandoned democracy because it had failed or it failed because elites saw their interests better served by authoritarianism, Sukarno and then Suharto cultivated the impression that liberal democracy had been a disaster—in part to preempt calls for its return and in part to justify suppression of democratic rights, including freedom of speech.*!

RISE OF THE NEW ORDER

In tandem with growing repression, Indonesia’s economy fell into disarray under Sukarno. The country reeled from soaring inflation, and food shortages were imminent; international tensions increased as the president nationalized foreign firms, rejected US aid, and provoked a confrontation with Malaysia. Concurrently, the Communist movement, now more closely allied with Sukarno, pushed hard for land reform, raising tensions with Muslims and the military, and pressured artists and journalists to adhere to the guidelines of its People’s Cultural Institute. Strained by these conflicts, President Sukarno’s political coalition became increasingly untenable. In a final bid for stability in 1963, parliament elected him president for life.*

In 1965, an alleged Communist coup and a military countercoup set in motion events that effectively stripped Sukarno of power and allowed the little-known General Suharto to seize control and launch his New Order. Suharto’s subsequent crackdown on what he called a “counterrevolutionary movement” set off a brutal, army-led purge of suspected Communists that left up to a million dead. “In terms of numbers killed,” the CIA reported, “the anti-PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.”

Thus, Suharto’s regime rose to power on a wave of terror that left an indelible mark on the nation’s consciousness, creating a formidable legacy for future democracy advocates to overcome. Promotion of regime propaganda by surviving media and the absence of public debate on the killings deepened their impact. As the regime held public trials of suspected Communists, Suharto asserted his version of events, arguing that liberal democracy—with its contentious pluralism, partisan press, and confrontational politics—had produced the deep divisions responsible for the 1965-66 massacre. With this portrayal shaping the country’s collective memory, Suharto recast the bloody military-led campaign that brought him to power as a spontaneous eruption of mass violence.** This reconstruction reinforced a larger, two-pronged point: Indonesia’s short period of democracy had led to the societal disintegration of the 1960s, and strict political controls, including restrictions on speech, were necessary to prevent the recurrence of violence.

EARLY POLITICAL JOURNALISM

President Suharto began his reign in the spirit of reform, liberating the print press from controls imposed by his predecessor. Over the next decade, however, he would employ and expand Sukarno’s entire arsenal. The resulting apparatus restricted media outlets through a web of laws and regulations. Increasing control over ownership, corporatist norms, and the carrot of a protected market all cultivated a culture of compliance.

In the regime’s early days, despite ongoing bloodshed in the name of restoring order and the relentless pursuit of suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), there was relief among many journalists and intellectuals at being liberated from Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. There was, moreover, optimism over new reforms. Although one of Suharto’s first acts was to shut down forty-six newspapers associated with the PKI, many previously banned publications were revived, including Mochtar Lubis’s Indonesia Raya.

In late 1966, the new parliament passed the long-awaited Basic Press Law, containing twenty-one sections covering nearly every aspect of media functions, from journalists’ duties to the composition of the National Press Council. The law protected news outlets from outright bans and promised abolition of the notorious press license system once the transition to the New Order was complete.” As David Hill notes, during Suharto’s first years, “those newspapers which had supported [the regime’s] emergence . . . enjoyed opportunities for often robust debate.”” One cabinet minister compared this period to 1968’s Prague Spring.”

In the new regime’s early years, Jakarta’s surviving newspapers were instrumental in imposing transparency on the government—particularly its management of the government oil monopoly, Pertamina. Scandal, fed by leaks, was the primary mechanism. What was arguably the most famous scandal broke in November 1969, when Indonesia Raya published a scathing critique of Pertamina’s management.” The article featured a photograph of the company’s director, the Suharto crony Ibnu Sutowo, next to his new Rolls Royce and accused his organization of “waste, inefficiency, and all kinds of irregularities and unjustifiable expenditures.”*° It backed these charges with leaked data documenting nepotism and payoffs as well as the purchase of assets at far above market value.“

The controversy that followed saw the beginnings of the logic that would stigmatize political journalism and legitimate the proliferation of media controls. Disregarding the value of investigative reporting in helping avert economic disaster, the regime and several newspapers accused Indonesia Raya of adopting a “crusading” style of journalism and began treating it as a threat. After raising suspicions about the paper’s motives, the regime began to condemn such journalism as fostering what editor and scholar Daniel Dhakidae calls “the politics of negation.”

