Asian press needs more say

Asian press needs more say

By Goenawan Mohamad

This is an abridged version of an Avery Lecture given at
Pomona College on Oct. 28. It was presented in conjunction with
an international conference on "Media in the Asia Pacific World.
Press and Politics in Economic Crisis".

CLAREMONT, California: Indonesia is currently in a political
transition from an authoritarian regime to a confusing state of
waiting. The headlines of the world media continue to describe
the country as a huge area of economic collapse and of large-
scale brutality. No doubt, both the economic meltdown and the
sudden end of Soeharto's dictatorial rule have contributed to the
breakdown of social order.

I am not saying that anarchy prevails in Indonesia. Yet
everyone seems to have all the reasons to take the law into his
or her own hands. The state is no longer the authority; legal
institutions are too corrupt to be credible and society is
suffering from a political paranoia.

Three months ago there was a harrowing story of looting and
rape of Chinese-Indonesians. An influential group of activists
believes there was an organized power behind the crime. The
allegation, provoking fear of an unknown evil force, is yet to be
substantiated, but it has also not been convincingly refuted.

Last night I read an AP dispatch with another story of
violence and fear. A mob beat three people to death and set fire
to their car after accusing them of being involved in a wave of
mysterious killings. The region has been shaken by the slayings
of more than 150 people in the past three months, many of them
suspected of practicing black magic. The mysterious killers are
said to wear black ninja-like clothing. Fear prevails in many
towns, with vigilante groups targeting strangers and even
mentally ill people who they suspect are behind the killings.

This kind of paranoia is clearly the sequel to Indonesia's
history of repression. Contrary to common belief, the major
feature of Soeharto's dictatorship was not a social surveillance
conducted rigorously by proficient military and bureaucratic
machines. It stayed in power for more than three decades because
it was successful in managing social trauma.

Most Indonesians of my generation always remember their
generally hapless past and the political violence of the 1960s,
when thousands of people were killed in an anti-Communist purge.
This act of atrocity has never been brought to light, let alone
put on trial, and what remains is the terror of shrouded
yesterdays. Soeharto's regime liked to keep the terror in the
nation's mind. It constantly cautioned the people of the danger
of political instability and sent warning signals against
"subversive element".

Paradoxically, it was the regime's arbitrary character (marked
by its scant regard of due process and its porous, corruption-
ridden bureaucracy), that reminded the people of the vagary of
life under such a political structure. The structure made it
possible that one's personal existence can be transformed into
something else at the caprice of the people in power.

In such a perpetual sense of insecurity, political paranoia
easily sinks in. Inevitably, today's Indonesian politics is badly
scarred by a rampant growth of conspiracy theories, created both
by government's spies and their enemies. Curiously, people seem
to like them. It has the allure of old-fashioned superstition.

Previously, they were thrilled by ghost stories. Today, they
love to listen to rumors of clandestine operations of various
kinds. Probably this is their way of defending themselves from
the intrusion of a chaotic world. They accept anything in order
to create a pattern out of today's complex, jumbled and
unpleasant inflow of information.

However, political paranoia is a case of fear-generating fear.
Some analysts may suggest that a freer inflow of information,
carried by free media, is the best antidote to the disease. Maybe
it is. But allow me to add a caveat.

Every time a reporter steps into the arena of free expression,
he or she has to deal with the limited nature of his or her
narration. The media necessarily projects the world as a
homogeneous space. In a sense, every news item, no matter how
well researched and elegantly written, is a part of the economy
of remembrance. By the economy of remembrance I mean the way
readers, viewers, listeners and journalists maximize the use of
the past out of minimum memory input.

From this perspective, journalism cannot claim the validity of
its truth. A newspaper or a news broadcast is by no means a
signifier of "the truth, nothing but the truth". Like the most
fantastic conspiracy theory, it has only a limited space to
accommodate the real world. Journalism becomes an antidote to
political paranoia not because of its truth-content, but because
of its innate skepticism.

Therefore, as far as journalism is concerned, the demand for
more freedom of expression should go together with the need for
more freedom to doubt. To be sure, on many sides of the Pacific,
people have dreams and nightmares about an intellectual minority
who likes to make skepticism a profession. Accordingly, a
journalist's job has to deal not only with government censorship.
From time to time, it has also to cope with the wrath of the
faithful and the anger of the ideologues. Hence the necessity of
a high quality of public debate.

This brings me to the issue of responsibility. In my view,
given the current political economy of the media, in which
government and/or business interests are the ones that have the
capacity to rule the roost, the insistence on journalistic
freedom is at the same time the insistence on journalistic
responsibility.

To be responsible one has to be free. Parrots and robots
cannot claim responsibility for whatever they say and do, because
they just copy and follow others' words. This is an important
point to stress, since the most often-used apology for censorship
tends to pit the idea of freedom against the idea of
responsibility.

To be sure, there are ethical considerations a journalist has
to be aware of every time he or she writes and gets published.
But the substance of ethics is self-restraint (the emphasis is on
"self"). It necessarily presupposes freedom. What one ought to do
and not to do is decided in the solitude of one's independence.

However, this is not an exercise of solitariness. I am
persuaded to think that basically, ethical issues are born out of
the human sense of contiguity with the "Other". When you have
power, or when you write and publish, the first question about
the "Other" is not whether he or she is the one to read and
respond, but whether he or she is the one to suffer. And most
likely, she or he will be one of those who have no means to speak
and defend themselves.

Of course, in many countries in the Pacific, the press is by
no means equivalent to the Fourth Estate. Politically, the media,
especially the print media, does not yet belong to the big
leagues. When election results are either rigged or illegally
collected, when public opinion is often generated by oral
communication (with various degrees of brainwashing), and not by
an eloquent prose on the editorial page, the press can only have
a very limited claim on political life and its changes. To borrow
Anthony Sampson's description of British journalism, one can say
that many newspapers in Asia are not the extension of history,
but of conversation.

Still, it is an important piece of public conversation. At
least it can raise, or give room to, pertinent questions,
opposing views and perspectives, and challenge the monotony of
lies. In a society where the ruling elite tends to dictate the
style and the substance of discourse, the so-called harmony -- a
highly valued thing in Asian societies, they say -- tends to
silence the weak. The is especially true when fear is widespread
and takes the edge off any meaningful public debate. It is not in
anybody's interest to let people who have the monopoly of
violence in society go unchecked and become murderers and
torturers. It should be everybody's concern when people having
the monopoly of words get away with their deceit.

Journalists and the mass media may not change this overnight.
As I pointed out earlier, in many countries in Asia, the press is
not a powerful political player. But I like to think that their
submissive and weak appearance is like that of water. Allow me to
quote Lao-Tse, the Chinese philosopher: "In the world there is
nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking
that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."

Goenawan Mohamad is chief editor of the newly resurrected
Tempo magazine.