A new wave of Indonesian films
Joanne Sharpe
For a brief period in July this year, shoppers and cinemagoers at Blok M Plaza in Jakarta might have noticed something quite unusual. Strung up on the outside of the building, large hand-painted banners usually advertise the latest American blockbusters to reach Indonesian theatres. However, for a day or so, the lineup included three Indonesian films: Eliana Eliana by Riri Riza, Bendera by Nan T Achnas, and Marsinah by Slamet Rahardjo.
In recent years it has often been said that Indonesian film is dead. Bearing in mind that just 16 feature films were produced between 1999 and 2001, to have three Indonesian films playing simultaneously was quite remarkable. Unfortunately, Bendera quickly disappeared from cinema screens, and when I went to see Marsinah at Blok M three days after its release, the session was almost cancelled because only four people turned up. There were about 12 people in the theatre for Eliana Eliana, however, and it ran in Jakarta for several weeks. For a low-budget Indonesian film, preceded by minimal hype, this was nothing short of a triumph.
Eliana Eliana, which picked up the Best Young Cinema and Critics prizes at the Singapore International Film Festival, tells of Eliana (Rachel Sayidina), a young woman brought up by her single mother in West Sumatra. Her mother, Bunda (Jajang C Noer), has severed all contact and vowed never to speak to her again after she fled to Jakarta to escape an arranged marriage. The film opens in Jakarta five years later. Eliana, who has just lost her job and is facing eviction, arrives home to find Bunda waiting for her. Bunda has come to take Eliana back to Sumatra, but Eliana is predictably resistant to the idea. The story unfolds on the streets of Jakarta in the space of one night, as the pair charter a taxi and go in search of Heni, Eliana's housemate, who has been missing for several days.
Heralding the expanding role for digital technology in low budget film, Eliana was shot using a single hand held digital camera and mostly incidental lighting, evoking the neon and grit of Jakarta at night. One of the strengths of the film is that it is rarely judgmental of the city's seedier side, or of the characters that inhabit it. Eliana may have fallen in with a morally ambiguous crowd, but she has retained her own sense of values - a credit, in fact, to her self-possessed mother. Much of the humor and pathos in this film comes from the obvious similarities between Eliana and Bunda, each as uncompromising and iron willed as the other. In one scene, their taxi driver stops briefly for an herbal tonic from a stall by the side of the road. The woman serving asks why he doesn't invite his passengers to join him. He replies in a tone heavy with resignation, 'Those two? They don't need tonic. They're tough enough already.
The publicity for Eliana quotes US film critic Chuck Stevens, who raves, 'On a variety of visceral and aesthetic levels, Riza's tightly-budgeted, fourteen-day, one-camera production elegantly out-maneuvers anything going on in American independent cinema today.' Certainly, in comparison with the polished American productions that are dominant in Indonesian theatres and even recent blockbusters like Ada apa dengan Cinta? (What's up with Love?), this film conforms to the way you might expect an independent production to look. Yet calling Eliana and its director Riri Reza independent causes a few raised eyebrows in Indonesian independent film circles.
Riri established his independent credentials in 1998 with the release of Kuldesak, a film he co-wrote, produced and directed with Mira Lesmana, Nan T Achnas and Rizal Mantovani, who are some of the biggest names in Indonesian film today. Kuldesak is widely hailed as the first in the recent wave of independent productions, which are self-funded and filmed on the sly guerilla style without the necessary state permits. Since then, however, Riri has been involved with two of the most successful Indonesian films of recent years. He directed Petualangan Sherina (The Adventures of Sherina) and co-produced Ada apa dengan Cinta?, both big budget productions supported by canny marketing and promotion strategies. The production company behind both these films, Miles Productions, was also involved with Eliana Eliana. As Riri and his generation of filmmakers are some of the most successful and active in Indonesia today, some might call them the closest thing the industry has to an Establishment.
Riri laughs this off. 'As far as I'm concerned, there just aren't any conditions under which we could become established. You can call me an established filmmaker, I don't mind, you can call me an independent filmmaker and that's okay too, whatever.' He speaks pragmatically about his alliance with giant television production company Prima Entertainment, which co-funded the production, while waxing enthusiastically about experimenting with new genres and alternative modes of production. The main thing, he says, is just to tell stories about Indonesia and Indonesians. 'About us and our dreams.'
In Eliana, the story is essentially about the vulnerability of relationships and people, and the difficulties they have communicating with one another. It may be a universal theme, but Eliana is most definitely an Indonesian film. Interestingly, it is also a film about women, although Riri has in the past stated that he does not set out to comment specifically on women's issues. Rather, he speaks of his great respect for women in Indonesia, who in his opinion face difficulties far greater than those faced by men. Eliana is a subtle portrait of some of these challenges, such as the problems of living on the mean streets of Jakarta, or bringing up a child as a single mother, as well as some that are even more fundamental.
In one scene, Bunda goes into a filthy public toilet, the floor muddy and wet. Encumbered by her large handbag, she struggles keep her long skirt and shawl out of the mess. As she goes to leave, she looks at her reflection in the grimy mirror and suddenly starts to sob. Clearly the stress of her reunion with her daughter and the events of the evening would be enough to make anyone cry, but her problems with her dress add an extra poignancy. Says Riri, tongue in cheek, 'You can see this scene as Bunda thinking, "All I want to do is help my daughter, take her home, and even peeing is difficult"'
The growing overlap between 'independent' and 'mainstream' film in Indonesian is manifest in 'i-sinema', a movement based on a manifesto signed by thirteen contemporary filmmakers. Both Eliana Eliana and Bendera are i-sinema films. The meaning of 'i' in 'i-sinema' is ambiguous - it stands for the word 'Indonesian' as much as it does for 'Independent', as well as other terms like 'eye' or even the English 'I'. I-sinema films are made in the spirit of independence and even individualism, but they are also national in character. Riri is adamant that his films should not alienate people. 'It seems that alternative film movements in other countries just don't care much about their audience. For us, the audience is still very important.' Of primary concern is that the Indonesian audience has been starved of Indonesian film, and this is the first thing these filmmakers seek to redress.
The first line of the manifesto states that 'Stagnation in the Indonesian film industry means that we must find new ways of making feature films, and much of the short document relates to what these new ways might be. The use of digital technology is mentioned specifically as giving us the opportunity to work more freely and independently'. The members of 'i-sinema' emphasise the importance of film as a form of freedom of expression and pledge to create films of artistic and personal credibility, but they remain aware of the practicalities of production. Essentially, if Indonesian film is dead, filmmakers are being forced to be alternative in the way they produce and distribute their films. As a result, Independent film has become National film, and the independent voice has become a national voice on the big screen, not just due to natural progression but almost by default.
For Riri Reza and those of his generation, whether people regard these films as being independent or not are not a matter for concern, as long as the films are being made and filling the vacuum in Indonesian cinema. 'The next film I make might be commercial, it might be more art house, it might even be a documentary. I'm not a jukebox. I'll make whatever films I want.'
Joanne Sharpe (polymorph2@hotmail.com) is a student at the University of New South Wales. She was recently in Indonesia on the ACICIS program, researching Indonesian Independent Film for her Honours thesis.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
The struggle to get Indonesia online
Onno Purbo
There is now a movement to develop self-financed bottom-up internet infrastructure in Indonesia, using high-speed wireless internet technology. Money, technology and government help are not the keys. The dedication of many Indonesian volunteers to community education processes is the most important factor in developing this infrastructure.
Copyleft
Free education on various aspects of the internet is the key to help Indonesian society become receptive to this technology. Indonesians can then invest and build their own infrastructure at virtually no cost to the government or donor agencies.
For free education to succeed, information must circulate quickly. Internet based media disseminate information and knowledge far more quickly than conventional media. CD-ROM and web servers are typical methods to disseminate knowledge in electronic form in the public domain. The faster knowledge circulates, the greater its audience and as a consequence, the greater the value of the distributed knowledge. The ultimate goal is to transform communities into knowledge producers and writers through abundant freely available knowledge provided online.
Copyright inhibits the accelerated flow of knowledge and thus reduces the value of the information distributed. Not surprisingly, most Indonesian internet activists prefer to disseminate their knowledge free of copyright. This material, distributed free of copyright, is called 'copyleft' or 'copywrong'.
Indonesian internet activists such as I Made Wiryana, Michael Sunggiardi, Adi Nugroho, Irwin Day and Ismail Fahmi publish freely on the internet. Their work is available at the Indonesian Digital Knowledge Foundation (IDKF) http://www.bogor.net/idkf or from the Pandu Team Website http://www.pandu.org/. These websites contain more than five thousand articles and references on various aspects of the Internet.
Putting copylefted knowledge into the public domain can attract a surprising amount of funding and sponsorship. Depending on audience size, this sponsorship may surpass the salary of a professional executive with a permanent job in Jakarta.
The free distribution of this knowledge to the public creates demand for certain technologies and services. The private sector or other entrepreneurs can then profit by providing the required technologies and services to the public. The private sector views this process pragmatically; they support the person who created the market demand so as to continue to maintain and expand their market.
Sponsors also arrange seminars, roadshows and talkshows. The door price for a one-day seminar is only US$3 per person and includes snacks, Linux CDs and a magazine. It is normal for more than 300 people to attend each seminar, and this audience is multiplied through radio talkshows and various other programs in each city. This enables knowledge producers to continue to distribute their knowledge freely to the public.
The activists involved in these roadshows also provide free seminars in many schools. This program is arranged by the Indonesian School Information Network.
Internet mailing lists also assist the interaction and dissemination of knowledge. A few examples include genetika@yahoogroups.com (more on information technology (IT) politics), majalahneotek@yahoogroups.com (IT beginners), linux-admin@linux.or.id, linus-setup@linux.or.id.
Since the necessary knowledge is freely available, the public has started to invest their own money in infrastructure. Small to medium entrepreneurs are putting their money into IT businesses and re-investing their profits as their businesses go well. This cycle of business and investment may gradually accumulate the public's money in IT businesses and enable them to build their own internet infrastructure. This process has left the grassroots movement with much stronger roots in society than government initiatives.
Government Initiatives
Although the Indonesian government has invested a lot of money to shift the Indonesian people into cyberspace, it has been private sector investment and various sponsorships that have sustained the Indonesian internet.
Successive Indonesian governments have actually been a stumbling block for internet development. These governments have stifled creativity, as they require everything to be registered and licensed. Government policy lags behind developments and fails to provide the industry with a competitive safeguard. The government will not issue licenses for internet service providers (ISPs) using newer technologies for their connection. Small to medium enterprises, such as internet cafes, must also bear unofficial government taxes.
The Indonesian government has established several national teams to assist internet development. The National Development Coordination Body (BAPPENAS) used the concepts produced by these teams to obtain a World Bank loan in 1998.
The loan was approximately a couple of hundred billion rupiah, and is known as the Information Infrastructure Development Program (IIDP). Some IIDP projects are still on-going in 2002. However, as the loan has been used to pay international consultants to write concept papers, and has not been invested in infrastructure to help people access the internet, these hundreds of billions of rupiah have had negligible direct impact on the Indonesian people.
In 2001, the Ministry of Research and Technology launched Internet Cafe Technology and Science Technology CDs. Because the government's budget is limited, the onus for these activities has fallen on the private sector. The Internet Cafe Technology program aims to build 9000 Internet cafes through private sector investment. The investment will then be returned by the Internet cafe users though an access fee.
The Science Technology CD contains research done for the Ministry of Research and Technology. It is distributed freely to the public. The Sekolah 2000 foundation and Master Data, with a lot of private sector sponsorship, supports the production and distribution of the CDs.
The only government initiative that has significantly benefited the Indonesian internet community is the vocational schools Internet movement (dikmenjur@yahoogroups.com). Dr. Gatot H.P., the director of vocational schools at the Ministry of Education, is the driving force behind the movement. In 2001, he worked closely with other Indonesian Internet communities and managed to push over 1000 (out of 4000) Indonesian vocational schools onto the Internet, a commendable accomplishment.
There is still a long way before Indonesia's 1300 tertiary institutions, 10,000 high schools, 10,000 Islamic schools and 4000 vocational schools are all online. Currently only about 1200 schools and 200 universities are on the Internet.
Wireless Internet
The most convenient gauge of the development of Indonesian internet infrastructure is the expansion of Indonesian internet service providers (ISPs). IndoNet - Indonesia's first commercial ISP - was started by IndoInternet in 1994. Currently, over 160 ISP licenses have been granted, and about 60 ISPs are operational. Current large ISPs include IndosatNet, LinkNet, CBN, RadNet, Centrin and Indonet.
In early 2002, the Association of Indonesian Internet Service Providers (APJII) estimated that around four million Indonesians use the internet. Each year, the number of Internet users in Indonesia doubles. APJII claims that the majority of users are male, young (25-35 years old) and educated. About two-thirds of Indonesian users access the internet at various internet cafes (known as warnet in short for warung internet).
Aside from the commercial and legal ISPs, there are significant grassroots movements behind most of Indonesia's internet activities. These movements involve internet cafes using high-speed (11-54Mbps) wireless internet technology.
There are over 2000 internet cafes in Indonesia, most of which are self-financed. The Indonesian Internet Cafe Association (AWARI) was founded in May 2000. Its current heads are Judith M.S, Michael Suggiardi and Abdullah Koro. AWARI is fighting to expand our own network and implement a self-financed community based network to reduce dependence on Indonesian telecommunications provider services.
Most of the cash flow of these internet cafes actually goes into the coffers of the Indonesian telecommunications providers for line rental. The incumbent operators, Telkom and Indosat, have tried to use their power to distort the industry. They have also overcharged ISPs for incoming call lines and frequently rejected applications for lines. This has driven the community to seek alternatives to build our own independent network. The easiest way is the wireless LAN [Local Area Network] technology. At a cost of approximately US$150 / unit, anyone with a strong Linux background can easily integrate a LAN or a community to the Internet at a speed of 11Mbps, provided they have an external antenna with sufficient gain to reach the access point. Using such an antenna, I have integrated my LAN at home as well as my surrounding neighbourhood to the Internet for 24 hour access at 11Mbps for Rp 330.000 / month.
Building a low cost home-made antenna is not that difficult. A tincan with a 90 mm diameter and 215 mm length can serve as a 2.4GHz antenna with a range of three to four kilometres. It costs approximately US$5 to US$10 per antenna. Many internet cafes in Yogyakarta use this type of antenna to reduce their investment. They can also use old 486 [forerunner of the pentium chip] terminals running Linux to allow low cost investments and avoid copyright problems. The software drivers and information needed to set up wireless internet are easily found on the Internet.
The cost of satellite access for each cafe can be reduced to US$250-500 per month by sharing the connection between 10 to 20 internet cafes. These internet cafes use high-speed wireless technology to share the bandwidth. Considering some of these cafes take in US$50-100 per day from their customers, US$500 per month is affordable.
Based on the technology and business plan described freely at http://www.bogor.net/idkf, various internet cafe's have reduced the cost for public users to access the internet to Rp 5000 per hour. In Indonesian schools, the cost of accessing the Internet can be brutally reduced to Rp 5000 per month per student. This makes the internet accessible to a much wider range of people than simply those who can afford a personal computer. Many small to medium businesses and schools are now investing their money to build their own internet infrastructure. If a conducive policy is implemented, over 20 million Indonesians could access the internet with 4-5 years, without any loans from the World Bank, IMF and ADB.
Internet telephony (also called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)) is another emerging controversial technology that can be used to build a community based telephone network at very low cost. Government officials and the police are currently conducting unlawful sweepings to seize 'illegal' VoIP and Wireless Internet equipments.
These solutions may not be appropriate for some countries, especially those with tight rules on frequency usage. Most, if not all, the time, we run the equipments without any license. The government would like to protect the interest of incumbent telecommunication operators, which are paranoid about this new technology. Fortunately, the Indonesian media helps keep us from being jailed. We only hope to provide the best,low cost solutions for Indonesians to be integrated into the Internet and to reduce the existence of a digital divide.
High-speed wireless Internet is the necessary technology to build community based internet infrastructure without telecommunications providers. At the moment, there are more than 1000 corporate users or wireless internet and some residential users, like me at home. Most of the wireless internet operators hang out at indowli@yahoogroups.com and are fighting for low cost, if not free, frequency licenses. We hope that people will not have to pay to use the air.
Educated, dedicated and militant people are the key to this community initiative to deploy infrastructure. It shows clearly the strength of community education in attempting to transform Indonesia into knowledge-based society.
Onno W. Purbo [onno@indo.net.id] is an independent IT writer, a former lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and a former Indonesian civil servant. Most of the copylefted reference and technical materials mentioned in this article can be freely downloaded from http://www.bogor.net/idkf, http://bebas.vlsm.org, http://free.vlsm.org and http://www.pandu.org/.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
The 68H network brings people closer together
Santoso
It's evening in Jayapura. We have just finished installing a parabolic antenna and digital receiver, and have connected them to studio Radio Suara Kasih Agung. We hurried out into the front yard of the radio station with a small radio. Together with eight radio workers from the city, we gathered together, hearts pounding waiting for a signal. Suddenly the broadcasters voice sprung forth from the small radio. 'This is the latest news from Radio 68H News Office.' We were all surprised, but also relieved. There was good reception for radio broadcasts from Jakarta, which can be re-broadcast by local radio.
Our Papuan friends were even happier that one of the news sources in the broadcast was Tom Beanal, the Vice President of the Papua Council Presidium. This Papuan identity explained the situation, and the Papuan people's desire for independence. Our friends who were huddled around had certainly rarely or never before heard their idol speak on the radio. And on that day, Tom Beanal's voice was not only heard in Jayapura, but throughout Indonesia. Through Radio 68H, the voice of a person in Jayapura is heard in Banda Aceh, Manado, Kupang and other cities.