Despite its unwelcome reception, Indonesia Raya’s exposé prompted the government to appoint a special investigative group, the Commission of Four. The commission’s findings were damning, confirming the paper’s allegations and uncovering tax evasion so egregious that it nearly drove the state into bankruptcy. The 1970 leak of this official report by another major daily, Sinar Harapan, kept public attention focused on Pertamina, forcing enactment of a 1971 law increasing the company’s payments to the state."

This controversy demonstrated the media’s vital role as an early warning system for economic mismanagement. As the government scrambled to cover Pertamina’s payments and save it from a bankruptcy likely to bring down the New Order, each revelation was a reminder of the costs of the failed oversight of this most valuable state enterprise. But the revelations also showed scandal’s potential to weaken the regime’s legitimacy.** Even after vowing to clean up the corruption, President Suharto condemned the media’s reporting as “excessively mean” and “confusing [to] the society.”

Sinar Harapan's leak added insult to injury by usurping the president's authority to present the commission’s report in his own way. Lacking any legal basis for sanctions, Suharto pressured the PWI to do what the courts could not—“discipline” the paper for leaking a “state secret.”*° However, the conditions that would eventually make the PWI the “long arm” of the regime were not yet in place.

Little came of this pressure on the PWI. Yet Suharto continued where Sukarno had left off in subordinating other sectors to the presidency. Rather than stifling political activity through raw coercion, he co-opted competing centers of power and reconfigured government institutions, including the parliament. In 1967, he claimed the right to appoint one-third of the full parliament, or MPR, responsible for choosing the president, and more than one-fifth of its lower house, the DPR. Explains Schwarz, “[T]he idea was to restructure the political system in such a way that it could no longer compete with the executive office for power.”

The new configuration allowed the regime to engineer elections to insulate itself from political challenge. Testing the system’s efficacy, the country held its first post- Sukarno elections in 1971. The new government party, Golkar, won a crushing 63 percent of the vote after the regime rigged the process, requiring all civil servants to vote for Golkar, giving village and district leaders vote quotas, and promising development funding to pro-Golkar districts.** New official “rules of conduct,” which came to be known as the “Twelve Commandments,” advantaged the ruling party further with severe restrictions on public speech during the campaign, barring candidates and the media from criticizing the state ideology, the constitution, and anyone in government. Any speech that might provoke religious, ethnic, or racial antagonisms and glorify either Sukarno’s Old Order or the Communist party was also strictly forbidden. ^

In the election’s aftermath, the regime concentrated power further by dissolving all opposition parties to create two new, substantially weaker ones that were barred from representing specific social sectors, thereby reducing representation of the country’s extraordinary diversity to just three political parties. While Suharto claimed that he was preventing a return to the divisive politics of the past, the system produced the pliant parliament he sought and turned elections into vehicles for the affirmation of his agenda. “With one and only one road already mapped out,” he reasoned, “why should we then have nine different cars?”

