The past, even in Indonesia, is a foreign country: they did things differently there. The downfall in 1998 of the 32-year Suharto ‘New Order’ regime seemed to mark the border as clearly as would a checkpoint and a queue for immigration. This side of the boundary, Indonesia enjoys liberties, a raucous free-for-all of competing ideas and the luxury of democratic choice. On the other side lurked repression, rigged elections, stifled opinions and a long list of banned books. So it is odd and not a little disturbing, in this last respect, to find the freely elected government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono not doing things differently at all. In December the attorney-general’s office banned five books. The government is looking at proscribing a further 20, which might, it frets, prove a threat to “national unity”.
If this is continuity, there’s also an attempt to disguise it. Most of the books in question are histories, guidebooks to parts of that foreign country which the government still wants to keep out of bounds. One tackles the mysterious atrocities that still haunt Indonesia: the massacre of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists and others as Suharto consolidated his power in 1965-66. Few horrors have been so unexamined.
Back in 1998 the late Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s greatest novelist, a prison-camp veteran who was by then a deaf and cantankerous but still eloquent old man, enjoyed a moment of untypical optimism. At last, he believed, the truth about 1965 would come out. He dismissed the usual guess of up to 500,000 deaths, claiming there had been 2 million. Now that Suharto had gone, there was no reason the truth had to lie buried with the many dead. Today Pramoedya’s books, at least, are unbanned. But had he lived, he would be raging against the incompleteness of reformasi (reformation) and the resilience of censorship.
Nor is 1965 the only forbidden territory. Also banned (censors do not do irony) is a book called Lekra Doesn’t Burn Books, a reference to a leftist cultural institute, very influential in the early 1960s, to which Pramoedya belonged and which was later demonised by the Suharto regime. Another banned volume covers Indonesia’s controversial annexation of Papua in 1969. An Australian film (Balibo) has also been banned.
Yet far from sliding back to the authoritarian ways of the past, Indonesia now has arguably the freest and most vibrant press in South-east Asia. ‘Law number 4’, passed in 1963 to sanction fierce censorship, was lifted for the press in 1999.
So, though books, pamphlets and posters remain under the censor’s thumb, newspapers and magazines have proliferated. They report the latest political intrigues involving President Yudhoyono with little restraint. The attorney-general’s office is reportedly also mulling a ban on a book claiming campaign-finance violations by the president last year. But as soon as this became known hawkers started flogging pirated versions across Jakarta. Indonesia has more than 30 million Indonesian internet-users, with access to every fact, theory and guess about their country’s recent past. The censors’ argument —the one used by their peers everywhere — is that the banned works might divide the nation and lead to bloodshed. That does not hold water, for censorship no longer works.
More fundamentally, the book bans hint at the identity crisis suffered by Indonesia’s political elite. The Yudhoyono regime is rightly proud of its other democratic and liberal credentials. But it is not willing to declare a complete break with the past. The president himself is a New Order general who served in East Timor. Both the main opposing presidential tickets in last year’s election featured another Suharto-era general (each with a murkier reputation). It is easy to understand why they are unwilling to confront the past. But until they do — and repudiate parts of it — Indonesia’s democratic transformation will always seem provisional, and the past not so much a foreign country as the place where its leaders still live.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)