The exchange of information between regions is one of the strong points of Radio 68 News Office. In previous times, radio was very local, but broadcasts now reach a national, even international audience. This news radio office has bridged the isolation between regions in Indonesia.
A friend who recently visited North Maluku spoke of the importance of this news office. In this new province, there are two radio stations that are members of the 68H network, namely Gema Hikmah in Ternate and Gema Pertiwi on Bacan Island. Of course, the signal from these stations doesn't reach all of North Maluku. However, because people who live a fair way away also want to hear 68H news broadcasts, a number of police rebroadcast the signal over their shortwave radios.
A survey of radio listener behaviour in East Java found that when listeners wanted news, they would first tune in to Buletin. This is a 30 minute Radio 68H program broadcast twice daily in the morning and evening. This is the most popular of Radio 68H's programs, not just in East Java, but also throughout Indonesia. With 230 member stations broadcasting it, it is estimated to reach an audience of 20 million people.
Radio 68H started operations in April 1999. Initially, it was a program of the Institute for the Study for the Free Flow of Information (ISAI), an NGO struggling for the free flow of information. This program aimed to provide independent news for radio. A limited number of news items were produced, digitised (MP3 files) and sent to member stations over the internet. At the outset only 14 stations, mainly in large cities, used the news items.
ISAI itself was founded in 1995, shortly after the Detik tabloid, Editor and Tempo magazines were banned. ISAI initially focussed on print media, as many of its activists were from the print media. However, when the Suharto regime toppled, its activists felt they needed to contribute something to radio journalism, because during the New Order, radio was subject to the tightest repression.
Aiming to facilitate information exchange between the regions and improve the quality of radio journalism, Radio 68H was always intended to incorporate two-way communication. Although the idea was conceived and its studio was established in Jakarta, the contribution of the regions has been very important to the advancement of the organisation. The network members are not just radio stations to relay 68H programs, but are also a source of information ad important contributors that sustain the programs. We encourage every network member to become a correspondent, and routinely report interesting news from their region.
As its regional correspondents are so important, 68H has actively organised radio journalism training in various regions. Usually, a local network member hosts the session. About 12 participants are invited to each five-day training session. The training material is elementary; namely the basics of radio journalism and necessary technical skills, such as using the Cool Edit Pro software to process voices. Training participants become potential 68H correspondents. In three years, we have organised around 25 training sessions with over 300 participants. Fifty of these participants have become routine contributors to 68H.
Over time, the 68H network has continually expanded. At the end of 1999, there were around 60 stations broadcasting 68H programs. Word of mouth recommendations from our network members assist the expansion of the network. Because 68H news is perceived to be independent, easy to understand and reliable, many radio stations want to join the network.
As its network has expanded, the 68H crew has learnt to produce more varied programs. In the beginning, we only produced one-minute dispatches; in August 1999, we plucked up the courage to produce a 24 minute Buletin Sore (Afternoon Bulletin). This program was split into four files, and sent by email to the network affiliates. It was hoped they would download the program before 4pm, and broadcast it simultaneously.
However, by the end of 1999 it was clear that it took too long to download broadcasts off the internet. Our friends at Radio Suara Padang in Padang, West Sumatra, explained that they needed 8 hours to download a 24 minute broadcast. Radio Nebula in Palu, Central Sulawesi needed 6 hours, as did Radio DMWS in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. As a result, the programs were not broadcast simultaneously, and the telephone bills of member stations blew out. The slow speed of internet access, particularly outside Java, forced us to find an alternative technology to distribute the program.
In 2000, Radio 68H News Agency started to use a satellite to distribute its programs. This is far more effective, easy and cheap for our network members. They just need a parabolic antenna and a digital receiver to access all 68H programs, then broadcast those that they are interested in.
Our target is for the 68H network to reach all regencies in Indonesia before the 2004 general election. Through this network, we plan to publicise and monitor the implementation of the forthcoming election. This is very important, as the next election will have different features. For the first time in Indonesia, the president will be directly elected.
Another advantage of the satellite is the opportunity for listener interaction. We have subsequently set up an Indonesia-wide toll-free number. The talkshow that we broadcast each day from 09.00-09.30 has become a favourite with listeners. The listeners always run out of time to participate in the daily thematic discussion. We choose topics like law reform, human rights, regional autonomy, the environment and the economy. Most recently, we have added a talkshow about religion and tolerance, as a cooperative program between 68H and the Liberal Islam Network. This has attracted attention from society in general, and the transcripts of the discussions are published in dozens of Indonesian newspapers.
The biggest problem for the network is now self-sustainability. We have been lucky enough to receive strong support for the initial stages of the program from institutions such as the Asia Foundation, Media Development Loan Fund, the Dutch Embassy and CAF. However, from the outset we have also realised that this assistance cannot continue indefinitely. We are determined to enter the market, and seek funding through the market. For that reason, 68H programs are designed with part of their duration allocated for advertisements. This news agency also accommodates the needs of various institutions that want to arrange sponsored programs.
This extensive network is of course a strong drawcard to attract sponsors. Apart from social institutions, such as the UNHCR, UNDP, Health Department and NGOs, the network has also attracted commercial sponsors, such as the food supplement industry, insurance companies, Pertamina and other mass products. We stipulate that the maximum time that can be allocated to advertisements is fifteen per cent of broadcasts. At present there are eighteen hours of broadcasts daily. As such, 68H still prioritises its listeners' interests over other interests. We believe that 68H News Agency is first and foremost a public service. So it has been from the outset, and so it will continue to be, even when it is market funded.
Foreign broadcast institutions are another source of funding. At present, 68H provides news for Radio SBS in Australia, and Radio Hilversum in the Netherlands. In the near future, Deutche Welle in Germany and the Voice of America will use news produced by 68H. Apart from generating income, cooperation with foreign radio is a new phenomenon. Usually, Indonesian radio just relays foreign radio; now we can provide news for them too.
Radio 68H News Agency also cooperates with Radiq.com in Malaysia to produce the Nada Nasional (National Tone) program. This program is produced in Kuala Lumpur, and broadcast by 68H in several areas that border on Malaysia. This program helps to foster mutual understanding between inhabitants along the Indonesia-Malaysia border. And listeners in Malaysia receive an alternative to official government news broadcasts.
This is one of the results of reformasi in 1998: the freedom the media now enjoys has opened up many possibilities that could not even be imagined previously.
Santoso (tosca@isai.or.id) is the director of radio 68H News Agency.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
Radio has undergone a revolution since Suharto resigned
Edwin Jurriens
Following decades of government monopoly on news and information broadcasting, four major developments have taken place in the Indonesian radio scene since Suharto was deposed. These are: 1. the production of news by commercial stations, 2. the rise of community radio, 3. training and production activities of non-government radio news agencies, and 4. attempts to transform government radio into genuine public radio. These are new and revolutionary developments.
During Suharto's New Order (1967-1998), state radio and television (RRI and TVRI, respectively) implemented their own interpretation of development journalism. Developed during UNESCO meetings and other international discussions on communications since the 1960s, development journalism is intended to function as a 'watchdog of the government and champion of the public good.' In RRI and TVRI's interpretation it was close to government propaganda, however, and was used to support Pembangunan, the state development project. Only since the era of political and social reform, so-called reformasi, have broadcast media been allowed to engage in other, government-critical, aspects of development journalism, or develop completely different journalism concepts.
A 1998 Information Minister's decree permits Indonesian commercial radio stations to produce and broadcast their own news programs. These radio stations have since provided their audience with information that involves their listeners as critical, active and mature members of civil society. Interactive talk shows, which are currently extremely popular on the Indonesian airwaves, are an important aspect of this agenda. These talk shows discuss politics, the economy, culture, health, religion and other topical social issues. Listeners can take part in the discussion by phoning in or visiting the station in person. Some news bulletins give listeners the opportunity to report on topical events or situations they have encountered in their daily lives, and become journalists themselves. In this way, the Information Minister's decree has also enabled radio stations to explore the profitability of a new market segment.
Community radio expands interactivity beyond program content into program production and station management. Since Reformasi, international donor organisations and local NGOs have actively promoted community radio as an alternative to government radio and commercial radio. The community as a whole is responsible for ownership, organization, funding, editorial independence and credibility. Community radio is supposed to be open to various communal groups and interests, and pays special attention to minorities and marginal groups. In Central Java since the late 1990s, several community radio stations have represented the interests of farmers' groups. Campus radio stations, which operate in several Indonesian cities, are another form of community radio.
After the fall of Suharto, both commercial radio and community radio have made use of two non-government radio news agencies, Kantor Berita Radio 68H (Radio News Agency 68H, or KBR 68H) and Internews Indonesia. These agencies produce radio programs, but do not broadcast themselves. They distribute their programs to clients through the Internet and satellite technology. Besides news production, they also organise broadcast journalism courses for radio workers.
KBR 68H provides an important contribution to multi-culturalism and mutual understanding between different groups in society. The news agency incorporates these values both in its programs and its institutional structure. The journalists involved in KBR 68H constitute a community out of shared professional and ideological interests. This community is organized along multiple lines of ethnicity, religion, gender, status and political affiliation. Thus it provides a model for a new, democratic and multi-cultural organization of Indonesian society as a whole. The news agency's multi-cultural character is enhanced by its exchange of programs with radio stations from different regions and with different identity policies. A disadvantage of KBR 68H's nationwide network is that it may lead to the homogenisation of news and information, as well as journalistic ideas and practices.
The activities of Internews Indonesia -which is part of the United States non-profit organization Internews Network Inc.- include training courses, a television project, broadcast production and a media law program. The news agency also makes technical equipment available to local radio stations. While Internews offices in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union focus on television, and other offices in Southeast Asia on the print media, Internews Indonesia's main medium is radio. Internews Indonesia considers radio the most appropriate medium for disseminating ideas, because of its oral character and relative cheapness. Internews Indonesia currently has a nationwide network of more than 50 radio partners that use its services.
In discussing these new types of radio activity we should not lose sight of the dynamics of older media institutions, such as the state-operated RRI (radio) and TVRI (television). Both RRI and TVRI have already become semi-autonomous, and are supposed to be transformed into real public media, free from restrictive government control, in the near future. Their excellent broadcasting equipment and extensive regional networks mean these institutions could potential become important contributors to the democratization of the Indonesian public sphere. In short, for the Indonesian mediascape to be a real force for democratic reform, it must incorporate diverse media activities and outlets.
Edwin Jurriens (e.c.m.jurriens@let.leidenuniv.nl)is a postdoctoral fellow of the Indonesian Mediations Project (IMP), Leiden University.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
Millions of Indonesians must watch soap operas
Amrih Widodo
Thursday evening was a special time for Herlina, a 30 year old white collar worker in Jakarta. For one hour, she had to perform her special ritual: watching her favourite sinetron (Indonesian television drama) Dewi Fortuna (Lady Fortune). She would do anything to see her favourite stars Bella Saphira and Jeremy Thomas on screen. Once, she had to tell her boss that she had serious diarrhoea, to excuse herself from an important company meeting. Another time, at a workshop in a small town in Central Java, she panicked when she realized that her anti-sinetron male colleagues had already monopolised the only television in her small hotel. She decided to drive for five hours to Surabaya to buy her own television set so that she could watch sinetron the following night, so reported Tempo (14/01/2002).
Mrs. Sum, 45, a housewife, runs an all night food stall near the market in Blora, Central Java. Even though her food stall should open at 7.00 p.m, she sometimes remains glued to her favourite sinetron until after 8.30 p.m. She has been addicted to both Indonesian sinetron and Latin American telenovela for over ten years, but prefers telenovela. What annoys her most about sinetron is that the protagonists never age. In contrast, telenovela could cover the life span of two or three generations in a series, ?naturally? following the development of human life. Despite being dispassionate about a couple of sinetron series, Mrs Sum?s daily schedule has revolved around the timetables of television dramas for the past decade.
From her home in Sydney, Mrs. Dewi runs a small business which is also her hobby, or perhaps more precisely her addiction. She is one of the Chinese Indonesian mothers who fled Jakarta after the riot in May 1998, but she has not left sinetron behind. Through a satellite dish in her house, she receives all of the Indonesian television stations. Over 20 thousand Indonesians now live in Sydney, and a good number of them simply have to watch sinetron. A few entrepreneurs have made copies of sinetron episodes and rent them out to their fellow sinetron fans. There are more than five sinetron video rentals in Sydney. The rent is usually US$1.50 per cassette per week - each cassette contains three episodes. Mrs. Dewi's sinetron video rental is not the biggest one; nonetheless, she has about 75 titles with an average of 25 episodes for each title.
Herlina, Mrs. Sum and Mrs. Dewi are representative of millions of Indonesians, especially women, who consume sinetron and structure their lives around their schedules. They have lived through generations of TV drama, from those produced or commissioned by state television when TV drama was popular as much because of the unavailability of alternatives as their quality; to the more commercially driven sinetron, in which popularity is measured by SRI-AC Nielsen rating and advertising revenue achieved by exploiting good-looking stars, intriguing family affairs, tear-jerking love stories, and displays of the glamorous life-styles of the rich. The term sinetron comes from the words sinema (cinema) and elektronik (electronic). After ten years of struggle asserting their existence against imported TV drama, sinetron have become pivotal members of millions of Indonesian families. Daily household chores, family business, official meetings and social events are all often scheduled around the timetables of popular sinetron. For a decade, the popularity of sinetron has served as a backbone for the rapid development of private television in Indonesia. The Mediascape of Sinetron
Prior to the introduction of private television in the late 1980s, state television was a prime site for the construction and circulation of an Indonesian national identity. The state monopolised the electronic mediascape, and the Palapa satellite vastly expanded its national audience. In his book, Television, Nation and Culture in Indonesia, Philip Kitley writes that the state television station, TVRI, through news-as-ritual and pre-sinetron ideological family dramas, was able to address its audience as a public and national family.
The introduction of commercial television in 1988 did not result in a paradigm shift towards more democratic or even market-driven media. The Suharto regime maintained its monopoly over Indonesian television through nepotism in issuing private television licenses. However, the state can no longer monopolise the political and cultural sphere, and television is now ratings driven. New licenses were issued after Suharto?s resignation and in 2001-2002 four new private television broadcasters entered the market. Except for Metro TV, which like CNN specializes in news, all nine private and the two state broadcasters rely on entertainment for about 75 percent of their programming. One of the main elements of this are sinetron.
Private television depends on advertisements. The expansion of the Indonesian economy since the late 1980s has made television financially possible. Television reaps 62 per cent of media advertising expenditure in Indonesia, followed by print media with 33 per cent (Gatra 10/11/2001). Total national advertising expenditure doubled from Rp. 639 million between 1990-1993, after private channels were made available nationally, and skyrocketed tenfold in a decade to Rp. 9.7 billion in 2001. Despite a dip for the economic crisis, advertising revenue is predicted to reach Rp. 12,2 billion in 2002. Private television channel RCTI, owned by Suharto?s son Bambang Trihatmojo, dominated the race for advertising revenue for a decade, however a 2000 AC Nielson Indonesia report showed that Indosiar, owned by Chinese tycoon Lim Sioe Liong, has surpassed RCTI. New television operators have learned that advertising does not go with channels, instead with high rating programs. The localized version of Family Feud, Famili 100, and the sinetron Si Doel Anak Sekolahan (Doel, the Uni Student) have proven this: both moved to Indosiar without losing ratings, and maintained their advertising revenue. The fight is now on to produce or pirate high-rating programs. Newcomers see a chance to win the race for advertising revenue, or at least secure a viable segmented market.
Imagining Sinetron Audiences
Sinetron, meanwhile, have been almost invulnerable to Indonesia?s recent economic crisis and political turmoil. Sinetron?s expensive production costs (Rp. 90 ? 125 million per episode) did cause a 40 per cent decline in their production by late 1998. However, ratings remained solid.
The Indonesian TV drama industry started to flourish early in 1990s in response to the emergence of private television stations and the death of film industry. As television imports grew, only 12 films were produced by mid 1992, compared to 118 the previous year. Most film companies converted to production houses to service the high demand for local content to fill broadcast hours. One of those film companies was PT Parkit Film, owned by Raam Punjabi, an Indonesian of Indian descent, whose production house PT Tripar Multivision now dominates sinetron production. Smaller production houses and sinetron critics have resented the domination by Punjabi?s company, particularly his strategy of booking prime time slots, making exclusive contracts with popular stars, and producing a massive number of sinetron based on proven, conventional formulas - love stories, tears, domestic affairs, and popular stars (Tempo 14/01/2001). Punjabi controls an estimated 40 per cent of sinetron production in Indonesia, and during prime time, all the five channels broadcast similar sinetron. Indonesian viewers are bombarded by images of modernity manifested in the life-styles and environs of the rich.
Massive production of sinetron has also hampered creativity and variation of theme, scenario, and story lines. Many almost literally copy imported TV drama from India and Latin America, which became popular when dubbing replaced subtitles. To make sure that the appeal of Indian TV drama was transferred to Indonesian sinetron, Raam Punjabi hired the Indian TV drama director Vasant R. Pathel to direct Tersanjung, Indonesia?s longest running sinetron (Rakyat Merdeka 28/07/2000). A script writer for one of the big companies informed me that he was often given a series of Indian TV drama to watch and simply copy the story.
Only a decade old, Indonesian TV drama is still at an early stage. Audience taste is still volatile. Many production houses and television channels do not want to risk broadcasting sinetron that differ from those with high ratings. Copying previously popular, locally made and imported series is common. Consequently, Indonesian TV drama is produced merely with commercial considerations, at the expense of quality. However, several imported programs with high production values, such as the X-Files and similar American series, have low ratings but brim with advertisements. Harsiwi Achmad, Planning and Development Manager at SCTV explained, ?Because the audience is from Class A [middle and upper class] ... the advertisements are for products targeted for this class A.?
