It was a typical muggy, hot Javanese Sunday morning in early August. About 60 Indonesian journalists had gathered at the country retreat house of Tempo magazine, the newsweekly recently banned by the authorities.
They were young, most of them, in their 20s and 30s. Many wore blue jeans and T-shirts. The gathering seemed more like a college colloquium than the founding convention of a new journalists’ association. Quite a few were disheveled, having just concluded an all-night session where they hammered out their new charter.
Most of them worked for Indonesia’s largest dailies and tabloids, which had editorially blossomed in recent years. In their short working lives they experienced Indonesia’s first legitimate press opening in decades as the long-lived regime of President Suharto briefly relaxed the strict press censorship that has marked most of his 28 dictatorial years in power.
But they now knew how quickly freedom’s flowers can wither in the equatorial heat. The gathering included writers from Tempo, a polished magazine whose status in Indonesia has been compared to Time or Newsweek, as well as journalists from two new investigative weeklies, DeTik (Moment) and Editor, which also were banned in June.
The three publications’ publishing licenses were revoked when Suharto unexpectedly ended his brief flirtation with openness. Their ostensible crime was reporting the political implications of dissent within the military to the government’s purchase of former East German submarines, a pet project of Suharto’s successor designate, Technology Minister B.J. Habibie.
But that minor scandal was far from the minds of the young journalists who gathered at Tempo’s mountainside retreat. Besides forming a new association, they had come to hear Goenawan Mohamad, the 53-year-old founder and editor of Tempo, whose own career inspired their belief that independent journalism was possible in Indonesia.
“Goenawan Mohamad has been very involved with us since the banning,” said Hendrajit, a 30-year-old senior reporter from DeTik. “He is a symbol and a moral force. Since the 1970s, he has represented what journalism could be in Indonesia.”
In recent years young journalists like Hendrajit had sampled the freedom that Tempo helped forge, reporting some-and only some-of the labor unrest, environmental degradation and vast disparities in wealth that have marked Indonesia’s headlong rush to development. Now they were afraid for their futures as their own newspapers pulled in the reins because of the crackdown.
Their institutional support was running scared too. The officially sanctioned Association of Indonesian Journalists had refused to condemn the ban. Earlier in the week a group of more than 100 journalists protested outside association headquarters.
Inspiring young journalists
Sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a traditional straw mat, a microphone in his hand, Mohamad’s mind drifted back over the 23 years it took to build the 200,000-circulation Tempo into something of a rarity in Asia: a thriving, independent editorial voice that wasn’t afraid to conduct investigations and criticize the government. He recalled the previous time the magazine had been banned and the precarious financial situation of its early years.
“Do not think this is the end of something,” he told the young journalists. “This is the beginning of your life as a journalist. You have learned an important lesson: the connection between the journalist’s role and freedom.”
Mohamad, a Harvard Nieman fellow in 1989, at this stage of his life would appear to be an unlikely candidate for leading young journalists on a campaign for press freedom. In recent years he has focused his writing talents on poetry and literary criticism rather than the hard-hitting investigative journalism that first brought him and his magazine international recognition.
Indeed, one could say that he had been resting on his laurels. Until the shutdown, the “not-for-profit” magazine had been one of Indonesia’s larger taxpayers. It occupies spacious quarters in a downtown high-rise that displays the Tempo logo on the building’s exterior.
Sixty percent of the company is owned by a staff stock-ownership plan. The other 40 percent is owned by the Yayasan Jaya Raya Foundation, which uses part of the magazine’s hefty cash flow to support many of the non-government organizations that have sprung up in Indonesia over the last decade to champion causes such as labor rights, pollution control and women’s rights.
Mohamad has been deliberately reducing his role at Tempo to make way for a new generation of writers, in which he has tried to inculcate the values of professionalism and objectivity. Each week the magazine faithfully reviewed the top stories affecting Indonesia and Southeast Asia, while saving its cover for exclusive reports on politics and culture and, when valor overcame the magazine’s preservational instincts, the endless corruption controversies that swirl around the Suharto government.
