Journalism and political struggle: Soeryono 1927-2000

By Aboeprijadi Santoso

AMSTERDAM (JP): Journalism only thrives with freedom as fish do with water. But what if freedom still had to be fought for? At the time of Indonesia's independence revolution, the press was inevitably caught up in the political struggle to secure freedom and mobilize the people. The death of the journalist and freedom fighter Soeryono is an untimely reminder of that struggle and the Cold War era.

Few Indonesians today have heard of him. Long forgotten, Soeryono (born Feb. 27, 1927) passed away on Sept. 26 in Amsterdam. He left a son, a faithful brother, and many Dutch and Indonesian friends.

The dynamics of state and society deeply colored his life. Born in Prambanan, "Bung (brother) Soer", as he liked to be called, was brought up in Blitar amid momentous change as the great crisis of the 1930s hit the world and national consciousness grew.

At 73, he died in exile shortly before the 35th anniversary of the Sept. 30 coup attempt, which dealt the death blow to his party, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and drastically changed his life.

He went through the hardships of living under colonial regimes and enduring great poverty and then became involved in the revolutionary struggle in East and Central Java. Up to 1964, he was a politically passionate journalist in Jakarta. He then became trapped in exile in China and Soviet Union, and since 1989 has been living as a lonely, controversial and physically infirm old man in Amsterdam.

"The day the Allied forces landed in Normandy, I was released by the Japanese army," Soeryono, a faithful radio listener, once recalled.

But he had to regularly report to the Japanese military police, the Kempetai, who remained powerful despite Japan's capitulation in August 1945. So he challenged both the common wisdom that there was a vacuum of power, and the Dutch view that Indonesian nationalists had collaborated with the Japanese fascists. "We really had to fight to secure our freedom," he insisted.

"The first thing we did when we heard the news of the (independence) proclamation by Bung Karno (the future president Soekarno) was to seize state offices."

He then became involved in the publication of political pamphlets, spreading news of the proclamation to the people, and later led the Magelang-based daily Penghela Rakyat (The People's Vanguard) which had a circulation of 1,500 copies -- a wide circulation for that time.

As an activist, he joined the war on Nov. 10, 1945 (Indonesia's Heroes' Day). As a member of Socialist Youth (Pesindo), he personally was acquainted with Indonesia's first socialist leaders, Sutan Sjahrir and Amir Syarifuddin.

He admired both and once helped Sjahrir to smuggle weapons. He could vividly describe Sjahrir's frequent arrivals by train at Yogyakarta's Tugu station -- memorable moments for his contemporaries.

Recalling social conditions at the time of the revolution, he cried for a couple of seconds, saying few today could have imagined "the great sacrifice of the Indonesian people who were poor and down-trodden."

As a young writer in the 1950s, he was involved in a polemic through the pages of the weekly Revolusioner (The Revolutionary) with the then minister of finance Jusuf Wibisono.

As a journalist, he knew many leaders. He served, so he claimed, as a bridge between president Soekarno and the PKI, but the party cut this link and sent him in 1964 to Beijing as a sports correspondent for the party's daily Harian Rakjat. When the event of Sept. 30, 1965 occurred, he felt it was fatal for the Left.

In any case, it became fatal for his journalistic career as he started to be critical of the party authorities. Five years compulsory "reeducation" at the party's military school in Nanking was like a prison; "We learned the thoughts of Mao Zhe- dong like we learn the Bible. That was wrong."

Then he fled from the Cultural Revolution to Moscow. But, "as a reporter, I took a lot of trouble to keep my ears open," he said in a letter to Benedict Anderson, an Indonesia specialist at Cornell University, in 1979.

A rebel in changing times, he became isolated. In the late- 1980s, a Dutch journalist discovered him at the Peredelkino Home for Party Veterans outside Moscow. His only contact with the outside world was listening to the BBC and Radio Netherlands and writing letters to specialists on Indonesia. Thanks to the efforts of the Dutch publishers Jan Mets and Willem Piet in 1989, he was relocated to Amsterdam.

Many academic researchers on Indonesian left-wing movements turned to Soeryono to check their facts, but he himself left few written testimonies. His last written work was a review of a Dutch book on Soeharto in the mid-1980s. There are many letters and interviews, but they are scattered. He was just about to tell his full story shortly before he was hospitalized.

In a university journal, he blamed the PKI leadership -- under Sudisman "the King Maker" -- for the bad shape of the party that led to the 1965 debacle. To the dismay of many, he compared the party to Soeharto's Golkar: either way, with these kinds of leaders, Indonesia was bound to fall into serious crises.

So, there is no need, he said, to be overly burdened by the past. Rather one needs to concentrate on a long-term program of building a strong economy.

Commenting on the polemic between writers Pramoedya Ananta Toer -- who flatly rejected President Abdurrahman Wahid's apology for the events of 1965-1966 -- and Gunawan Mohammad, Soeryono sided with the latter, saying Abdurrahman's gesture was very significant, and as the president paid a political price for his move, it should be respected.

Bung Soer struck many as an independent minded and intellectually intriguing man, a journalist with a strong memory, and a compatriot with a great love for his country and a deep concern for its people. He was sharp and straightforward, and, thus, in many ways controversial.

Whatever the merits of his views and political beliefs, up to the end, he remained what he always was -- a Marxist fighter, a Javanese and an Indonesian. It is only fitting that, as a farewell, his body was dressed in batik, with a Mao Zhe-dong cap and red star, and placed in a coffin that was draped with Indonesia's red and white flag.

He was buried in Kruislaan, East Amsterdam, sharing -- ironically -- the same cemetery as Gen. J.B. van Heutsz, once the symbol of Dutch imperialism in Indonesia.

Soeryono's experience highlights the role of journalism as an integral part of the nation's struggle. As a consequence, once independence was achieved, the profession of journalism inevitably was confronted by the dynamic, often tragic, course of the Cold War.

Today, physical revolution is much shorter. In 1989, it took 10 months for the communist dictatorship in Poland to crumble and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, only a few weeks for the East German, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian and Rumanian regimes, to follow suit. People Power, in tandem with the alternative press, rendered ineffectual the efforts of the official press.

In each case, the state television became the next target after the parliament. Very recently, Slobodan Milosevic's powerful mouthpieces, the state television channel and the daily Politika, were razed during a one-day popular revolt in Belgrade.

As globalization proceeds apace, human rights and journalistic activities are tending to become interlinked both within and beyond national boundaries. Most journalists today, even those associated with former regimes, have survived political upheavals as their job has become less and less integrated with the current national cause than in the past -- a world more fragmented, but more humane than in Soeryono's days.

The writer is a journalist, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.