Putu Wijaya, one of the most prolific Indonesian writers who has produced, directed and written more than 50 sinetron titles, explained how production thinks about the audience. Television channels and production houses classify Indonesian viewers into two categories. Class A consists of middle and upper-class families, while Class B comprises middle and lower-class families. Even though Putu Wijaya himself sometimes dismissed this classification as being arbitrary and inconsistent, he explained that it has been a useful tool for television and sinetron workers to imagine their target audience. When an order for a sinetron series specifies that it is for Class B, Putu Wijaya will have in mind an audience of maids, housewives, drivers, food vendors, low-level civil servants, and other blue-collar workers. Class A, meanwhile, would include professionals, university students, high ranking bureaucrats, upper-scaled entrepreneurs, and journalists. Class B viewers are considered uninterested in long dialogues or discussions of difficult concepts. Instead, they are stimulated by action, more susceptible to manipulation of emotions, and keen for black-and-white morality. According to Putu Wijaya, sinetron for a Class B audience often relies on straightforwardness at the expense of narrative and reflective aspects. In practice, this means linear plotting (very few flash-backs, no multiple framing); stereotypical characterizations visually demonstrated through body parts, mimics, gestures and outfits; exaggeration of events or characters to demonstrate extreme emotional expressions, and conflicts on very concrete domestic issues between family members or among individuals within a given social setting. A Class A audience, on the other hand, is imagined as more educated and receptive to longer discussions on conceptual matters, more critical of logical representation of reality, able to understand complex plotting, tolerant of less clear-cut problem solutions, and appreciative of artistic creations. When he receives an order for a Class A audience, Putu Wijaya feels freer to express his aesthetic creativity.
Sinetron workers often assume that Class B audiences will not critically scrutinise a story?s logic. They are felt to regard sinetron as ?tontonan?, spectacles for entertainment, which need not necessarily represent ?reality?. In defence of his ?unrealistic? sinetron, Punjabi claims, ?I am not a merchandiser of dreams, instead, of wishes. Everyone longs for a comfortable life.? Convinced that the poor must be tired of poverty, he chooses to display beautiful stars, nice houses, luxurious cars, and glamorous lifestyles (Suara Pembaruan 09/05/2002). He claims that his sinetron are popular because viewers are able to identify themselves with characters and situations in the sinetron. Viewers of Punjabi?s sinetron must identify with a ?reality? different from the social reality in which they live. Sinetron are perceived as a medium to display modernity and for viewers to engage themselves in substitutional activities to give their lives a middle-class ?touch?. But why are they content for their consumption to stop at the symbolic stage?
Sinetron Consumption and Life styling
Sinetron content is relatively immune to political and social changes in Indonesia. Indeed, sinetron have served as a medium for Indonesia?s ?new middle class? to symbolically establish and maintain self-identity and group membership. Solvey Gerke calls this symbolic consumption ?life styling?, where membership of the middle class is not necessarily determined by income, but through the display of certain commodities imagined as signifying modernity and urban middle-class lifestyle. Gossip about the most recent twist-and-turns of plots in sinetron as well as the affairs of the actresses and actors which can be followed through ET-like television programs and inexpensive tabloids like Nova, Cek & Ricek, X-pose and Sinetron enable the members of even cukupan families (those who have enough, but are not rich) to participate in such cultural practices.
Putu Wijaya explains that most sinetron workers, himself included, tend to avoid discussing politics in their cultural products. In the euphoria of freedom for political discourse in mass media, sinetron has isolated itself from incorporating social and political reality into their themes. Keywords prevalently used in contemporary Indonesian politics such as democracy, civil society, general election, individual rights and political reform are almost totally absent in current Indonesian TV drama. Censorship by the New Order cultural regime has been replaced by the media regime of advertisement and ratings.
Various feminists have criticised sinetron for its stereotypical portrayal of women as passive, inexpressive and dependent mothers. A closer textual investigation of sinetron, however, reveals a different aspect of the role and position of women. Most sinetron have a female protagonist from a small town thrown into a big city having to deal with the complexity and conundrum of modern life. The female protagonist is usually contrasted with a female antagonist, commonly manifested in the relationship between daughter-in-law versus mother-in-law, country girl versus modern city girl, orphaned girl versus dominating aunt, and other similar familial relations. The aim is to highlight extreme binary contrasts between country, poor, uncultured, simple, domestic, and traditional versus city, rich, cultured, sophisticated, career-oriented, and modern. The protagonist becomes a role model idealized as the bearer of moral values of simplicity, fidelity, honesty, dignity, loyalty and piety amidst the corrupt consequences of modernity. She has to endure a series of struggles and hardships and resist temptations to compromise her virtuous principles, often through humiliating and violent tear-jerking mistreatment, to emerge victorious.
It is this moral victory that appeals to sinetron viewers. For Mrs. Sum and her friends in Blora, the pleasure of watching sinetron comes from the relief and satisfaction in seeing their protagonist emerge from her sufferings and struggles, which remind them of their own struggles as women. They are also relieved that moral values win over material goods and luxurious lifestyles that they can never achieve.
The female characters who represent such moral virtues often have non-Eurasian physical features. The central female characters in both Tersanjung and Camelia have dark complexions, long straight black hair, exotic subdued faces, soft voices and enigmatic and inscrutable characters. They represent a statement of endurance against modernity manifested in bodily glamorous beauty, materialism and consumption.
In a time of crisis, sinetron maintain continuity. For middle-upper class families, similar to shopping, dining in prestigious restaurants, and wearing clothes and accessories with famous brands, watching sinetron maintain their membership of a now much smaller social group, without the expense. For lower class families, watching sinetron provides for symbolic consumption and strengthens the moral values they adhere to. For the diaspora in Sydney, sinetron provides a link to the homeland.
Amrih Widodo (amrih.widodo@anu.edu.au) is a lecturer in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
'In Indonesia, pornography is also blamed for everything from teenage promiscuity, to rape and AIDS (and is also linked in the public mind with drugs)'
Justine Fitzgerald
One of the most recent adult products on offer in Indonesia is a VCD called Kasting Sabun Mandi (Shower Soap Casting). The 9 young models, cameramen and production house involved became the focus of public and police attention this year because it was claimed that the film was 'pornographic'. Although the women interviewed by police claimed they thought they were doing casting shots for a soap product commercial, the controversy has naturally helped to sell thousands of copies of the film.
Pornography, whether you see it as exploitation or as sexual expression, is an issue that will never go away. Like abortion and drug use, there will always be some members of society who want it to exist. Many countries recognise this reality and introduce very specific legislation to control it, with a range of censorship classifications for different media, and then enforce these laws and classifications. They also have enforcement of copyright laws and tighter control on pirated goods being smuggled into the country. Indonesia has none of this: no specific legislation, inconsistent censorship, and negligible law enforcement. Pornography is dealt with under articles 281, 282, 532, and 533 of the Indonesian Criminal Law Code (KUHP), but because it is only defined as being anything that offends public morals, a perhaps deliberately open definition, anything that is vaguely sexual is in danger of being labeled as 'porno'. No wonder then that there is panic about this deluge of pornography that is desecrating Indonesian culture and family values.
The Kasting Sabun Mandi scandal is only the last of many incidents involving 'pornography' in Indonesia, but the response to it and the issues it raises generally follow the same pattern. After whatever it is that offends public morals causes public outcry, usually from Islamic groups like KAMMI, Marka, KNPI and the infamous FPI, who are all members of KMAP (Anti-Pornography Community Consortium), or from women's groups, the police will investigate, generally focusing on any celebrities or 'artists' involved rather than those distributing and making real money from the product. There will be calls for specific laws to be introduced, for those laws to be enforced, a number of scapegoats will receive minimal penalties, KKN (corruption, collusion and nepotism) ensuring that no-one important or rich is affected, and the issue will be swept aside by the next new scandal.
This is not to deny that there are groups in Indonesian society who are trying to act on their concerns about the impact of pornography, such as the exploitation of women and the easy access that minors have to hardcore pornography in Indonesia through unregulated pirate materials on the street and internet services provided without any filters. However, instead of, for instance, assisting with establishing definitions for the drafting of specific legislation, their reactions tend to be blanket and ultimately unconstructive, such as burning magazines, or MUI's (the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars) recent idea of initiating a class action against the mass media for having pornographic content.
In Indonesia, pornography is also blamed for everything from teenage promiscuity, to rape and AIDS (and is also linked in the public mind with drugs), when there has still been no real research on connections between pornography and criminal or 'undesirable' behaviour. This attitude also denies the increase in the level of discourse about the sexual in general, not just sensationalistic reporting of rape cases and celebrity sex scandals, but also in the form of advice and medical columns, radio call-in shows, and self-help books.
Under the Soeharto regime, it was harder to see pornography if you weren't looking for it, but with greater press freedom and a less controlled society, it's now everywhere. Soft porn photos can be found in calendars, magazines and tabloids, and hardcore photography is increasingly available on the street. And of course you can see whatever you want on the internet, which if you live in a reasonably large Indonesian town, is only as far away as the local warnet (internet cafe). As early as 1995, the Indonesian government was trying to block online porn, but as there is no specific legislation to regulate or filter internet access, or enforcement, naturally these attempts have been futile. Apart from overseas sites, there is also an astounding range of Indonesian material available. Most of these sites are photographic, but often also have email services, a chat room, articles, and links to yet more sites, including those with Indonesian language stories and translations from English or European stories.
One of these sites is Cerita-Cerita Seru (CCS - 'Way-Out Stories'), which has achieved the status of being the first and still most popular of its kind, to the point where the site is now copyrighted, more a sign of its prestige than a serious attempt at protection since many other Indonesian adult sites often plagiarise from CCS. In comparison to the print media, stories on sites like CCS are much freer in the range of scenarios, locales and experiences described. (Another Indonesian adult site, 17tahun.net, has same sex stories for both genders.) Many stories are told in the first person, and they are often presented as recollections of 'real' events. For instance, one story was apparently written by an Indonesian man living in Melbourne who sleeps with 'easy' Australian girls!
And whilst women are overwhelmingly still the objects rather than consumers of pornography, it seems that there are Indonesian women creating and consuming it on the net in the form of emails, eGroups, chat room sex, seeking photos and posting photos of themselves, and as writers. Sites such as 'Romance for Indonesian Ladies' include chat rooms, surveys, articles on sex such as descriptions (with photos) of sexual positions, and information about services like gigolos in the Jakarta area.
For those without access to the internet, there are also sex stories circulated in magazines, tabloids, and as stencil books, all of which are relatively cheap and accessible. The print media stories are noticeably tamer than those on the internet, or Western equivalents, in terms of experimentation and more 'deviant' sexual practices.
One infamous example is Enny Arrow, who is the supposed author (because no-one seems to know if 'he' really exists) of stenciled books of Indonesian language pornographic stories, most of which appear to have been produced in the 70s - 80s. These books are now considered classics. In the 80's they used to cost 3,000-5,000 rp., but now the price is around 15,000rp which in Indonesia is not a small amount for such a low-quality publication. This is crass and repetitive writing that perpetuates stereotypes concerning class, ethnicity and gender, including the idea that 'no' means 'yes'. Many of Enny's stories describe a young woman who is single, or a divorcee/ widow (janda), who comes to the city from the village to find work. She often becomes a housemaid, or a factory worker who, after she is coerced into having sex, which she invariably ends up enjoying (how could she not when all the men are 'as big as horses'?!), very frequently becomes a prostitute. Obtaining Enny's work used to be like buying illicit drugs: you had to have the right connections because dealers from the big cities sold it through underground networks. Now, however, you can get Enny or his equivalent from newsagent kiosks on the side of the road, and many of the consumers of this kind of material are high school students.
In terms of film, despite legislation, Indonesian and foreign sex movies have been shown in cheap cinemas for years. There have been cases of prosecution against cinema owners, sometimes merely because of the promotional posters they used, but yet again this is arbitrary and generally not aimed at the actual producers, so more films are made, or the old ones are simply re-released under new titles.
However, the increasing use of new technologies makes taking the risk of being caught at a disreputable movie cinema unnecessary, and VCD/DVD is definitely the most prevalent and easily accessible form of pornography in Indonesia today. It is apparently common now to find someone with a VCD machine and pornographic disks who charges a minimal price for others to watch, in even the smallest villages on the main islands of Indonesia. And anyone with a computer can go to the corner VCD/DVD rental shop to get a 'bf' (blue filem) to watch in the comfort of their own room. Huge amounts of pirated material are smuggled into Indonesia from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Hong Kong (mostly Western or Hong Kong products). Apart from Kasting Sabun Mandi there are a few other infamous local products, notably Anak Ingusan and Bandung Lautan Asmara or Itenas.
Indonesia does have a problem with pornography because it has no control over it, and as long as KKN runs the country, Enny and Kasting will circulate freely. Although there has been a huge increase in the level of Islamic rhetoric and 'morality' in the public sphere since the end of the Suharto regime, there are also more people now who are brave enough to speak out for freedom of the press, the right to individual privacy, and a woman's right to display her sexuality and be paid for it. It is often these same voices that call for distinctions to be drawn so that there can be an acknowledgement of the erotic, and a limit on the pornographic. If they can engage in a real dialogue with Islamic and women's groups, and the government, then Indonesia might be able to take steps towards controlling this problem in a more pragmatic way.
Justine FitzGerald (justinef@hotmail.com) is currently the coordinator of the Indonesian section of the UNMISET (UN Mission in Support of East Timor) Interpreting, Translating & Training Unit.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
Indonesia's free press needs time to mature
Lukas Luwarso
Indonesian press freedom dates back only three years, but the press remains a continual target of criticism and abuse, usually from government officials or politicians. The most recent case, for example, involved in a Consultative Meeting of the DPR Commission 1 with the press community in March 2002.
In this meeting, a number of members of parliament (MPs) from various fractions opined that the press is erratic, invades privacy, spreads pornography and fans conflict. A DPR member even said with some enthusiasm, 'Before Indonesian society was oppressed by the military, now they are oppressed by the press.' The State Minister for Information and Communication, Syamsul Muarif, has categorised these criticisms into five diseases of the press, namely: pornography, character assassination, false and provocative news, misleading advertisements, and unprofessional journalists (called bodrex).
In itself, this criticism is above board and healthy for the development of the press. However, recent developments indicate that the government and some politicians are responding to dissatisfaction with the press through systematic efforts to again muzzle the press.
These signals include the discussion of draft broadcast laws, the suggested revision to Law No.40/1999 concerning the Press and the strength of the anti-pornography campaign targeted at the press. Various suggested draft legislation could also eat away at press freedom. For instance, the proposed anti-pornography, state secret and anti-terrorist legislation. These various signals strengthen the hunch that a regime of closedness is putting itself in order to again reign over Indonesia. This negative campaign targeting the press's work ethic is an entry point for those who wish to silence freedom.
Politicians' Fear
The number of penal threats in the draft broadcast laws reflects politicians' fear of press freedom. Nineteen of the 63 clauses of the DPR's draft broadcast law are penal threats. These clauses are not relevant in a broadcast law, as they are contained in the Criminal Code and other related legislation. The government's version of the draft broadcast law, like that of the DPR, demonstrates a desire to control the public's right of expression, communication, and the right to obtain information.
The government and some MPs thought of revising Law no 40/1999 concerning the press, which they have always considered to be too liberal. Their intended revisions, amongst others, were to insert a number of clauses from the Criminal Code, to give the Press Law more teeth. Once again, politicians showed no faith in Indonesia's legal system, and felt the need to duplicate clauses from the Criminal Code in other legislation.
This trend is also evident in the suggestion to draft anti-pornography legislation. Pornography is already regulated by Clause 282 of the Criminal Code. The press is the real target of this anti-pornography campaign. This is clear because little fuss has been made about the most blatant and spectacular pornographic product: VCDs, which can be obtained easily by the side of the road.
Members of parliament have complained that every day no less than 2000 journalists (many of them bodrex) make their fortune by asking the members for money. This problem is so 'complicated' for the MPs, and in the end they blame freedom of the press, or chide the Press Council or journalists' organisations for not working to administer journalists. But the problem has an easy solution. Journalists who are authorised to cover news at parliament just need to be given a clear identity card. After all, why do bodrex flock to parliament? Because MPs charitably give journalists envelopes of money, and in so doing attract the interest of those claiming to be journalists. As such, haven't MPs actually played their part in the spread of bodrex?
Community Affairs
Politicians' support for freedom of the press is questionable. In October 1999, then president Abdurrahman Wahid stressed that information (the press) was a community affair, and no longer a government affair. However, Indonesia's politicians clearly have no faith in the positive potential of press freedom. They only see the negative aspects. A desire to control, govern, threaten and take action still dominates. Politicians appear to be insincere in their support for a free press, and they are not patient enough to allow self-regulation-through market forces and press community initiatives-to operate.
The 'chaos' produced by press freedom is now being put in order. The number of print media in Indonesia, which did explode to 1881, has now returned to 556, according to Press Council data. The number of journalists' organisations had swelled to more than 40, but these have started to fold and less than five are now truly operative. During the last three years, a media watch institution has been established to monitor the press. Legal action has also been taken against 18 print media judged to have published 'pornographic' material, after complaints from the community. Almost two years after its establishment, the independent Press Council has received 120 complaints and endeavoured to mediate between the community and the press. Journalists' organisations and non-government organisations have actively organised discussions, training, workshops and education to improve the ethics and professionalism of journalists. This has included specific training on investigative reporting, peace journalism, and the connection between the media and human rights, autonomy and transparency.
The various efforts of the press community and society to improve the quality of the Indonesian press have by no means immediately resulted in ideal conditions or the sort of press that we hope for. Moreover, what sort of press do Indonesians hope for? Like society, the press is extremely diverse. There will always be tabloids oriented to gossip, sensationalism, criminality and even indecency. However, there will also assuredly be many serious (mainstream) media that apply professional journalistic standards and become a reference for the public in forming opinions.
