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)