Yet civil society remained unsubdued, leaving Suharto’s system incomplete. In 1973, Sinar Harapan leaked another government report. This time, Suharto found a legal basis to suspend the paper’s license, charging it with “contempt of Parliament.”*! But he refrained from banning the paper outright because, notes Dhakidae, civil society, through both the media and university students, could still unite to check executive power.?2

THE MALARI INCIDENT

The events that ultimately reversed this power relationship began in 1974 with demonstrations culminating in what became known as the Malari incident. During the months leading to these protests, students, intellectuals, and military factions had been growing restive over continued corruption, particularly among senior army officers, certain ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, and Suharto’s wife, Ibu Tien. At the same time, the government was courting foreign investors, especially the Japanese, with incentives to establish capital-intensive factories that were putting indigenous companies out of business, provoking angry protests from displaced workers and sympathetic students. During a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka, in January 1974, thousands of students protested the rising cost of living, corruption, predatory foreign investment, and cronyism. Called the “Disaster of 15 January,” or “Malari,” the demonstrations became riots that destroyed hundreds of buildings and left at least eleven people dead.”

The regime’s subsequent repression began a step-by-step depoliticization of civil society, largely through measures that closed off or co-opted the available channels for criticism. Early in his honeymoon period, Suharto had moved preemptively, resurrecting the Sukarno-era Anti-Subversion Law that defined subversion as any “action [that] could distort, undermine or deviate from the ideology of Pancasila or the Broad Outlines of State Policy, or otherwise destroy or undermine the power or the authority of the lawful government or the machinery of the State, or disseminate feelings of hostility or arouse hostility, disturbances or anxiety among the population.”** Such broad strictures effectively criminalized all critical reporting and most public debate. Following Malari, the regime dismissed officials accused of inciting the students and filed criminal charges against hundreds of civilians.

Suharto also punished the print press by closing twelve news publications, including Indonesia Raya.” While several newspapers had been critical of corruption and government policy, their gravest transgression in the Malari incident was exposing intraelite divisions. Suharto responded by preventing such divisions from reaching the public in the future.” With the 1974 media crackdown, John Bresnan notes, the country lost “a valuable source of information that helped the government to track the outcomes of its policies and articulated and projected elite opinion during a period in which no other institutions were doing so.”*”

In 1975, Suharto continued to depoliticize society while further weakening opposition parties by introducing a “floating mass” policy restricting subregional party activity and limiting the rural population’s role in politics to just voting. The logic, Cribb and Brown explain, was to protect people from becoming “distracted from the tasks of national development ... so that they would be fully responsive to government instruction and advice.”** A.S. Hikam adds that the policy also aimed to “protect the people from political manipulation by competing parties” and a return to Sukarno-era divisiveness.”

By requiring permits for gatherings of over five people, the regime made political rallies outside state control virtually impossible. The government further restricted political parties by limiting issues they could raise and appointing an electoral commission to review campaign materials. Finally, parties had to submit candidate lists to the commission for approval.

Even before this forced depoliticization, elements of the media felt that responsibility for representing citizens had shifted to them. As the daily Harian Kami put it, “TW ]hat is expected from the press is to function as a ‘parliament outside the parliament.’”°! Dhakidae takes this further, explaining that print press efforts to expose state corruption in Suharto’s first years “represented a last ditch defence of the society in a self-imposed task of redefining the interest of a nation in the absence of political parties.”? In other words, as the legislature lost its ability to check the executive and opposition parties lost the ability to compete fairly in elections, the media became the last institutional vehicle of political contestation.

For four years following Malari, surviving news outlets, though more cautious, managed to retain a critical perspective through favorable coverage of protests by students who were angered by economic mismanagement and fraud in Suharto’s reelection in 1977. Student criticism of the president and his family became “the daily menu” of many newspapers. Though the regime was now shielded from serious electoral competition, the print press, giving voice to the students, could still challenge this claim to uncontested power.

In January 1978, however, student protests culminated in a new crackdown when the government’s internal security agency, Kopkamtib, disbanded all student councils and ordered temporary closure of seven campus newspapers and seven Jakarta dailies. The interim minister of information, Sudharmono [one name], justified the newspaper closures, explaining that coverage supporting the students threatened to shatter the nation’s stability. The military then occupied universities and arrested more than two hundred undergraduates. To depoliticize the students for good, the Ministry of Education introduced a policy called the Normalization of Campus Life, which severely restricted their rights to engage in political activity and placed all campus publications under official control.