Criticism of the press in Indonesia frequently relies on a fleeting impression or a generalisation, and accusations are not accompanied by data: which Indonesian press, when was it erratic? Various accusations are also often off the mark; for example, someone might take an entertainment tabloid or gossip rag seriously. In any case, the solution to disappointment with the press is very simple. You just need to stop buying or subscribing, or turn off the radio or TV if you don't like the program. If you have been wronged by press coverage, use your right of reply, complain to the Press Council. If it is particularly serious, refer the matter to the courts.
Our hopes for the role of the press depend heavily on our taste and choices in consuming the press. So many choices, such variety - that is the beauty, and the risk, of democracy and freedom. Unfortunately, politicians tend to see only risk rather and not the opportunity of press freedom. They claim moral authority and speak on behalf of the public interest so that they can impose their own value systems. Through formal regulations, such as legislation, they institutionalise their attitudes.
If Indonesia's politicians could be patient with a power (the New Order) that was not under control and was erratic for 30 years, why can't they be patient with the press, which has been not under control for only three years? I asked a similar question three years at a seminar in Jakarta to respond to various abuse directed at the press, particularly by a number of government officials and DPR members who wanted the immediate reintroduction of the licensing (SIUPP) system, and to bring the press under control again, after only a few months of freedom. They have continued to try to bring the press under control to the present day.
Just how serious are the consequences of the poor capacity of the press, that politicians have been so inconvenienced and furious. Just how bad have the excesses produced by the press in Indonesia been, that there is such a large desire to shackle freedom of the press? Politicians need to remember: the press is a private enterprise, which doesn't use the people's taxes, does not drain on the budget, nor are press workers paid by the state (in contrast to members of parliament and government officials). The press is chosen by and responsible to its readership, at any moment its consumers can choose it or toss it away. And of course, the press has no legal immunity. From time to time it can be taken to court to account for its products.
The capacity of parts of the press in Indonesia is indeed still poor. Why not improve this capacity, rather than restricting the atmosphere of freedom. Give freedom of the press a chance to repair itself.
Lukas Luwarso (seapajak@cbn.net.id) is the Executive Director of the Indonesian Press Council and the head of the Jakarta Branch of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance.
Inside Indonesia 72: Oct - Dec 2002
Indonesia today is a dangerous place primarily for Indonesians, not foreigners
John Roosa
The October 12 bombing in Bali, like most incidents of violence, was very brief, a matter of only seconds, yet its effects will be with us for a long time. The effects extend beyond the tragic loss of loved ones and the painful scars of the survivors. The bombing has badly damaged the cross-cultural, cross-national communication that this magazine has been trying to promote for the last twenty years. Many Australians (and other foreigners) studying, working, or vacationing in Indonesia have returned home. Indonesians living in Australia have been harassed.
Meanwhile, the Indonesian and Australian governments are eroding civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. Activists in both countries struggling non-violently for peace and justice are worried that they too will become targets of the anti-terrorism campaign. Added to these worries is the prospect of increased instability in Indonesia as the already faltering economy declines further.
As the repercussions of the bombing keep spreading, we should remember that it was the work of a small clique of conspirators. Although the perpetrators targeted foreigners, they were obviously indifferent to the lives of Indonesians and to the welfare of the nation. The bombing should not affect our appreciation of the need to maintain strong society-society relations between Indonesia and Australia.
Indonesia today is a dangerous place primarily for Indonesians, not foreigners. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by war. Some 600 Acehnese civilians have been killed in 2002. The task of making Indonesia a safer place is much larger than bringing to justice the clandestine group responsible for the Bali bombing. Foreigners need to continue to help Indonesian civil society find ways to end the violence and to ensure their own governments do not follow policies that encourage it.
The deadline for submission of articles to this issue was only three days after the Bali bombing. We decided to proceed with this present issue about the military and militarism. Our next issue (no. 74) will be devoted to reflections on the bombing and its consequences.
The bombing has actually confirmed the importance of the theme of this issue. Given the military's notorious corruption, it has been widely assumed that the bombers obtained their explosives from the military. This is a reasonable assumption: the first suspect arrested by the police (Amrozi) was found to have some 4,000 military-issue bullets. Given that elements in the military have been supporting extremist militias (such as Laskar Jihad), it has also been assumed that the bombers have had some backing from within the military.
The articles in this issue reveal that the Indonesian military, assigning as many troops to internal policing as external defence, has become a security threat for the society. Since about 70% of the military's funding comes from off-budget sources, the loyalty of the troops is divided between the state and the private businesses (sometimes illegal businesses) that pay their salaries. The military is in desperate need of reform. But the task of reforming it has become immeasurably more difficult as civil society itself has become militarized. This issue carries several excellent articles on the civilian militias that have emerged in recent years.
We at Inside Indonesia are proud of the high quality of articles we have been able to publish. Our magazine was a finalist in the United Nations Association of Australia media awards for an article titled 'Timor's Women' by Dawn Delaney in the East Timor edition (no.71). Congratulations to Dawn.
Because of a recent budgetary crisis, we have had to temporarily suspend publication of the supplement 'Learning about Indonesia.' We regret the demise and hope to hear from friends with ideas on how to restart it.
John Roosa jproosa@indo.net.id
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Understanding the tragedy beyond al-Qaeda and Bush's 'war on terror'
Thomas Reuter
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, 12 October 2002 a devastating attack was launched at the beachside town of Kuta on the island of Bali. Two bombs exploded in quick succession in Paddy's Irish Pub and outside the Sari Club. The blast and subsequent fires left more than 190 people dead and several hundred injured, most of them young holiday-makers from Australia and other Western countries.
Mainstream media reports quickly pointed the finger of blame at the international terrorist network al-Qaeda and its local operatives. Little attention was given to the national let alone local socio-political context in which this attack took place. Attacks of a similar kind, if not scope, have occurred with increasing regularity since the collapse of Suharto's military dictatorship in 1998. As a consequence, the tragedy of October 12 was co-opted prematurely and uncritically into the global political agenda and rhetorical paradigm of the United States government's 'War on Terror'.
National context
The task of addressing the issue of terrorism, or of assessing whether or not the Indonesian and Western governments are addressing it appropriately on our behalf, is made difficult by the secret nature of terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. At the time of writing (late October), no verifiable evidence of al-Qaeda involvement in the Bali attack has been made available to the public.
Even when it comes to the general question of al-Qaeda's presence in Southeast Asia, the evidence is scanty and often impossible to verify. On 15 September 2002, for example, Time Magazine claimed to have seen 'secret CIA documents' stating that the Kuwaiti militant and alleged al-Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, recently arrested in Indonesia and delivered to the US military, had confessed to the CIA, perhaps under torture, how he had been ordered to coordinate a series of attacks on US and other foreign interests in Southeast Asia. Many Indonesians do not accept the claims based on such intelligence leaks, not surprisingly given that the US government by its own admission considers it legitimate to spread misinformation for strategic purposes.
Al-Qaeda should not be considered as a singular organisation with an international agenda and a central authority. It is able to maintain a power base in numerous parts of the world because it is a network of rather loosely affiliated national or local extremist groups. What needs to be explored are the reasons for its successful expansion into countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where the vast majority of Muslims have been consistently classified as moderates by generations of Western scholars.
While a unitary organisation's expansion conceivably can be halted by pursuing a smallish group of key culprits through intelligence or military operations, a bottom-up process can be expected to self-perpetuate unless underlying political and socio-economic causes are removed. The implications for foreign policy are serious and far-reaching.
This is not to deny that an internationalisation of terrorism has been taking place. Radical Islamic groups in Indonesia have had international links for at least two decades. The now-infamous leader of Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI, Council of Indonesian Mujahideen), Ba'asyir and many of his closest associates had established such links on their own initiative after having participated in the armed struggle against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan during the 1980s, a struggle for which the US was the major backer. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was also a watershed in that it provided the model case for establishing an Islamic state. Nevertheless, the main focus of political consciousness among such groups has been the Indonesian state itself.
It may be safe to assume that a network of radical Islamic groups with international links is present in Indonesia today, and that elements in some of these groups at least are willing to use terrorism as a political tool - with or without help from their affiliates and donors abroad. The political ambitions of these radicals most likely are still focused firmly on national objectives, even though their discourse may reflect an international rhetoric of fighting for the glory of Islam and against the great Satan America.
The problem in allocating blame for the Bali blast is that radical Islamic groups like Jemaah Islamiyah are not the only groups in Indonesia today who may be willing and capable of committing or supporting acts of terrorism. There are many causes and perpetrators of violence in contemporary Indonesia. Inter-religious conflicts, vigilante-style killings of petty criminals and other undesirables, institutionalised protection and extortion rackets, and the alarming spread of paramilitary groups are all part of this phenomenon. Different groups even within the government's own security forces have been fighting turf wars. This diffusion of violence makes it difficult to pinpoint a single person or group as the likely perpetrators in any particular case.
Balinese context
In Bali itself, there has been increasing tension between Hindu Balinese and Muslim labour migrants from neighbouring islands. Many fear this wave of spontaneous immigration could marginalise the Balinese as an ethnic and religious minority on their own island, as has been the fate of other peoples in the outer islands. More immediately, however, the problem is one of competition for jobs, and also social envy. Some of the migrants are not economic refugees at all, but wealthy Javanese investors who have established major businesses in Bali, ranging from hotels and restaurants to taxi companies.
As early as April 1999 there have been violent attacks on Javanese street sellers. Several Javanese informants residing in Bali told me only a few weeks before the attacks how they no longer dared to be seen outdoors after 10pm for fear of being abducted and murdered, following threats and a spate of mysterious disappearances in their circle of friends and acquaintances. In turn, my Balinese informants told me that the Java-based Laskar Jihad (LJ, 'Holy Warriors') had begun to build a presence especially in northern Bali, allegedly to 'protect our down-trodden Muslim brothers in Bali' (from an undated LJ propaganda pamphlet distributed in Central Java in late 2001). Days after the Bali blast, this militant group disbanded or went underground, depending on how one chooses to look at it. LJ, in any case, has rarely acted on its own. In Aceh, Ambon and West Papua, for example, the group appears to have enjoyed extremely cordial relations with the army, and there is wide speculation that LJ has been encouraged to cause trouble in order to maintain a sense of crisis throughout the country.
In recent years, the Balinese have also responded to a number of serious security issues in relation to organised crime. My informants claim that the illegal drug trade, prostitution as well as extortion rackets, particularly in Kuta and Sanur, are firmly in the hands of immigrants, who are in turn protected by elements within the official security forces. In Sanur, for example, traditional Balinese community organisations have been fighting a pitched battle against the prostitution industry and its patrons. Note in this context that the main reason why the destroyed Sari Club had a policy of barring entry to Indonesians was to keep out sex workers, who had already swamped and changed the character of most other major bars and nightclubs in the area.
A key indicator of the state of the tourism industry, Bali's hotel occupancy rate had dropped from over 70 % before the attack to just 5 % by 29 October. This shows that that the main losers in the attack on Bali, apart from the victims themselves and their families, are the island's residents, irrespective of whether or not they are ethnically Balinese. The Hindu Balinese majority seem to have realised this and, until now, have shown restraint by not lashing out at Muslim immigrants in their midst.
Already destabilised by the attack, President Megawati has been under enormous pressure from Washington to take stern measures against terrorists. How is she to do this without the military, or with it, given that it is widely suspected in Indonesia that the military could have been implicated in the attack? Are the Indonesian police and intelligence up to the task? Could wanton arrests trigger a Muslim backlash? We may have to be patient. Too much pressure now could help to derail Indonesia's emergent democracy. The US and Australia, considering their interests in Indonesia now, should be aware of this peril. We should move forward by supporting the reform of the Indonesian military and the engagement of the mass of Muslim Indonesians in the democratic process.
Thomas Reuter (thomasr@unimelb.edu.au) is a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council, located at the School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Families of the Disappeared are Still Searching for Answers
R. Waluya Jati
In 1997 political activists began noticing that some of their colleagues were mysteriously disappearing. The general suspicion was that the military had kidnapped them to terrorize the burgeoning movement against the Suharto regime. That suspicion was confirmed when some of the disappeared activists resurfaced and told stories of their abduction, detention, and torture. It soon became clear that the army's Special Forces (Kopassus) were responsible for this covert operation. After Suharto fell in May 1998, nine Kopassus officers, including Maj. Gen. Prabowo, were tried by a military court and dismissed from the army for their role in the disappearances.
The story does not end there. Among those activists abducted, fourteen never returned. The military has refused to reveal what happened them. The military court only charged the Kopassus officers for the cases of the nine activists who had survived and been released. The military court did not accuse the officers of being responsible for the 14 still missing activists, despite the fact that the survivors reported seeing some of them still alive in the secret jail. The officers were only charged with misinterpreting an order and sentenced to between 12 to 22 months in jail.
The families of these victims have organised themselves to demand accountability of the government. They began their struggle with great hopes. They hoped to find out whether their loved ones were still alive or not. Their terrible fear of approaching high officials in the military and government was overcome by their boundless hopes.
It has now been four years since they began their quest for the truth. They have been knocking on door after door in the office buildings of the labyrinthine Indonesian bureaucracy. Still, they have not gotten one inch closer to the truth. The whereabouts of their loved ones are still unknown. The perpetrators, though already identified and publicly known, remain silent and untouchable. This case, like nearly all cases of past human rights violations by the military, is being ignored and forgotten by government officials.
All of the photographs here are of relatives of those 14 disappeared persons. At the moment I am writing this (in October 2002), families from all over Indonesia are gathering in Jakarta for a congress of the Union of Families of Disappeared Persons (Ikatan Keluarga Orang Hilang). This organization includes many more families than those of the 14 disappeared persons of 1997-98. Despite the state's indifference, they are persistent and have not lost hope.
Photos
Toeti Kotto, the mother of Yani Avri, a missing activist, was given clothes by another relative of a disappeared person. She is wearing the clothes on the day of the Muslim holiday Idul Fitri. From morning, she has been waiting at the front gate of her house for a miracle: for God to return her son to her.
Nabila, 11 years old, is the daughter of Noval Alkatiri. She has written the initial 'N' on the palms of both her hands - the initial standing for Nabila and Noval. Her father had not been an activist. He was an agent sending workers to the Mideast. He disappeared in 1997 while in the company of an activist, Dedy Hamdun, who is also still missing.
Wiji Thukul, a well-known poet and activist, has been missing since April 1998. In the years prior he had become a target of military intelligence. Dyah Sujirah and Nganthi Wani, his wife and daughter, are at the launching of a book of his poems in 2000.
On 12 February 1998, Suyatno was kidnapped by military officers who wanted him to reveal the whereabouts of his brother Suyat, an activist. He was released a few hours later after having been badly beaten and tortured. Suyat was then abducted by Kopassus and is still missing. Suyatno is haunted by regret and the desire to change places with his brother, though he, of course, can not be blamed for his brother's fate.
Although feeling unwell, Ibu Palan Siahaan forced herself to join a demonstration in front of the Presidential Palace during the International Week of Forced Disappearances in May 2002. Her son, Ucok Manandar Siahaan, disappeared in May 1998. The family had received anonymous telephone calls demanding that their son stop his campus activism.
R. Waluya Jati (jatijati@hotmail.com) is a photographer with Offstream Allied Media in Jakarta. He is one of the disappeared of 1997-98 who survived. His photographs of the families of the disappeared have been published in the book, Mereka Yang Dipisahkan (Jakarta, 2001).
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
A General of the Sukarno years criticises today's military
Muhammad Fauzi
Hario Kecik is an old soldier who refuses to fade away. At 81 years of age, he remains a fireball of creative energy. He has just published a novel and is just about to publish the third volume of his autobiography. For hobbies, he paints, sings (in six languages, including Chinese), and writes poetry. He is a natural public speaker who, with a vast repertoire of jokes and stories, can keep an audience entertained for hours. When telling stories, he frequently breaks into Javanese and raises the tone of his voice in such a way that one can not help but laugh at his expressiveness. He is like a one-man culture industry where rough East Javanese humour mixes with refined cosmopolitan learning. It is difficult to believe, given the cultural abilities of today's military officers (just listen to Gen. Wiranto's CD of his karaoke favorites!), that Hario Kecik was once a Brigadier General in the Army.
As we sit in his home on the outskirts of Jakarta, he describes the formative event of his youth: the Surabaya uprising of November 1945. It was a popular revolt against the British troops that had just arrived to secure the surrender of the Japanese. The British troops were seen, rightly as it turned out, to be the advance guard of a Dutch attempt to recolonise Indonesia. A guest in Hario's house is left in no doubt of the importance of the event for him: a massive canvas about it painted by Hario himself hangs in the front room.
One legacy of those early street fighting years is his name. His full Javanese name, Soehario Padmodiwirio, was hardly suitable as a nom de guerre. It betrayed his aristocratic ancestry. All these years, he has kept the diminutive name that his friends in the struggle gave him: Kecik, meaning small in the East Javanese dialect. Despite his short stature, even by Indonesian standards, he excelled in warfare because he was gutsy, clever, and agile.
Beginning and end of an era
For Hario, the formation of the Indonesian army emerged out of the spontaneous effort of the youth (pemuda) to seize the weapons of the Japanese in 1945 and resist the incoming European troops. He did not enter the army by signing up at a recruiting office: he and four friends created their own little unit. Many such units sprouted up at that time. Each group chose its own leader from among its own ranks. As these units merged and the leaders were accorded ranks, Hario was accorded the rank of Major. In Hario's experience, the national army, in its early years, was created by civilians. Its leaders emerged organically from below.
Following the departure of the Dutch troops, Hario stayed within the army and rose up through the ranks. He became the commander of the military region of East Kalimantan in 1959 and a Brigadier General in 1962. Despite the fact that he had attended two officer training courses in the United States at Fort Benning in 1958, he had a reputation for being left-wing. His experience with the 1945 revolution and with the United States attempts to sabotage Sukarno in the late 1950s had made him decidedly anti-imperialist.
