Early days -- of strong coffee and tight censorship

Early days -- of strong coffee and tight censorship

Bill Tarrant, Singapore

The phone call came at around 10:30 p.m., after the paper had
been put to bed. The voice on the other end of the line
identified himself as an Indonesian military spokesman.

The Jakarta Post had just started publication a few weeks
before. I was the late duty editor, a young consultant armed
with a master's degree in journalism and a few years on a Florida
newspaper. I had come to Indonesia to visit my brother and do a
little freelancing, but now found myself helping to launch what
was soon to become Indonesia's premier English language daily.

"Do you have a report about a bombing of the army barracks in
Palembang?" the spokesman asked.

We hadn't heard that, I said, grabbing a pen to take notes and
thinking how to retool the front-page layout to accommodate this
late breaking story..

"Good," he said. "It's only a rumor. It's not true and you
must not print anything on it."

Sifting rumor from fact was both an art and science in
Soeharto's Indonesia of the early 1980s. The Jakarta Post was
launched in April 1983 at the start of a new five-year Cabinet
with the aim of taking a straight-forward journalistic approach
to the news of the day, without crossing danger lines.

We began with a crew of veteran Indonesia correspondents, many
of whom had worked for foreign news organizations. We drilled for
a month on unfamiliar editing and layout skills, putting out mock
editions of the paper every day, turning grotesque pages in the
beginning to simple, clean and uncluttered efforts at the end.

The newspaper, designed to appeal to foreigners and well
educated Indonesians had several innovations: eight comic strips
on a lifestyle page, an "odd world" column on the front page,
extensive use of photos and graphics, and a modular page design
and organization not unlike the International Herald Tribune.

The newspaper quickly established a reputation for its well-
reasoned and sometimes hard-hitting editorials under the
direction of chief editor Sabam Siagan. Foreign news agencies
often quoted them. The Trib began excerpting the Post's
editorials in its "Other Opinion" column.

As an English-language newspaper, we had a little more room to
push the parameters of press freedom in Indonesia, but not that
much. We debated whether to put photos of South Korean
demonstrations against the strongman gov ernment of Gen. Chun
Doo-hwan on the front page or inside. How to play the fall of
Marcos and the rise of "people power" in the Philippines? Street
demonstrations against the Soeharto regime were unthinkable then.

In those days, the press censors were a busy, and sometimes
capricious lot. Mention of all things Chinese was usually blacked
out in foreign publications coming into Indonesia. (A story about
Hong Kong's subway system had printer's ink smeared all over a
photo of a subway sign with Chinese characters - it could have
been a secret code!).

Opposition activities were taboo; discussion of human rights
issues circumscribed.

And for the uninitiated American making his first trip abroad,
there were so many mysteries, some grim, some wonderful.

Within weeks of the paper's launch and the start of Soeharto's
fourth five-year term, the press began reporting "mysterious
killings". Bullet-riddled bodies of criminals with a history of
violence were found floating in canals and rivers, their hands
and feet tied with fishing wire. Then armed forces commander
Benny Moerdani called it the work of avenging angels.

In the months to come, a series of mysterious fires and
bombings, later blamed on Islamic militants, exposed early
fissures in the Soeharto regime. Troops killed a number of
rioters in Tanjung Priok port. A Bank Central Asia branch in
Chinatown was bombed.

A plot to bomb the great Buddhist Borobudur complex in Central
Java was uncovered. Another plot to assassinate Soeharto in his
car on the way to work from his Jl. Cendana residence was foiled.

Islamic militants were blamed and authorities began a
crackdown. Hardliners like Abu Bakar Bashir fled the country.
They were the first sprouts of Islamic militancy in the otherwise
placid landscape of Soeharto's New Order.

Mainly, however, this was Suharto's gilded period under
"guided democracy".

Indonesia's economy was picking up steam, opening up to
foreign investment led by a cadre of New Order technocrats..
Jakarta was playing a more influential role on the regional and
world stages, particularly over the Cambodian issue. Political
opposition was virtually nonexistent.

The country could afford to indulge more benign mysteries,
such as those related to Javanese mysticism, which was also a
Soeharto avocation.. In those early days, the Post covered,
perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, an eruption of sightings of
tuyul -- invisible child-like imps who are pickpocket artists -
in East Java.

We invented a persona named "Epicurus", a curmudgeonly and
somewhat libidinous character who did restaurant reviews,
haranguing bemused waiters at Jakarta's culinary establishments
with 19th century tips on dining etiquette ("Always eat peas
with a dessert spoon; and curry also.").

The strength and endurance of Indonesia's culture was in
inverse proportion to the profound indifference of many
Westerners, especially Americans, to the nation's existence. That
was a constant source of frustration to Jakarta's establishment,
who tirelessly pointed out that the resource-rich archipelago of
13,000 islands straddles key sea lanes linking the Pacific and
Indian Oceans and is now the world's fourth most populous
country.

Indeed, one of the original missions of the Post was to
reflect the dynamic face of Indonesia to the world ("The Journal
of Indonesia Today"), while deflecting the country's own
tendencies toward introspection. Indonesia, after all, was the
West's anti-communist strategic ally in an otherwise turbulent
region; its resources and human numbers making it "a sleeping
giant".

We had offices, loaned to us from Kompas whose massive
compound was on the other side of Jl Palmerah Selatan.
Typewriters were the state of the art technology in the newsroom.
We did layouts on pieces of paper the size of a broadsheet
newspaper, and typed out headlines and captions.

We worked 12-15 hour days in the beginning and I drank kopi
bubuk (coffee in the traditional Indonesian style) by the gallon,
served Jakarta style in tall glasses with metal lids. I never had
a beverage with a metal lid before. They are quite useful, as I
found out one time when I neglected to cap my drink and felt the
fly swimming frantically in my mouthful of coffee, expelling it
with a shout of startled horror on my finished layout.

The windows were often open, letting in the Jakarta symphony -
kaki limas (street vendors) with their distinctive cries, toots
and whistles; blaring car horns and bird songs. Inside, was the
clattering of teleprinters.

Unlike other newspapers, the policy of the Post was not to
accept "envelopes" the money routinely given at the end of press
conferences for "carfare" and "lunch". The envelopes implied that
journalists, like all other segments of society, were expected to
do their part in nation-building under the New Order. The
government gave newspapers a license to publish and could take it
away if publications did not toe the line.

In Indonesia those days, information was guarded and much of
it secret and therefore journalists were special. They knew what
others did not but had to be careful how they spent that
particular currency. As far as the government was concerned, the
country had seen factions, conflict and blood-letting in the name
of freedom and democracy and the press had a responsibility to
help the New Order keep order.

When then French president Francois Mitterrand came to
Indonesia in 1986, he and Soeharto went to Bandung to address
students who had studied in France. The AFP story described
students chanting liberte, liberte and waving anti-government
placards.

It caused ripples of excitement in the newsroom, but no
Indonesian newspaper could report that story or show a photo of
the two leaders against a background of anti-government
protesters. We knew that even before the man from the Ministry of
Information called.

Instead, we had blanket coverage of the "people power"
protests in Manila that day.

Our mantra was that of former vice president Adam Malik, who
was fond of saying: "Everything is possible, and everything is
impossible in Indonesia".

(Bill Tarrant was at The Jakarta Post from April 1983 to March
1986. He has been a correspondent in Asia for Reuters since
1986.)