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.