At the time of Suharto's takeover of power in late 1965, Hario was in the Soviet Union. He had been sent to study at the War College there in early 1965 by the army commander Gen. Yani. Given both his left-wing reputation and his stay in the Soviet Union, he knew he would be arrested or worse if he returned to Indonesia. In exile in Moscow, he took advantage of the time by studying. He was appointed senior associate at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Eventually, he decided to return to Indonesia in 1977 and face whatever awaited him there. Immediately after landing at the airport in Jakarta, he was hauled off to prison by army soldiers. He spent the next four years in a military detention jail in central Jakarta. No charges. No trial. No idea when he would be released. It was four years of waiting punctuated by the occasional interrogation in which he was respectfully referred to as 'Professor Hario'.
Punish the generals
After years of exile and imprisonment, Hario looks upon the army that developed under Suharto as a kind of freakish mutant. He hardly recognizes it as the army that emerged out of a social revolution. The army today still sticks to the rhetoric of that time "the people and the military are one" but has completely changed the meaning. Now the army employs the old populist rhetoric to justify its civilian militias that commit crimes for which the army wants plausible deniability.
Hario notes that the officer corps graduating from the military academy since the late 1960s have not been able to understand the army's history. What they learn is how to please their superiors, make a lot of money from corruption, and advance quickly up the ranks. 'It's too easy for them to gain promotions, especially when there isn't even a war going on.' Any military, Hario believes, faces problems in peace time. Without a war or the potential for war, 'an army loses its identity.' The Indonesian army has not faced any external threat since 1965 yet it has arrogated enormous powers to itself inside the country. It has focused on policing and waging war on other Indonesians.
The usual response of TNI officers to the crimes of soldiers is to say that the soldiers were acting on their own as individuals; they were oknum. According to Hario, 'If there is a brawl, the ones that are dismissed from the military are the lower ranking ones. Just recently, the Chief of Staff of the Army himself tore off their ensignia and discharged some privates because of a discipline problem. That kind of thing is really odd. If I was the Chief of Staff, I would first punish some generals. I would throw out the generals who are causing the problems.'
Corruption
Hario sees the problem of corruption as an institutional one for which the high officers are primarily responsible. He mentions a story that a private told him last year. 'After returning home at night, he goes out again and works as a security guard at a warehouse. He only gets 15,000 rupiah a night. He does the work but his commander, a colonel, demands money from the industrialist. The colonel doesn't do any work but he gets much more money than the private does.' This kind of situation is ruinous for the morale of an army.
As Hario remembers, the military's corruption was not so institutionalised and routine before 1965. When he was the commander of East Kalimantan, there were many opportunities to enrich himself had he so desired. He could have taken money from the timber barons and oil companies and used his troops to serve their interests - the pattern of the army commanders today.
Since East Kalimantan was largely undeveloped and the civil government was so meager, Hario thought his troops had to be involved in economic development. But his model of development was different than that of the big private companies. As a populist, Hario had his troops help build schools and run cooperative enterprises. While commander, he wrote a book about the army's economic role in the region titled People, Land, and the Military.
The general who replaced Hario as commander of East Kalimantan in February 1965, Sumitro, later became one of Suharto's closest allies. It is interesting that Sumitro's biography begins with a description of the ceremony for the transfer of the command. In the book, Sumitro presented Hario as a leftist who thought his transfer was a sign that the army high command did not understand 'the revolution' he was leading in East Kalimantan. Hario laughs while dismissing the description as entirely fanciful.
At the end of our discussion, Hario promises that the forthcoming installment of his memoir is focused on his reflections and analyses of the nation's military. He briefly outlines his analysis of the political differences in the 1945-65 period between officers deriving from the Dutch military, the Japanese military, and the people's militias (laskar). He laughs, 'but you'll have to read the book for the complete analysis.'
Muhammad Fauzi (mfauzi@hotmail.com) is a historian and librarian with Jaringan Kerja Budaya in Jakarta. Hario Kecik's memoirs have been published in two volumes: Autobiografi Seorang Mahasiswa Prajurit (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1995 and 2001). See www.obor.or.id.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Will a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ever be formed?
Agung Putri
Since the fall of President Suharto in May 1998, many Indonesians have been searching for ways to address the crimes of his 32-year dictatorship. One of Suharto's legacies to the country is a long trail of mysterious atrocities and unmarked mass graves. The questions that posed themselves after his fall from power were: How can we discover the truth behind the various atrocities? How can we determine who was responsible? If we are able to determine who was responsible, what should we do then?
The answers to these questions have not been obvious. Even though there has been a widespread desire to uncover the truth and hold the officials of the Suharto regime accountable, there has been no agreement on how that should be achieved. Even now, over four years after his fall, Suharto himself has not been touched, even for cases of corruption. All of the so-called 'reform' governments (under Presidents Habibie, Wahid, and Megawati) have failed to create any viable mechanism for dealing with past crimes.
Of course, one reason for this failure is the resistance from the Suharto family, its cronies, and the military. Additionally, the fact that many of the 'reform' politicians are holdovers from the Suharto era has meant that they often do not even perceive past atrocities as state crimes. Some politicians still uphold the line that the state can not commit crimes because it is the state. But those reasons by themselves are not sufficient to explain why so little has been accomplished since Suharto's demise. The factor that I would like to highlight here is the confusion concerning the appropriate mechanisms among the very people pushing for accountability.
Fact-finding committees
The first response of the post-Suharto governments to handle past crimes has been the fact-finding committee. So far there have been five such official committees that have investigated the following incidents: the violence in Aceh during the period when the province was called a Military Operation Area (1989-1998); the Jakarta riots of 13-15 May 1998; the massacre in Tanjung Priok in 1984, the violence in East Timor during the referendum process in 1999, and the killing of students during demonstrations in Jakarta at Trisakti University and the Semanggi cloverleaf in 1998-1999. The government established the first two commissions while the latter three were formed by the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM).
The committees performed well in bringing information about these cases to the public eye. Victims and witnesses were given the chance to provide recorded testimony. Military officers came before the committees and were asked to account for the military's actions. The reports of the committees have provided careful and sometimes exhaustive descriptions on what happened and how many people were killed or injured. But none of the committees have been able to conclude why the violence occurred. Every committee had to end its report with a recommendation for further investigation.
The preoccupation of the fact-finding committees was to identify particular military officers as the ones responsible for particular acts of violence. For instance, the report on the Jakarta riots suspected that Maj. Gen. Prabowo and Maj. Gen. Sjafrie Samsuddin had some sort of hand in provoking or organising the riots. It suggested that an investigation be held into a secret meeting they held on 14 May 1998 at an army headquarters. Similarly, the committee on the crimes in East Timor listed the names of 29 officers who were thought to be responsible for particular massacres.
This identification of individual officers, while helpful in framing court cases against them, does not lead to an understanding of the systemic nature of the crimes committed by the Suharto regime and the military. Indeed, it can reinforce the idea that there are a few bad apples within the military that need to be removed.
The problem with the military is not that there are a few bad officers within it. The main problem is that it is an unaccountable institution that has far too much power. It has routinely committed atrocities both during and after the Suharto regime. Arriving at the truth in the context of the military's power requires challenging the institutional power of the military.
The TRC
Members of Komnas HAM first proposed the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998. They approached President Habibie and the military soon after Suharto resigned. Habibie welcomed the proposal but declined to follow up on it. The military rejected it outright. The upper chamber of parliament (MPR) was more supportive. The MPR passed a law called Unity and Reconciliation number V/2000 at its session in 1999 that called for the creation of a TRC. It was left up to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights to draw up the guidelines and bring it into existence.
After the law was passed, there was a great deal of discussion about the TRC inside and outside of the government. There were seminars, conferences, and meetings. The non-governmental organisation that I work for, Elsam, was asked by the government to write a draft regulation that would determine the functioning of the TRC.
In my opinion, the advantage of a TRC is that it can address many cases of human rights that are already swamping Komnas HAM and have no hope of being handled by the country's ridiculously inadequate and corrupt legal system. Moreover, it can address cases that are far too complex and massive for legal remedies, such the killings of 1965-66. Perhaps the most important virtue of the TRC is that it can result in a comprehensive narrative about the systematic character of the Suharto's regime's crimes.
The TRC was a live issue for about a year. Despite the initial flurry of activity, there has been little progress in implementing the TRC. The law is on the books (and the MPR reaffirmed the law at its 2002 session) but the commission does not yet exist. By now it appears as if it will never be formed. Why has the TRC lacked a constituency that can forcefully push for its implementation? I think the reasons are manifold.
Some activists remain wary of the TRC because they think it lacks teeth, that it will not punish the military officers responsible for atrocities. Activists tend to prefer court trials. The Indonesian government's ad hoc court for the crimes against humanity in East Timor is closer to the method they would like to see used for all cases of state crimes. Moreover, they think 'reconciliation' is a pointless concept when dealing with crimes by state officials.
Many government officials and members of parliament support a vague notion of a TRC but do not fully understand it enough to push strongly for it. Some think it should just be a kind of quick 'feel good' exercise so that the past can be laid to rest. They are wary that it might actually not turn out to be that. Some think the TRC should include the Sukarno years under its purview. They do not view the Suharto regime as having a specifically criminal character of its own.
Victims organisations
Added to these problems is the lack of unity among the victims, especially in their support for a TRC. The victims have tended to organise according to the specific incident. Victims of the Tanjung Priok massacre, for instance, have an organisation of their own and have tried to find a resolution to their own particular case. Some of them have become quiet after reconciling personally with the officers suspected of ordering the massacre.
There have been numerous attempts to create a unified organisation for victims of the Suharto regime. A congress was held in Aceh in 2001 which led to the establishment of a a pan-Aceh Victims Solidarity Group. Another congress was held in Jakarta in early 2002 to consolidate all the groups of ex-political prisoners (Temu Raya Korban). A similar gathering was held in Papua in 2000. To some extent, these forums have raised the spirit of the victims and brought their plight to the attention of the public.
One problem such congresses have faced is their redirection for ulterior political ends. In Aceh and Papua, the victims' congresses were used to legitimate the demand for a referendum on independence. Meanwhile the victims' congress in Jakarta included in its resolutions the need to uphold Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution (the things the Suharto regime made sacred). The congresses have not actually been effective in insisting on a method by which the government should hold the former regime accountable for its crimes.
I think the idea of the TRC, so often misunderstood and under-appreciated, still holds great promise and should be pursued. The creation of the TRC will require building a consensus first about the need for a comprehensive approach to understanding the systemic nature of the Suharto regime's crimes.
Agung Putri (putri@elsam.or.id) is a staff member of Elsam, the Institute of Policy Research and Advocacy. She was a fellow at the Transitional Justice Program at the University of Capetown, South Africa, in 2002.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
The Military Fleeces and Polices Port Workers
Razif
In the northern-most reaches of Jakarta, on the edge of the Java Sea, lies the port of Tanjung Priok. As one approaches it from the road, one sees little more than high fences with guard posts interspersed at intervals. Behind the fences, one can catch glimpses of seemingly limitless stacks of containers - an immense accumulation of wealth in transit. Tanjung Priok is Indonesia's busiest port with some 1600 container trucks coming in and out every day. To handle the billions of dollars worth of commodities circulating through the port, there is a 15,000-strong army of stevedores, drivers, and clerks.
With so much wealth, one can be sure the Indonesian military is here taking a share. And with so many workers handling this wealth, one can also be sure the military is here to control them - and take a share of the workers' wages too.
Illegal fees
A truck driver at the port bringing in a container complains to me: 'after working at this port for nearly 30 years I've earned nothing. I've had to spend all my earnings paying off the military. Just about every day, to load or unload a container at the port, I have to pay Rp. 30,000 (US$3.30). Meanwhile, just for food and cigarettes, I spend about Rp. 20,000 [US$2.20] a day. So it's a real burden and it doesn't make any sense.'
There is no regulation that says the army soldiers stationed at the gates of the port can collect money from the truck drivers. The soldiers simply follow the slogan of a company whose shoes are exported from the port; they 'just do it'. They do not allow a truck to pass through unless the driver pays what they demand. Usually, the freight companies that employ the drivers do not provide extra money to pay for this unofficial tax.
The four metre-high fences and the ubiquitous soldiers are developments of the Suharto era. The first container docks were opened in 1974. Since then, more docks and cranes have been added to handle the growing amount of container traffic.
The port's pasts
Before 1965, the port used to be known as a open area. Just about anyone could enter. I met one elderly shadow puppet master in Jakarta who recalled how he would regularly perform a bi-weekly Saturday night show for the workers. He was a member of the left-wing cultural organisation Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat). He is still fond of those days: 'If it so happened that I didn't show up for a month, the dock workers would start asking about me. They'd wonder what could have possibly kept me away. Likewise, I would miss my friends there if I was off somewhere else. We were very close.' All that ended with the rise of Suharto in late 1965. 'On the night when the September 30th Movement occurred, I was actually performing at the Tanjung Priok port. I didn't know at the time that it would be the last time I ever performed for my friends there.' For being involved with the so-called 'communist' organisation Lekra, he was imprisoned for 14 years by the Suharto regime.
Although Tanjung Priok is an economic site, it has always had a political significance. During the nationalist movement in the 1920s, it was a refuge for those being hunted by the police of the colonial state. The dock workers could smuggle nationalist leaders into ships as stowaways. After independence, in the 1950s, the dock workers occasionally staged strikes for political reasons. For instance, they refused to load oil onto ships, mainly American ships, that were involved in the war in Korea.
Workers and soldiers
Looking at the port area now, it is hard to imagine those days. All around the port are Export Processing Zones (EPZs) that, with their barbed wire-topped fences and guard houses at the gates, resemble prison labour camps. Supplies are imported through the port, assembled in the EPZ factories by cheap labour, and then exported back out through the port.
What helps keep labour cheap in this area is the heavy military presence. Nearly every branch of the military is active in and around the port: the army, police, army reserves (Kostrad), marines, and navy. The company that owns the docks, PT Pelindo, uses the military for its security guards. The gates for docks are manned by active duty army soldiers who wear the uniforms of PT Pelindo. This is yet another case where the difference between state security personnel and private mercenaries for hire is often difficult to discern in Indonesia. The security personnel not only receive a salary from their units but also from PT Pelindo. Still, they do not consider it enough money and insist on extorting money from the truck drivers and workers.
Every worker at the port, including the drivers of the container trucks, is required to show an identity card when entering. To keep careful track of the workers, this card is re-issued every two weeks. It is not the company that issues the identity cards. It is the army command post situated right inside the port. The army is directly integrated into management-labour relations.
The port authorities have established their own labour law. During the Suharto years, the army, the manpower department, and the customs department issued a regulation forbidding port workers from striking. Port workers were exempted from the already weak protection afforded by national law since the port was considered a strategic asset for the national economy.
Gangsters
The truck drivers also have to face gangsters (preman) who are allied with the military. There is one area of the port known, ironically enough, as Free Land (Tanah Merdeka). It is the area where containers are temporarily stored. The so-called security for this area is provided by gangsters who are not officially employed as security guards. A truck driver who needs to keep a container there for a night has to pay rent money to these gangsters.
According to a truck driver, 'The gangsters are organised by the marines and have their headquarters near the Free Land. If we don't give them money, there is no guarantee that they won't steal the contents of the container. But that area is meant to be a facility of the port for us drivers. It is quite often that the ship comes into the port late in the day or is late a day. So we need a place to store the containers for a night.' This driver added sarcastically, 'Perhaps the place is called Free Land because it is free of any laws'.
On an average night, some 500 containers are stored in Free Land. The unofficial payment to the gangsters these days is Rp. 50,000 per night [US$5.50]. So one can imagine how much money the marines and their hoodlums are making every year for doing nothing.
A new union
Given the military presence and the tight regulation, it is remarkable that the workers have actually formed an independent union called Solidarity of Maritime Workers and Fishermen of Indonesia (SBMNI). Even more remarkable is that this union has organised a strike. About two-thirds of all the port workers went out on a two-day strike in November 2000. Apart from demanding an increase in wages, they demanded that the military stop collecting illegal exactions from the truck drivers at the gates.
The strike was partly successful. Management agreed to raise average wages from Rp. 600,000 to Rp. 700,000 per month [from US$67 to $78]. Despite such a relatively large increase in percentage terms, the wages are still very low, especially considering the long hours and heavy labour. Many dock workers put in twelve-hour days.
The military's illegal exactions at the gates were also stopped - but only for one week. As another truck driver I spoke with explained, 'The illegal fees started being collected again because the military threatened that they could not guarantee the security of the port, especially the security of the trucks coming in and out. For the owners of the port, it was better that the port's security was assured than the illegal fees abolished. Explicitly, the owners of the port sided with those bandits'. The military knows how to use euphemisms. When the military told the port owners that it could not guarantee security without the extra money, it was actually threatening to become a threat to security.
Once the strike was over, the port owners went on the offensive. They issued a new regulation which stated that the workers are allowed to form unions and strike. But they made the pre-conditions of unionisation and striking as burdensome as possible. Thus, the truck drivers, the workers who load and unload the containers, and the janitorial staff can not join the same union. They have to form separate unions. If one of these fragmented unions wants to strike, it has to notify the police one week ahead of time. No union is allowed to picket at the port itself and impede its functioning.
The SBMNI union is still organising and still struggling to make Tanjung Priok port a better place to work. But with the military so deeply involved, it faces a difficult and dangerous battle ahead.
Razif (ocip2363@cbn.net.id) is a historian with the Institute of Indonesian Social History in Jakarta and the editorial coordinator of the magazine Media Kerja Budaya (www.kerjabudaya.org).
