Officials urged to stop making flimsy statements

Officials urged to stop making flimsy statements

SEMARANG, Central Java: A well-known human rights activist
assailed government officials yesterday for issuing flimsy
statements on the danger of "formless" organizations.

Muladi said the officials have repeated their statements on
countless occasions but failed to define or identify the scary
"formless" organizations. This, he said, has confused citizens
and even caused a degree of the public unrest that officials are
trying to prevent.

"Government officials should try to refrain from making any
more statements that could cause public resentment," he told The
Jakarta Post.

Over the past few weeks, the local media has been reporting
official warnings on the latent danger of communism and the anti-
government elements that may have infiltrated various
institutions.

Senior military officials also warned that the so-called
communists are disguising their subversive activities as legal
campaigns to defend workers and human rights.

Muladi, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights
and rector of Diponegoro University, insisted that the government
define the meaning of a "formless organization."

He pointed out that the public is quite accustomed to the
officials and their tendency to blow up issues like the danger of
communism for political purposes, especially during the run-up to
election time. Similar maneuvers were also carried out in the
past, he said.

The government sees a serious challenge to repeating its
landslide majority victory in the 1992 election and is trying to
convince the public of why they should maintain the status quo,
he said.

"If the government gives a clear definition, people will be
able to determine for themselves if they have been influenced by
communism," he said, adding that communist infiltration into
organizations is possible.

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Syarwan Hamid, the assistant to the ABRI
Chief of Social and Political Affairs, said on an unrelated
occasion that the government means to caution the people and not
scare them with the warnings.

"We feel that communists are appearing again. They use
techniques similar to ones they employed in 1965," he said when
addressing student activists in Semarang last week.

He said the government is worried that the younger generation
loves literary works by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a former activist
in Lekra, a cultural institution backed by the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) in the 1960s.

The youths, he said, did not experience the bitter aftermath
of the 1965 coup attempt launched by the now outlawed PKI.

The government, which has banned most of Pramoedya's books,
warns that the writer -- who won this year's Magsaysay Award for
literary excellence -- is spreading communist messages.

"Youngsters tend to believe that anything he (Pramoedya)
writes is right. This is dangerous," he said.

In Surabaya, Amien Rais, chairman of the Muhammadiyah, a mass
Moslem organization, defended the government's policy to keep the
public aware of the danger of communism.

With "formless" organizations, he said, the government is in
fact referring to "night communists", whose activities are
underground and "very dangerous."

"Day communists have complete lists of their members. Night
communists are those who have little grasp of Marxism and
Leninism but think that the teachings are scientific," he was
quoted by the Antara news agency yesterday.

According to Amien, it would be useless to try reviving
communism in Indonesia because local activists no longer have
strong connections with their comrades in China or Russia.

"Their efforts to insert communism in their works show that
communists have no strong network," he said. (har/pan)