A history of troubles
Tempo’s staff of 350 included 52 journalists, who can earn 1 million rupiah ($500) a month. That’s a princely sum in a country where per capita income is still under $1,000 a year and factory workers often must strike to earn a minimum wage under $2 a day.
Tempo didn’t enjoy a smooth ride to the top of Indonesia’s tiny journalism world. (While a circulation of 200,000 in a country of 185 million people is paltry by Western standards, it reflects not literacy rates but the harsh impoverishment of the mass of Indonesians, who simply cannot afford to buy newspapers and magazines.)
“There were always problems,” Mohamad said. “Censorship is like a protective wall where you are fighting a perpetual guerrilla war to push out the boundaries. When the enemy attacked, we had to withdraw.”
The worst attack before the current ban came when the magazine reported riots among lower-class Muslims during the 1982 election campaign, an acute embarrassment to Suharto in a country that is 95 percent Muslim. The magazine was shut down for two months.
By the early 1990s, Tempo and Mohamad were back on the offensive. The magazine gave extensive coverage to the struggle for labor rights in Indonesia, including a cover story earlier this year on Marsinah, 23, a watch-factory worker and union organizer who was brutally murdered in May 1993 after leading a protest for a meal allowance at her plant.
Mohamad wrote numerous opposite-editorial page articles about the case, including one that appeared in the International Herald Tribune last January, in an effort to bring the case to international attention.
The Indonesian Center for Human Rights Study, which was founded in Jakarta four years ago and which Mohamad chairs, gave Marsinah its annual human-rights award posthumously. Last spring Mohamad traveled to Surabaya, the eastern Java city where she was killed, to present the award to her fellow workers.
“I was so impressed by a friend of hers who spoke at the award ceremony,” he said. ” `Don’t believe we don’t read,’ the young man said. `We learned about labor struggles around Indonesia by reading the press.’ “
Suharto on the attack
Mohamad said there have been protests across the Indonesian archipelago against banning the magazines, none of which have been reported in the local or international press. “People talk about how this is only the concern of middle-class intellectuals. This is simply not true,” he said.
Unlike the 1982 ban, Suharto appears intent on destroying Tempo this time, or at least rendering it ineffectual. In his annual independence day speech to parliament in mid-August, Suharto lashed out at a “hostile” press. “Openness doesn’t mean unlimited freedom,” he said.
Suharto’s Information Ministry is demanding the Jaya Raya Foundation sell the company to Bob Hasan, a Chinese-Indonesian timber tycoon who is a close friend of the president, before it can get its license renewed. The government said it is concerned about saving the magazine’s 350 jobs.
Mohamad and most of the Tempo staff are resisting the move. “We are not concerned about jobs. We are concerned about freedom,” Mohamad said. “It wouldn’t be the same magazine. It would lose its credibility. It would be a phony Tempo.”
Meanwhile, Mohamad is taking steps to keep from the censor’s grip the magazine’s most irreplaceable resource: a library with thousands of photographs documenting the social and political history of Indonesia over the past two decades. “To me that’s precious,” Mohamad said. “He (Hasan) can only take that over my dead body.”
The government has another motive in trying to force the foundation to sell the magazine and have Hasan reopen Tempo. It wants to create the appearance of normalcy before 15 heads of state, including President Clinton, arrive in Jakarta in November for the second Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
Mohamad wants the magazine to hold out until then in the hope that the glare of international publicity will force Suharto to relent and return the license to the old Tempo. Though it doesn’t publish, Tempo continues to pay its staff by liquidating assets. The mountain retreat where the young journalists gathered in early August, for instance, is up for sale.
But Mohamad is not optimistic.
“This is like a city after a long seige on the eve of occupation,” he said. “Some will stay and start pockets of resistance. Others will start refugee camps. Now is the beginning of our diaspora.”