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
The taskforces of the political parties
Phil King
Megawati's Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) claims to have over thirty thousand of them. By the time of his death, West Papuan 'separatist' leader Theys Eluay had over 5,000 of them. During the 1999 election campaign one of the smaller parties in Yogyakarta only had a couple of dozen, but would borrow a few from the PDIP on occasion.
They are satgas members, the ubiquitous muscle machinery of the political parties that has bloomed in the post-Suharto era. What are the satgas? Why have they emerged with such vigour? And what is the consequence of their presence in Indonesian politics?
Satgas (satuan tugas) translates as 'taskforce'. While now a synonym for party security forces, the term satgas is more widely used. A taskforce may be established to lead an initiative in public health or food distribution. Recently a satgas was formed to help in the repatriation of Indonesian workers ejected in Malaysia's most recent crackdown on guest workers. But it is the type of satgas associated with militarism, violence, and characters like Eurico Guterres that has come to assert itself in the public sphere over the last five years. Led and legitimised by the big political parties and fed by various criminal syndicates and 'youth groups', satgas have expanded across the archipelago. Here, I will only focus on the para-military wings of the larger political parties.
Private armies
Satgas parpol, or political party militias, have existed since the early 1980s. Although there is a significant overlap between them and earlier mass organisations, satgas emerged as a specific response to the violence of the 1982 general election and the New Order's ensuing war on gangterism. Previously curtailed in size by local military commanders and Golkar-sponsored 'youth groups', these militias mushroomed after the fall of Suharto and the re-establishment of competitive party politics. Absent in the first national election in 1955, the satgas became a ubiquitous, fatigue-clad fusion of recycled pemuda (youth) rhetoric and New Order thuggery in the 1999 election.
The massive expansion of party militias thrived on the recruitment of the more mercenary members of the disenfranchised urban milieu, ever deepening in the wake of the economic crisis. Essentially, reformasi was a liberalisation of both party politics and underworld criminal activities. The satgas have been the most astute beneficiaries of both processes.
For the major parties, the satgas are little more than private armies. The internal structure of satgas units replicates military orders of hierarchy from the regional commander down to the platoon. Other parallels are found in the existence of logistics and intelligence wings, fatigues and jackboots, and training drills. Both Golkar and PKB have a floating pool of 'strategic reserves' in addition to 'territorial' troops. When a satgas member is accused of any violation of civil liberties, the response from commanders is always that 'he was acting as an individual at the time'. The imitation of the military is so flawless that when one regional commander interviewed during the 1999 election described the style of his troops as 'semi-military', I could only assume that this meant that they didn't carry automatic weapons. Indeed, becoming a satgas member is a little like joining the army without having to go through all the calisthenics and barkings of sergeants.
The satgas themselves are diverse in character. When it comes to joining up, membership criterion is relatively open (unless you are female). Commanders are often former military men or veterans from New Order mass organisations. In Java, a fair proportion of satgas adhere to beliefs and practices which might be termed invulnerability cults. Generally affable, satgas members certainly reject the trivialisation of their character as a new breed of urban cowboys.
In many ways, heavy responsibilities are placed on the shoulders of satgas. Foremost amongst them is the organisation of party campaign parades. Routes must be planned to avoid opposition neighbourhoods and bottlenecks. Troops are stationed along the trail, radio communications are utilised, blow-fly sunglasses are obligatory. Crowds are constantly scanned for signs of disturbance from agent provocateurs. Elite squads act as bodyguards for the party hierarchy while more humble footsoldiers help in the supply of cotton wool for participants and spectators. (Parades are noisy.) With their feet up and sipping cold tea in the shade, the police and marines assigned to my street for the 1999 election thought the satgas were to be congratulated for taking all the work out of their work.
For all their utility as traffic wardens and deputised keepers of the peace, there are also the satgas that kidnap opposition pamphleteers, beat up journalists, and chase rivals down the main street waving machetes. During the 1999 election campaign, the satgas of PPP-Yogyakarta (United Development Party) demonstrated that thuggery is not without a sense of irony when they attacked and burnt an anti-violence protest site on Jalan Malioboro. Golkar's satgas stoned the party's Menteng headquarters in Jakarta and trashed the car of party chief Akbar Tanjung over a pay dispute.
Battles
Rivalries between the satgas of PDIP, PPP and PKB (National Awakening Party) were particularly violent throughout central Java. The PKB acronym was rephrased as the National Destruction Party due to the violent reputation of its militias. Satgas were lamented as the worst hangover of the Soeharto era to persist into the reformasi period. In a survey by the daily newspaper Jawa Pos in 2000, 87% of respondents said that the satgas of the reformasi era were far worse than those of the New Order. Unfortunately, things did not come to a halt with the election.
Satgas have proven to have a life far beyond the campaign period. President Abdurrahman Wahid's veiled threats that Ansor and Banser (effectively components of the his party's security apparatus) would brook no interference with his presidency regularly put Jakartans on edge. Parliamentary sittings since 1999 have been accompanied by the regular occupation of Jakarta by para-military groups from the provinces. Satgas are now part of a party arms race.
While the argument exists that satgas organisations offer direction and discipline to disenfranchised youths, plenty of hot-heads appear to thrive in them. Competition to control economic rents and run rackets in particular localities is the usual trigger for violence, something that can occur between rival satgas units within a single party.
A further problem emerges at the point of contact between these security organisations and the civilian party structure. In some parties such as PAN, the satgas structure is subordinated to the authority of the district executive. Co-ordination is achieved via the civilian executive and satgas protocol exists in the form of a nation-wide manifesto. The opposite situation is found in PDIP, where satgas units exist independently of party structure. They are self-financed and are often split in their support of rival factions within the party.
Megawati's footsoldiers
In the wake of the 1999 election, various instances have emerged where the selection of candidates for regional legislatures was marred by inter-satgas conflict. The devolution of political authority to the city and district levels under local autonomy laws has exacerbated the situation. As the value of district legislature seats has sky-rocketed, the stakes have risen between rival candidates who enter into informal coalitions with satgas commanders to boost their chances of success. One of the more infamous cases was the March 2001 beating and fatal stabbing of a district PDIP satgas commander in Gunung Kidul, Yogayakarta which took place in full view of a delegation of provincial PDIP parliamentarians. The incident was linked to factional rivalries within the party branch that threatened the satgas unit's access to a key funding source.
It is the para-military wing of the PDIP that raises the most concern for the future. In May 2002 they turned a Medan courtroom upside down when the judge postponed a verdict against a defendent accused of murdering a comrade. They have been implicated in various instances of violence and intimidation against journalists and NGOs. Most recently, they harassed and forcefully disbanded a People's Democracy Front (FDR) parade in Solo, Central Java, on the grounds that the placard 'Megawati Soehartoputri' was insulting. Legally they have no such power, though the partisanship of the state security forces is generally reflected by their inaction. The irony of the incident was that the parade was in remembrance of the brutal July 1996 attack on PDI headquarters by Suharto thugs.
Having inherited the mantle of their former tormentors, the satgas PDIP looks set to repeat history. The satgas of the political parties are the new forces of violent conservatism in Indonesian politics. Demobilisation appears impossible. The 2004 election is guaranteed to see a further spiralling of violence between rival para-military organisations.
Phil King (pk01@uow.edu.au) is a PhD candidate at University of Wollongong and is working on a project on the Thai-Malay border. He is currently lecturing in Southeast Asian Politics at University of Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Homegrown security forces wield great power in Lombok
John M. MacDougall
It was mid-October, 1998, in Malang, East Java. I was sitting in a friend's house watching television coverage of Indonesian students demonstrating in the streets of Jakarta. They were protesting against the entire government: President Habibie, the military, and the parliament. After forcing Suharto from power in May 1998, they were angry that the new government seemed to be nothing but a continuation of the old. Confronting the students were thousands of civilians organised into what was called a pamswakarsa, or self-reliant security corps. General Wiranto, then head of the Indonesian military, had suggested that such a corps be formed to counter a 'revolutionary' movement planning to topple President Habibie. As press coverage later revealed, the pamswakarsa in Jakarta in October 1998 was, contrary to its name, not self-reliant - they had been paid by the government. They were largely unemployed men bussed in from small towns and villages in West Java with the lure of a good day's wage.
Back to Malang. Just outside my friend's house, his neighbors had recently formed vigilante groups to protect their families from 'ninja' attacks. There had been a spate of mysterious killings of 'black magicians' (dukun santet) in East Java. These vigilante groups were not called pamswakarsa but they were, in a sense, vigilant self-reliant security groups. Like many young men throughout Indonesia in the uncertain days of 1998, when Suharto's old political system was breaking down, they organised patrols to guard their neighborhoods from the intrusion of 'dark elements' and 'criminals', who were all assumed to be from outside the community.
These two cases of civilian security forces, one in Jakarta, the other in Malang, represent two different phenomena. While the former was a rent-a-mob organised by a bureaucracy for political purposes, the latter was organised by volunteers within a neighborhood for purposes of local patrolling. Interpretations of the rise of vigilante groups in Indonesia often alternate between the poles illustrated by these two groups. They have been construed as either sinister products of a military conspiracy to fracture civil society or popular efforts to uphold the community in the absence of a state.
These two poles of interpretation, however, do not exhaust all the possibilities. As I will try to show through a case study of Lombok, a pamswakarsa can emerge from the society itself but do so in a way that recreates the state's militarism on a more communal level. If the society was policed during the Suharto era by a centralised military, it is being policed today in a no less brutal fashion by homegrown civilian security groups. The sad fact is that in this post-Suharto period the largest 'civilian' organisation on the island is a pamswakarsa.
Vigilantes in Lombok
On the island of Lombok, where I spent the better part of two years from 1998 to 2000, pamswakarsa groups first emerged to counter crime. Under the banner of the nationally validated moniker, pamswakarsa, Lombok's men, young and old, joined groups with such names as Amphibi, Ababil, Elang Merah, and Bujak. These groups vowed to protect their communities from thieves. Within a year after the fall of Suharto in 1998, Lombok was teeming with civilian security groups.
The first of these groups was Bujak (Pemburu Jejak, Tracker). With a base in the district of Central Lombok, it began in 1997 when the economic crisis had just hit. There was a panic about crime. Bujak developed a bounty hunter service where they would guarantee the return of stolen goods provided they were given a payment in return. Behind the veil of Bujak's community service, it became known that many of Bujak's members were ex-criminals themselves and were suspected to be working with thieves to extort money.
One of Lombok's religious clerics, disturbed at the overlap between Bujak and the criminals, organised his own group from the Islamic center of Jeroaru, in East Lombok. Named Amphibi (for unclear reasons), this pamswakarsa became extraordinarily popular. By August 1999, their numbers in East Lombok alone exceeded 100,000. The groundswell of support came from villagers who wished to resist the powerful network of thieves preying upon their property, especially their livestock.
The members themselves funded the organisation. The cleric, Tuan Guru Sibaway, and his brother, a mystic named Guru Ukit, offered membership, complete with a supernaturally charged invulnerability jacket, for the relatively large sum of Rp 103,000 [US$12]. Ex-criminals, youths, and occasionally prominent political officials signed up. Amphibi's coffers swelled with their ranks, allowing them to purchase walkie-talkies and trucks.
While Bujak's primary focus was upon the retrieval of stolen goods, Amphibi focused on capturing the criminal. The alleged thieves caught by Amphibi were given the opportunity to tobat (repent) and join the organization to hunt their former partners in crime. 'Those who returned to the ways of criminality were given a three strike rule. After the third violation they would be classified as escapees and an escapee is as good as dead', commented one Amphibi member of Eastern Lombok.
The tension between Bujak and Amphibi turned into a bloody, full-scale battle in August 1999. Amphibi managed to defeat its rival from Central Lombok at a battle in the village of Penne, a village straddling the border between the two districts.
The expansion of Amphibi
With Bujak out of the way, Amphibi's scope expanded into Central and West Lombok, drawing an additional 100,000 members to its ranks. Amphibi moved into the northern regions of West Lombok after the anti-Christian riots of 17 January 2000. Its security posts could be found throughout both northern Lombok and Mataram, two areas with historical tensions with East Lombok. Lombok's northern communities had not only sided with Balinese colonial forces in the nineteenth century, they continued to practice 'animistic' traditions of the Sasak ethnic group. Such traditions had been eliminated in Muslim communities throughout East and Central Lombok.
Amphibi is a distinctly Muslim organisation but does not have missionary ambitions outside of Lombok. It does not imagine itself to be part of a nationwide or global Muslim movement. Similar to the reformist Islamic effort to remove Sasak society of the residual Hindu practices of their Balinese colonial past, Amphibi endeavors to purge Sasak communities of criminal networks.
If Amphibi had been widely seen as a protective ally in its home base of East Lombok, it was viewed as a fearful intruder in northern Lombok. In an interview with an Islamic leader in northern Lombok, it was evident that Amphibi's expansion was not commonly supported there: 'These Amphibi are scaring us. Our [Islamic] teachers are from the East [Lombok], true, but these Amphibi take the heads of their victims. 'They take our heads.'
The rise of Amphibi also threatened the Hindu Balinese communities in Mataram. On 21 December 1999, Amphibi beheaded a Balinese noble suspected of being a middleman for crime networks. Since no Amphibi members were arrested for the decapitation, the Balinese felt it necessary to establish their own pamswakarsa, named Dharma Wicesa. Balinese aristocrats and priests were commissioned to lead Dharma Wicesa and provide local Balinese men with the same mystical invulnerability as their Amphibi rivals.
The religious polarisation between Muslim Amphibi and Hindu Dharma Wicesa can be trumped by local loyalties. When Amphibi attacked the West Lombok village of Perampauan in October 2000, the villagers, Muslims included, refused to allow Amphibi to apprehend Balinese suspects living in the village. According to a legal aid lawyer present at the scene, the Amphibi members threatened, 'We will attack your village because you dare to protect infidels instead of siding with your fellow Muslims.'
The Muslim villagers stood by their Balinese neighbours and defeated Amphibi's thousand-man attack. The Balinese pamswakarsa rushed to the village to defend their fellow Balinese only to be forced away as well. Amphibi lost that day in Perampauan but continued to attack smaller villages in West Lombok before local officials pressured the leadership to stop the anti-Balinese campaign.
Militarisation from above and below
How should we interpret the rise of Amphibi in Lombok? In some respects, it resembles the East Javanese men in Malang defending their communities. As such a large mass-based organisation, it has to be responding to a widespread felt need. In other respects, it resembles the government-backed militia in Jakarta. The members of Amphibi do not just defend their own neighborhoods; they head out into battle and expand into other districts. In Lombok, local police, military, and government officials have joined, legitimated, and encouraged the organisation for lack of any other means of controlling or guiding it.
Indonesia's young men have begun to play a crucial role in politics as Suharto's authoritarianism has been transformed into multi-party parliamentary politics. Yet these young men are, for the first time in their lives, politically useful without a clear definition of what 'political' is. In the words of an East Lombok lawyer, 'Most of Amphibi's members consist of men who didn't exist in the eyes of the state during the New Order. Now, with their new orange jackets, the police, their communities, and religious leaders treat them with respect and caution. During Suharto's era, if the military slapped them they would break into tears. Now, it is their turn to do the slapping.'
John M. MacDougall (jomon@indo.net.id) is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Princeton University.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
A new security force in Bali is cloaked in tradition
Degung Santikarma
Two months ago, I received an e-mail from a Western friend living in Bali. He thought that I, as a Balinese and an anthropologist, might be able explain a disturbing incident in his neighborhood.
Dear Degung,
A few days ago I was a witness to an episode which I have enormous difficulties understanding and I wish you to help me in finding an anthropological frame to rationalise it. I was at home at 9 p.m. and watching TV with my kids when the kul-kul alarm bells started sounding all around my house and people started screaming: 'Maling!' Thieves had broken into a neighbour's house. The burglars ran away without taking anything from the house. In a very short time many youngsters from my village and the villages nearby began the hunt, screaming in the meantime: 'Matiang!' 'Bunuh!' etc. We were terrified. After a short time the thieves were found: three young boys, 12 to 13 years old, from Lombok. One of them managed to escape. The other two were killed on the spot. Since then I have had terrible feelings of guilt and find myself totally unable to accept what had happened. I would very much appreciate your reading of this barbaric episode as a Balinese and an anthropologist. How and why can things like this happen and how can the people involved survive with the feeling of guilt and how do the villages and banjars come to terms with it? I will value and appreciate very much your opinion.
Thanks, your very shocked friend.
On reading this letter, I was saddened, disgusted and angered - emotions that only grew stronger after my friend called to say that his own 12-year-old son, who had witnessed the killing of these boys his own age, had been so traumatised that he was nearly catatonic. I could not, any more than my friend, rationalise or explain this killing of children. It was hard to consider why I should want to, as my friend asked, 'rationalize' this event, to the extent that giving it an explanatory framework could make men who were, after all, killers of children seem 'rational'. I did not know how to respond. This was not the usual kind of question I receive from foreigners puzzled by, say, a Balinese tooth-filing ceremony or a trance dance in which people stab themselves.
As I thought about the incident, I realised was that I was not shocked by it in the same way my friend was. Anyone who has spent much time in Bali recently knows that such events are occurring with increasing frequency. I began to wonder what kind of social and cultural conditions are making violence in Bali not only possible but increasingly likely to the extent that few Balinese find it shocking or problematic.
Invisibility of Violence in Bali
This issue of violence in Bali is difficult to raise for several reasons. The first is that while Bali is no stranger to violence, discussions of it rarely take place in public. During the thirty-two years of Suharto dictatorship, the state was a clear force restraining such discourse. It was considered dangerous to discuss the violence in 1965-66, when up to 100,000 Balinese or 5-8% of the island's population were killed. There was an official narrative of the events but no public space available for alternative interpretations. Raising the perspective of the victims or questioning the narrative that portrayed the deaths as morally justified, was to risk becoming labeled 'communist' oneself. Even with the fall of Suharto, the trauma of the victims of the 1965-66 violence and their families continues to shade Balinese life and ways of speaking, making people reluctant to bring up incidents of continuing violence in their communities.
Tourism has also acted as a restraint on discussions of violence. The prerequisite for tourism is a sense of safety, order and stability. Tourists are reluctant to travel to places that they believe to be violent. For many Balinese, 'safety' has real economic consequences, as has become obvious in the wake of the October 2002 bombing. It is no wonder that the murders that occurred in front of my friend's house - like dozens of other such incidents that occur every year - did not make it into the pages of the Bali Post. And it was no wonder that I, living six villages away, did not hear about the event, and probably never would have heard about the event, had it not been for an e-mail from a Western friend.
The third reason why public discussions of violence are rare is that the Balinese cannot imagine themselves as 'violent'. The Indonesian words like kekerasan or kerusuhan seem alien to their self-image. Such words seem applicable only to areas like Ambon or Aceh. When incidents of violence are publicised, especially conflicts between members of different villages, the media does not usually use the term 'violence'. Instead, it uses the euphemism 'kasus adat',or customary law dispute, as if the incidents represented traditional tribal rivalries rather than modern conflicts. Violence in Balinese society is usually tucked away as an unexamined aspect of discourses of 'tradition' and 'culture'.
Inventing Tradition
To explain what I mean by this last statement, I need to turn to the issue of who actually carried out the killing of the children in front of my friend's house. That night, a man spotted three boys on his property and began calling out 'Thief! Thief!' Immediately, a neighbour ran and began pounding on the kul-kul, the wooden drum hanging in the neighborhood meeting hall. He beat out a rhythm signaling that the neighborhood, the banjar, was in a state of emergency. The banjar's drum was then answered by drums in the other banjars of the village.
By sounding the kul-kul, this case of transgression against one man's private property immediately became a communal matter requiring the attention of the entire village. It also positioned the incident as a matter of culture, tradition and adat, insofar as the kulkul is a primary symbol of these concepts. Nobody considered calling the police, not simply because the police are often seen as corrupt or incompetent, but because if this was a matter of culture, tradition and adat, it could not simultaneously be seen as a matter for the state. Since the New Order's fall in 1998, the state has been viewed as the force against which culture, tradition and adat need to be empowered.
Dozens of men answered the call of the kul-kul. Included among them were the village's pecalangan or security force. They came dressed in their trademark uniforms of sarongs, black and white checkered poleng cloth waistcloths, carrying keris daggers. Together these men hunted down the boys and murdered two of them. While the pecalangan were not the only ones to participate in the killings, their presence added a certain legitimacy to the actions. The pecalangan were also able to smooth things out with the authorities so that none of the villagers responsible for the murders were arrested.
Pecalangan groups such as this one have become common in Bali since the New Order ended in 1998. Today virtually every Balinese village has its own pecalangan. Indeed, one of the ironic results of Balinese resentment toward the repressive power exerted by Suharto's New Order state has been Balinese claiming the right to exert that same control over their own communities. In other words, reformasi has not brought a demilitarisation of Balinese life. What has occurred instead has been a remilitarisation. There has been, in the name of culture and tradition, an even deeper penetration of militarisation into the everyday fabric of community.
Few people that I spoke with in my own village to the east of Denpasar could explain where the term pecalangan came from or could relate with confidence the history of these groups. Some said that the pecalangan's predecessor was the 'taskforce' of security guards for the 1998 conference of Megawati's party (the PDIP) in Bali. Others said that the pecalangan got their start in the late 1970s when the Bali Arts Festival, the island's major annual cultural event, began using security guards dressed in traditional ceremonial outfits to direct traffic and guard the parking lots. Still others believed that the pecalangan were a modern incarnation of the old palace guards. And those who can still remember the violence of 1965 ventured that the pecalangan were a revival of the gangs responsible for carrying out executions of alleged communists.
Despite this lack of consensus about the origins of the pecalangan, most people agreed with the notion, regularly expressed in the mass media, that the pecalangan are 'traditional'. Even those who acknowledged that there had never been anything called a pecalangan in their village before seemed convinced that such groups were part of a Balinese heritage that was being recovered. By drawing upon a notion of 'Balinese tradition', the pecalangan seem to have succeeded in erasing their own modern origins.
Guarding Culture
The regional government of Bali passed a law in 2002 that formally legitimised the pecalangan: -1) Safety and order in the area of the desa pakraman (village) is carried out by pecalang. 2) Pecalang carry out duties of safeguarding the area of the desa pakraman relating to adat and religion. 3) Pecalang are selected and relieved of their duties by the desa pakraman based upon a village forum. Desa pakraman is a term that has recently become popular among bureaucrats as a replacement for the term desa adat (customary village). This is part of a project to 'Balinise' the language - the word adat comes from Arabic.
Pecalangan groups are, in keeping with this regulation, given ritual duties. These may include acting as traffic guards at ceremonies, making sure that sloppily-dressed or badly-behaved tourists are not allowed to enter temple ceremonies, and guarding the cockfights held as part of ceremonies. They also act as enforcers of silence on the day of Nyepi. They patrol the streets to make sure that everyone, Hindu or not, keeps their lights turned off and does not venture out into the streets. For many pecalang, Nyepi becomes an occasion to assert a sense of ethnic identity and even superiority. As one of them said to me, 'On Nyepi we don't just stop people from outside our village or outside Bali. Even the military has to stop if they're on the road and we see them.' Smiling broadly, he said, 'It's too bad Nyepi is just one day.'
Depending upon the particular village, however, pecalangan often carry out other duties that have little to do with ritual. In Denpasar, Kuta or Legian, where there are large numbers of non-Balinese inhabitants, the pecalangan have worked together with the police to carry out identity-card raids, traveling from house to house at night to ask the inhabitants to demonstrate that they have registered their current addresses with the government. Typically pecalangan members who assist with such raids are paid a fee for their night's services (according to those I questioned, approximately Rp25,000). In Kesiman, many pecalangan members act as guards for the places of prostitution to be found in the Padanggalak Beach area.
In South Bali, they may also provide 'protection' for bar and nightclub owners, receiving monetary subsidies in exchange for ensuring that local residents look kindly upon what goes on in those places. In Nusa Dua, pecalangan receive financing from hotels in exchange for similar protection against local protests concerning land or labour issues. In the Padanggalak Beach area, pecalangan act as guards for brothels. And wherever there is a cockfight, it is virtually certain that the pecalangan will participate, taking a cut of the profits as their fee.
Motivations for joining the pecalangan vary. In my village, each banjar is required to send at least two adult male members to join. Most of the men who sign up are those without steady employment. Anyone who works cannot stay up all night patrolling the streets. Becoming part of the pecalangan offers them a bit of money, a sense of pride, and an ability to exert power over those even more marginalised.
But what about other Balinese? Why do they feel that the pecalangan are necessary or, at the very least, unobjectionable and tolerable? Traditionally, Balinese ritual is thought to evoke the potential for danger from the unseen world. Those holding rituals would often call upon people with special supernatural abilities, those who could ward off attacks of black magic by those who might be jealous toward those sponsoring the ritual. But it is only recently that people have felt the need to have pecalangan participate in rituals as security guards.
Most people I asked about the pecalangan spoke not about their ritual duties but about how they kept things 'safer' in general. A typical comment was that of one man who said, 'We always used to have our motorbikes stolen, but now nobody dares.' Many people, especially in multicultural Denpasar and Kuta, said that because there were now many non-Balinese living in Bali, the pecalangan are necessary to deter theft and violence. Some people saw the police as being too corrupt to fulfill their proper role.
While the presence of pecalangan in Bali parallels in many ways the rise of militia groups in other areas of Indonesia, the Bali case presents some important differences. Rather than being demonised in the national and international press, as have so many other militant 'security' groups, especially those who draw upon religion to legitimise themselves, they have been lauded. They have become a kind of model militia. Most recently, pecalangan from villages across South Bali were assigned by the police department to assist with security for a United Nations conference. A police delegation from Japan visited Bali to learn about its 'traditional security system'.
Even when the pecalangan become involved in killing, 'culture' is drawn upon to explain their actions. Today 'Balinese culture' is often viewed as a kind of precious object that can be marked with a price tag and sold to tourists through 'cultural tourism'. With culture being reduced to an object, an anxiety has arisen among Balinese who fear that this valuable possession could be lost or stolen. Now that culture has become like an expensive antique preserved in a museum, the pecalangan have become the museum guards. Those who might try to damage or destroy or steal this culture are 'outsiders'.
This sense of being under siege translates into a resentment against ethnic others and a belief that all thieves must be non-Balinese. Killing a thief becomes sensible, even honorable, as a defence of culture. Thus nobody who participated in the killing that night in front of my friend's house thought to raise the question: were these boys really thieves even though they were empty-handed? It was enough, in the end, that they were outsiders, for there was far more than private property at stake. What was at stake that night was culture. The killers of those two boys in front of my friend's house that night have not been perceived in Bali as killers for they acted in defence of culture - the culture sounded by the kul-kul drum.
Degung Santikarma (cultural@dps.centrin.net.id) is the editor in chief of the monthly magazine Latitudes, published in Denpasar, Bali (http://www.latitudesmagazine.com).
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Street children face police and security guards
Rikah and Dede
Rikah Suryanto
They wear neat uniforms, sport sunglasses, never forget to carry clubs and whistles, always stand erect, and guide traffic in a busy intersection. Perhaps that is the usual image of policemen. Each person probably has a different image. It depends on the context in which they come to know policemen.
Street children know policemen very well even though they aren't on good terms with them. In the eyes of street children, the police appear to be people whose only job is to scare them. With their menacing looks, big boots, and long clubs, they are always ready to chase and beat up street children. The typical policeman is like a wild cat that tirelessly chases after a rat.
You've probably seen from behind your car windows when stopped at a red light, the sight of a policeman, perhaps just to fill up his time, running after a child begging or selling newspapers. And you've seen barefoot children being shooed out of a shopping mall by security guards. We don't see much of the army but we see a lot of the police and security guards.
Being punched or kicked by the police and security guards has become as routine as waking up in the morning for street children. With the chasing and the fighting, the story might appear as if it is like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But there is another side to that story that is terrible and tragic - a side that isn't some drama on TV or something happening in a foreign country. Sometimes the violence is so extreme that the child is seriously wounded or killed.
Just last month in the next neighborhood down the road, two street children died after being chased out of an area by security guards. They tried to save themselves from the guards by jumping into a canal. They couldn't swim and wound up drowning. I can imagine why they wanted so desperately to avoid getting caught. Street children not only get beaten, sometimes they are taken to what is called 'rehabilitation,' which is a like a prison for children.
I read in a book compiled by a non-governmental organisation in Jakarta about one street kid who survived being shot by the police. He said, 'The thing I wanted to steal was owned by the police. I didn't know that. This policeman immediately came out of his car and pulled out a gun. He shot me in the chest and the bullet went right through me. I was bleeding all over but he still came over and kicked me until I was unconscious.'
Children are still children, whoever and wherever they are, whether they are living on the street or in a big fancy house. All children have a right to go to school, play with their friends, and obtain enough food to live. In Indonesia, the government doesn't respect those rights. Indeed, the security forces themselves, in the name of security, make life more difficult for street children. But we have rights too.
Dede Puji
What I see in my neighborhood is that the ones who are supposed to uphold law and order and make the community feel safe are precisely the ones that make us feel unsafe. Let me give you a small example.
There is a low level officer of the navy who lives in my neighborhood. He uses his position in the military to shield himself from the law. One day, a factory nearby was closing down and moving to a different location. It opened up its gates for local people to come in and take things that the company was going to leave behind. We were all quite happy to get some materials for free. The first day that people were allowed inside everything went smoothly. But on the second day this military officer and his colleagues began taking away some of the large valuable equipment that the company was going to move and keep using. Seeing that, some of the local people started grabbing some of that equipment too.
After a few days, the owners discovered that their property was being looted. The military officer accused the local people of having stolen the goods even though he was the one who had been primarily responsible. The company believed him and put him in charge of guarding the factory yard. He used his new position to then steal more things. He arranged for some of his friends and some neighborhood kids to come in, take things away, and then give him part of the profit from selling the things. He eventually got into a fight with some of the kids because he thought they were not giving him enough money. One kid ran away from home and still hasn't returned for fear of that guy. I don't see how this guy is protecting the community.
I'll give you another example that involves the same guy. He sells liquor illegally from a house in the neighborhood. Everyone, including the police, knows where the house is and what goes on there. But it still operates without any problem. I've heard that his salary from the navy is actually pretty high but he still wants to earn more by running an illegal business.
Every so often, to earn some money, I help a friend who drives a small truck. I help load and unload things. The main job of the traffic police in Jakarta seems to be to stop trucks, especially at night, to demand money. The police plant themselves at a corner or along the side of the road and then stop every truck that comes by. Even if all the papers are in order and you haven't committed any traffic violation, you still have to pay something. It is like an unofficial toll. I guess they figure that because the truck is involved in commercial activity, it has money. Drivers have to set aside money to pay off these police. Our truck is quite small but still we get stopped too.
Such is the state of the security system in Indonesia. The ones that are supposed to protect the people use their position to make money off the people. We wind up being scared of the people that call themselves our protectors.
Rikah Suryanto (18 years old) and Dede Puji (19) are former street children who now work with a home for street children, Sanggar Akar, in Jakarta.
The Security Forces as a Source of Insecurity
John Roosa
Imagine the following scenario: three truckloads of men armed with submachine guns and grenade launchers surround a police station late one night. They shoot their way inside and then torch it. In the chaos, sixty-one prisoners escape and over one ton of marijuana being held as evidence disappears. Some of the men then drive to the electricity relay station and force the workers at gunpoint to blackout the city. In total darkness, they head off to attack another police force in the same area. When they withdraw in the morning, after nine hours of unloading their firepower into two police facilities, they have killed seven policemen, three civilians, and suffered one casualty. This is what transpired in the town of Binjai, near Medan, on 29-30 September 2002.
Now imagine who the attackers were. Members of a powerful crime syndicate? Terrorists? Invading soldiers from a different country? Guess again. The attackers were Indonesian army soldiers stationed just down the road. They belonged to an airborne unit (Linud 100) of the army's Strategic Reserves (Kostrad).
Journalists quickly learned that the Kostrad soldiers had attacked the police station because the police were refusing to release a drug dealer who had been paying the soldiers protection money. In the parlance of today's Indonesia, the drug dealer had beking (backing). A group of soldiers had already descended upon the police station the day before the assault and aggressively demanded his release. Determined to show who controlled the drug trade in Binjai, the soldiers decided bring out their heavy weaponry and raze the police station.
The Binjai incident illustrates many of the systemic problems of today's Indonesian military. Under the 'dual-function' doctrine, the military has expansive, undefined, and unchecked powers within Indonesia. Add to this unaccountable power an insatiable drive to find off-budget sources of funding and one has a combustible combination. The late Maj. Gen. Agus Wirahadikusumah, one of the very few officers to whom the label 'reformist' could be accurately used, noted in late 1999 that soldiers had become 'backers of prostitution, gambling, and narcotics and this has become fairly widespread.'
The fact that many troops have experience in brutal counterinsurgency warfare in such areas as West Papua, East Timor, and Aceh certainly does not help them behave well once back in civil society. The Linud 100 unit that carried out the Binjai attack had served in neighboring Aceh. It was one of the units involved in the July 1999 Bantaqiah massacre in Aceh.
Police and soldiers
The hiving off of the police from the military in late 1998 has created a new difficulty for the military's lawlessness. The police have become more assertive - sometimes for the sake of their own illegal rackets, sometimes for the sake of law enforcement. After the Binjai incident, the army officers assigned to damage control wrote op-eds blaming the separation of the police from the military as the root cause of the problem. In a perverse way, they are correct. Before, the military could order the police to not interfere with its corrupt practices. Under the former chain of command, the police chief would have received an order to release the drug dealer. Now, the police, developing their own institutional autonomy, cannot be so easily ordered around. The solution to conflicts such as Binjai is obviously not to put the police back under the military s thumb.
In response to the Binjai incident, vice-president Hamzah Haz surprised many journalists with an uncharacteristically insightful comment: 'The main problem is not that the police and military have been separated. It is that there is beking of criminals and this has involved troop units. So the military leaders first have to attend to this.'
Over the past several years, there have been many similar, though less spectacular, incidents as Binjai. Let me pull out my clippings file.
On 26 December 1999, about 50 members of an army airborne battalion in East Kalimantan attacked and destroyed a police post in the village of Nipah-Nipah. They shot and killed a police corporal and seriously wounded two other policemen. The attack came hours after the policemen had stopped two soldiers riding a motorbike for a traffic violation.
On 28 April 2000, 30 soldiers of an army subdistrict command (Koramil) attacked a police station in Karawang, a town 45 km east of Jakarta. They beat five police officers and stole a gun. One of their men, a sergeant, had been arrested by the police the night before for being involved in an automobile theft.
On 19 June 2000, about 50 marines attacked a police station in the middle of Jakarta (the Mampang headquarters). They stabbed three policemen and wrecked the building. Several nights earlier policemen had brawled with a marine corporal who was a working as a security guard in a caf�.
On 15 September 2001, Kostrad troops attacked a police station in the center of the city of Madiun in East Java. This army riot was triggered by a brawl between soldiers and policemen at a gasoline station pump. A group of policemen objected when a carload of Kostrad soldiers jumped ahead in the queue. The soldiers returned to their barracks and mobilised a large crowd of their brothers-in-arms for the assault on the police station. Three civilian bystanders were killed in the shooting.
This list represents just a sample of the incidents reported in newspapers. In some cases, the soldiers attack policemen to avenge a perceived insult. In other cases, they attack when their economic activities are disturbed.
Bombing
The military has a serious problem not only with the discipline of its personnel but with the management of its equipment. Most worrisome, especially in the wake of the October 2002 bombing in Bali, is the military's lack of control over its explosives.
On 4 May 2000, a bomb made of TNT manufactured by Indonesian weapons company Pindad was found in the Attorney General's office in Jakarta. The serial number was traced back to the East Java army command but at that point the trail ended. The army never revealed how the explosives went missing or who was responsible. The bomb was thought to have been planted by men working for Tommy Suharto who was being questioned by the Attorney General around that time.
The worst bombing in Indonesia prior to the one in Bali was that of the Jakarta Stock Exchange on 13 September 2000. Ten people were killed and the building was badly damaged. Among those charged with the bombing were two military personnel. It is likely the five kilograms of TNT used in the blast came from the military. The official line from the military was that the bombers had deserted their units and acted on behalf of the Free Aceh Movement. However, there are other possibilities. Suspiciously, the two soldiers were able to escape from prison.
Hand grenades have been denotated or left in public places numerous times in Jakarta. In July 2001, one person was killed and 24 injured in two separate explosions of hand grenades. Another 12 people were injured in February 2000 when a hand grenade was thrown into a brothel in a southern part of the city.
Ammunition and guns have disappeared from storehouses. A recent case was in October 2002 when 65,000 bullets were reported missing from a Special Forces warehouse in West Java. In April 2000, the police in West Java discovered that two army sergeants and a lieutenant colonel were involved in a weapons selling syndicate. In Aceh, the independence forces have been able to purchase weapons from the military.
Fighting for Income
When it comes to defending its sources of revenue, the military can be ruthless. It is highly probable that the killing of three schoolteachers working for the mining company Freeport in West Papua on 31 August 2002 was the army's handiwork. The human rights organisation Elsham was the first to allege that the army was responsible. Elsham's claim was corroborated by the province's former police chief, I Made Pastika, who privately told journalists that the police believe the army carried out the murders. The claim has been confirmed by officials in the U.S. embassy in Jakarta who have had access to intercepts of the army's radio communications. According to Hamish McDonald's report in the Sydney Morning Herald (2 November 2002), the army wanted to pressure Freeport into paying US$10 million as protection money.
The military's involvement in the underground economy and its own protection rackets have created serious problems of discipline. Although the rhetoric of the military is all about discipline, the daily practice of the troops is a cut-throat entrepreneurialism. The recent incidents in Binjai and Timika indicate that the military is largely superfluous and counterproductive as a domestic security force. Even in conflict regions where it faces an armed insurrection (as in Aceh and Papua), it devotes much of its time to fighting civilians and policemen to secure its own revenue. The solution is simple enough: end the military's dual-function, territorial structure, and business activity and make it entirely dependent on funds allocated by the state. Implementing this solution, however, appears nearly impossible. The military is committed to the status quo and the civilian politicians are not committed to military reform.
John Roosa (jproosa@indo.net.id), a historian of South and Southeast Asia, is guest editor of this issue.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
A report by a human rights organisation in West Papua
Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (Elsham)
The shooting by unidentified gunmen on 31 August 2002 on the road from Timika to the Freeport mining enclave of Tembagapura in which two American citizens and one Indonesian citizen were killed and twelve others were injured is a demonstration of the strength of militarism and impunity in Indonesia. It calls into question relations between Freeport McMoRan, PT Freeport Indonesia (Freeport's Indonesian subsidiary), and the military.
At noon on the afternoon of Saturday 31 August, a convoy of trucks carrying teachers and children from Timika's International School was seen by two Freeport employees stopping at mile 62-63 on its way back to Tembagapura. Minutes later a Freeport employee and his wife arrived at the scene and, seeing the convoy under attack, quickly returned to the mile 64 security checkpoint to call for help. Immediately after the shooting, the military blocked off the road between mile 50 and 64.
Decky Murib was an eyewitness to the attack and is currently under police protection. He was a former member of an indigenous Papuan civilian group recruited by the Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) to assist with covert operations. He has told Elsham investigators that Kopassus members were involved in the shooting.
Eyewitnesses have confirmed that a Freeport company vehicle from its Grasberg mining site arrived at the scene just prior to the attack. The vehicle was driven by a Freeport employee and was transporting members of the armed forces. According to standard Freeport policy, all company vehicles from the Grasberg site must be checked out in writing. Review of vehicle documents from the morning of 31 August should provide important information about the perpetrators of the attack.
The military's accusations
On the night of 31 August there was an agreement between the military and the police to patrol the area of the shooting. The next day, 1 September at 8:00am, the police were fired on while conducting a search of the area. They took cover. Later, personnel from the army unit Kostrad 515 approached claiming that they were guarding the ambush site and had just shot one of the alleged 31 August gunmen. The military brought the body of the victim, Elias Kwalik, to the side of the road, where police investigators took over the case.
The results of a medical examination on Kwalik revealed that he had been dead for approximately 12 hours prior to the 1 September shooting. A Freeport employee informed Elsham investigators that he had seen Kwalik at Mile 38 at 3:00pm on August 31, waiting for a ride, and had recommended to Kwalik that he return to Timika because of the military operations farther up the road.
Despite a lack of evidence, Indonesian military and governmental officials - as well as senior Freeport management - publicly attributed responsibility for the 31 August attack to the TPN/OPM (National Liberation Army/Free Papua Organisation). In response to such accusations, the head of the the TPN/OPM, Kelly Kwalik, issued a statement on 17 September stating that he and his group were not responsible for the shooting. He reiterated his earlier statements that he had cancelled any plans to attack Freeport and reaffirmed his commitment to establishing Papua as a Zone of Peace.
Since March 2002, indigenous Papuans' concerns about the escalating threat of an Indonesian military and police crackdown led civil society groups including Elsham to urgently pursue an initiative on conflict resolution. The groups set up a Peace Task Force in July 2002, inviting Indonesian civil and military authorities as well as TPN/OPM leaders to enter into a dialogue to establish Papua as a Zone of Peace.
The culmination of the first stage of the Zone of Peace process was a conference co-sponsored by the governor, police chief, and the provincial parliament together with Elsham and other civil society groups. It was held in Jayapura on 15-16 October 2002. Major General Mahidin Simbolon, regional commander of the Indonesian military in Papua, was the only official who refused to participate in the initiative. As part of the Zone of Peace initiative, the Task Force separately met with Papua's police chief, chairman of the provincial parliament, and governor as well as all TPN/OPM leaders, including Kelly Kwalik, with very successful responses.
Immediate background
Regardless of the peace initiative or its results, there had been an increase in military activity. The day before the shooting, on 30 August, there had been a joint armed forces operation including the army, special forces, marines, and mobile brigade police (Brimob) in the area of the shooting. Attacks on Freeport personnel and local indigenous Papuans had been escalating since December 2001.
In December 2001, two Freeport environmental unit employees were shot at the Grasberg mine site. No investigation into the attack was conducted. The shootings were reportedly carried out by unidentified gunmen wearing military uniforms.
In April 2002, Kopassus attacked indigenous Papuan civilians in the lowland hamlet of Kali Kopi in which one civilian was killed and seven others were arrested and tortured.
On 25 May 2002, five to seven Papuans holding axes and one revolver attacked Freeport security guards at the main office building in the company's Western-style suburb town of Kuala Kencana. They then fled the scene.
Despite the fact that all of these cases had been reported to Freeport security, company management took no action to investigate and apprehend the groups perpetrating these crimes. It was in this atmosphere of total impunity that the 31 August attack took place.
It should be noted that the Indonesian military has a long history of destabilising violence in the area of Freeport's mining operations. For example, in 1994, armed forces battalions 752 and 733, posing as a TPN/OPM unit, shot and killed a Freeport employee on the road near Mile 62. An Australian employee was shot and wounded in the same incident. In March 1996, the military orchestrated a 'riot' that caused the closure of the mining operation for three days. This led to an exponential increase in the number of troops based in the area.
Freeport's security policy
The 31 August attack is reminiscent of previous military assaults on Freeport employees and the military's other destructive acts directed at the company. Not only have elements of the military attacked Freeport employees and the local community, they have also stolen Freeport property. Soldiers of the army unit Kostrad 515 while on duty at Freeport in March-June 2002 stole six tons of wire from a factory at mile 74 and later sold it for Rp 8,000 [US$.90] per kilogram. They also stole Caterpillar trucks with an estimated value of US$150,000 from a warehouse at mile 39 in mid-June 2002.
From a business standpoint, these criminal activities by the company's security forces are extremely disadvantageous to Freeport shareholders' interests. Although Freeport management is aware of these cases, the corporation has taken no legal action against the perpetrators.
Freeport's lack of responsiveness is further demonstrated by its policy after the human rights violations in 1994-5. The Indonesian armed forces killed or disappeared 16 civilians, raped five local women, and tortured and arbitrarily detained dozens of other community members. While corporate management publicly stated its concern about the abuses on several occasions, Freeport continued to augment its relationship with the Indonesian military.
Since 1995, Freeport officials have claimed that Freeport's Contract of Work (COW) with the Indonesian government actually requires the company to provide logistical support to the Indonesian military and police. However, none of the company's COWs includes any such explicit stipulation.
Freeport's continual failure to act in response to human rights violations and other violent attacks in the lead up to the 31 August shootings, and even more interestingly, its failure to respond to criminal activities of the security forces against its own business interests, calls into question its security policy and its commitment to the protection of its employees and human rights more generally.
Elsham is concerned that this case will be dealt with in the same manner as the November 2001 assassination of Papuan leader Theys Eluay, which has resulted in the trial of Kopassus soldiers as individuals before a military tribunal, with no investigation into the decision-makers who ordered the killing or the state policies of which the killing was a result. Unless the policies of the Indonesian central government and Freeport security are investigated, human rights violations and attacks of this nature will continue with impunity.
Elsham (ElshamNewsService@jayapura.wasantara.net.id), founded in 1998, is based in Jayapura, West Papua. This article is extracted from a longer report issued on October 21, 2002. The full report can be obtained at Elsham's website www.geocities.com/elshamnewsservice. The army has threatened to sue Elsham for alleging army responsibility for the killings.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Sending Troops is not Going to Solve Regional Conflicts
Douglas Kammen
Indonesia is presently faced with large-scale conflicts in the regions of Aceh, West Papua, Ambon, and Central Sulawesi. The basic remedy of successive governments in the post-Suharto period has been to send more troops to these regions. There has been a steady and dramatic rise in the number of troops deployed since 1998. These additional troops have not ended the conflicts. In fact, they have set in motion a dangerous dynamic in which the military finds itself incapable of doing anything but sending more and more troops.
The Indonesian army is organised on the basis of a territorial structure. Paralleling the civilian bureaucracy, this structure extends from the twelve regional military commands down to the village-level babinsa. It serves as the army's instrument for policing society. Troops within the structure are intended to be strongly rooted to their area and are thus referred to as 'organic' troops. If a violent conflict within a region becomes too large for them to handle, the military high command in Jakarta dispatches what are called 'non-organic' troops from other territorial commands or combat troops from the army's Strategic Reserves (Kostrad) and Special Forces (Kopassus)
In responding to the armed movements for independence in Aceh and West Papua and the Christian-Muslim violence in Ambon, Central Kalimantan, and Central Sulawesi, the military has relied on the deployment of 'non-organic' and Kostrad troops. Indeed, the military seems to have no other strategy.
Deployments
Since the fall of President Suharto in 1998 the military has sharply increased the number of troops deployed from all service branches (the army, air force, navy, and police). I will consider only army deployments in this essay since they constitute the vast bulk of the troops.
In 1998, in addition to the territorial units already in conflict zones, the army deployed at least 28 additional battalions to East Timor, Aceh and Papua. Non-organic troops were predominant in East Timor and Aceh while Kostrad troops were predominant in Papua.
In 1999, deployment increased to at least 29 battalions. While the number of troops in East Timor remained roughly the same as the previous year, it dropped in both Aceh and Papua and increased in Ambon in response to the outbreak of communal violence there.
In 2000, troop deployment further increased to at least 40 battalions. That increase took place despite the commitment of President Wahid, who took office in October 1999, to find negotiated solutions to separatism and ethnic-religious conflict. Those 40 battalions represented nearly one third of total Army troop strength. Remarkably, the Moluccan islands received the greatest number (15 non-organic and 4 Kostrad battalions), followed by Aceh (7 non-organic battalions), Papua (7 Kostrad battalions), West Timor (2 non-organic and 4 Kostrad battalions), and Poso (3 non-organic battalions).
The following year, 2001, at least 57 battalions were deployed to handle regional violence. This included a sharp increase in Aceh (8 non-organic and 6 Kostrad battalions), a modest increase in West Timor (5 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions), a significant decrease in Papua (2 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions), a larger increase in Ambon (21 non-organic battalions but only 1 Kostrad battalion), as well as stable numbers in Poso (3 non-organic battalions) and new deployments to Central Kalimantan (3 non-organic and 2 Kostrad battalions).
With improvements in Poso, Central Kalimantan, and Papua, the total number of battalions deployed in 2002 has dropped to 44. This includes 14 non-organic and 3 Kostrad battalions in Ambon and 13 non-organic and 8 Kostrad battalions in Aceh, and lower levels in West Timor and Papua.
In viewing the army's deployments, it is clear that the military's strategy to handle regional conflicts has been to throw more and more troops at them. In the four years from 1998 to 2001, the number of non-territorial battalions sent to conflict areas jumped from 28 to 57. Counting territorial troops as well as non-organic and Kostrad battalions, more than half of the Army's battalions are now bogged down in Aceh, Papua, Ambon, and along the border with East Timor. Still other units are on alert for the return of the Islamic organisation Laskar Jihad from Ambon to East Java and the safeguarding of Bali in the wake of the 12 October bombing. Other battalions have been confined to barracks because of disciplinary infractions. Escalation is reaching its limits.
A vicious cycle
The experience of the past four years suggests that the military now finds itself caught in a vicious cycle of escalation and deescalation. The logic works something like this. When regional violence increases, the military responds by sending more external troops to the region. But given the competing chains of command, the poor training of troops, the military's own deeply entrenched business interests, and the ambiguous mission assigned to the troops ('restore order'), escalation invariably leads to atrocities. When atrocities occur, civilian and military elites frequently respond by reducing the number of external troops. But this reduction creates a situation conducive to new atrocities either by the military or the local combatants. Then the cycle begins again.
Let us look more closely at this cycle of escalation-atrocity-deescalation-atrocity-reescalation. In Aceh, there was a deescalation in August 1998 when President Habibie ordered the withdrawal of external troops. In the months that followed, the remaining troops committed a series of massacres, perhaps to impress upon the Acehnese that the withdrawal did not signal a weakening of the military's resolve. The Bantaqiah massacre of July 1999, in which soldiers shot and killed 71 civilians, was the most brazen atrocity during this wave of repression. The reescalation was not immediate. President Wahid attempted to prevent the military from reescalating but he was finally forced to back down.
The reescalation in Aceh began with the creation of a new Operations Implementation Command (Komando Pelaksanaan Operasi, abbreviated Kolakops) in early 2001. Deployments of external troops began soaring. The military elite viewed the creation of Kolakops as a necessary means of ensuring that there was a single chain of command to oversee both the territorial military apparatus and external troops. A year later Kolakops was replaced by the Iskandar Muda Regional Military Command.
The same cycle can be seen in Ambon. After the first outbreak of violence in early 1999, the government began sending large numbers of external troops there. To deal with the incoming troops, the military reestablished the Pattimura Regional Military Command in May 1999. Its task was to coordinate the activities of the territorial military units and the increasing number of external troops. After a number of atrocities, the army in 2001 reduced the number of battalions from Kostrad and East Java which were seen to be siding with the Muslim population. But this change in troop deployments did not reduce the conflict. The separatist organisation, the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS), issued a militant declaration in early 2002 which led to a new massacre of civilians. And so, as was the case in Aceh, the military responded by sending more troops and establishing yet another command, the Restoration of Security Operation Command (Komando Operasi Pemulihan Keamanan).
Strangely, the majority of battalions deployed to Ambon over the past two years have been artillery, engineering, and cavalry battalions, rather than regular infantry battalions. According to sources in Ambon, these battalions have been utilised because the army is short-handed. These units resent being posted as peace-keepers, something for which they were not trained. But that does not mean that they have neglected their own specialisations: sources report that both the Christian and Muslim communities have gained much of their expertise in assembling bombs and weapons from the artillery units on duty in Ambon.
As for Papua, the cycle has not yet run its full course there. While the first several stages have been evident in Papua, the military has thus far not sought to reescalate. Perhaps the generals in Jakarta fear that any attempt to assert centralised military control over Papua would result in increased tensions between the well-entrenched Special Forces and non-organic or Kostrad units.
This trajectory of escalation-atrocity-deescalation-atrocity-reescalation in Aceh, Ambon, and Papua is all too reminiscent of the last decade of Indonesian rule in East Timor. Lacking alternative means for resolving the root causes of conflict, military deescalation invariably leads to new atrocities by either the military or the local insurgents. The subsequent renewal of violence only seems to confirm the view - one held not only by the military but also by many civilian elites - that the military is the only institution capable of containing violence, and hence of preserving Indonesian unity. And thus escalation begins once again.
Civil-military relations
The steady rise in military deployments within Indonesia since May 1998 has led many observers to conclude that the military has new designs on political power. It is undoubtedly true that the military is in a stronger political position today than at any time over the past two decades (including the late Suharto era!), but this does not necessarily mean that the military is scheming to seize state power.
Rather, the dramatic increase in troop deployments reflects the failure of civilian elites to assert their supremacy over the military and to offer non-military solutions to the country's pressing regional problems. The civilian elites have been relying on the military to find solutions to the conflicts in Aceh, Papua, Ambon, and Poso. But passing the buck will not end the violence.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Page 57 of 67
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