One generation, two kinds of political trials

Max Lane, Visiting Fellow, Center for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

Akbar Tandjung has finally been sentenced to three years in gaol. He was given a light sentence because, the judges said, he did not benefit personally from the corruption. Both Akbar and many of the members of the Golkar party in the legislature maintain, however, that he has not been proved guilty yet.

There will only be final proof of guilt, they say, when the appeal process is completed and if then he is still found guilty. So he remains Speaker of the House of Representatives and is still undertaking state functions, such as visiting Vietnam for the International Parliamentary Union meeting.

Akbar has been in politics a long time. He was a student activist in the 1970s belonging to the Association of Islamic Students (HMI). He even took part in anti-corruption activities and once, at least, joined a student delegation to meet president Soeharto to discuss the corruption issue. He later went on to become a central leader and indeed chairperson of the Indonesian National Youth Committee (KNPI), the youth organization officially favored by the Soeharto-Golkar dictatorship of the New Order. Later he joined Golkar and became a Golkar leader and served in the Cabinet under Soeharto.

But Akbar is not the only person from that generation of student activists, the 1970s, who has been brought to court. In the 1970s period itself, some of the same students who went with Akbar to see Soeharto were also put on trial. These were Sjahrir, not actually a student then but a young, new lecturer at the University of Indonesia; Hariman Siregar, then chairperson of that university's students council, and Aini Chalid, a student leader from Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.

They were not put on trial for corruption, however, but for opposing corruption. They were all found guilty under the anti- subversion laws, so often used by the New Order. Of course, they had all done a major service to their country by organizing protest actions against corruption, and also against the economic policies that led to Indonesia becoming dependent of foreign loans and foreign markets.

But, unlike with Akbar, their service to their country did not get them out of jail while they appealed their sentences. They were considered guilty from the moment of their conviction, not from the time of their appeal hearings. They languished in prison for between two years to four years each.

And their trials were different also. Take the trial of Aini Chalid, for example. Aini set an example that is still worth valuing today. I recently met him again in Manila where he is a successful businessman. I remembered then his famous summing up for the defense: A one minute statement rejecting the whole trial as the political theater of the intelligence agencies, devoid of any real justice.

He was being tried under the Anti-Subversion Law, which potentially brought the death penalty. Yet, he dared face the court without a lawyer -- the first such act of defiance in an Indonesian court. Why have a lawyer for a piece of theater, he told me in Manila.

I saw some of the sessions of his trial in 1975. Witnesses, called for the prosecution, tried to help Aini by avoiding confirming that he had said that Soeharto or his wife were corrupt.

"Excuse me, Mr. Witness," Aini would add, "You have forgotten that I also said that Mrs. Tien Soeharto also took 10 percent commission on everything"; "Excuse me, Mr. Witness, we did mean that manifesto to insult the President." Aini's defense did not resort to pleading or crying: He stood up for the ideas he believed in then.

By the time he was released from prison, the protest movement had collapsed. Unable to find a vehicle to fight the regime, he decided to hijrah, to move out of Indonesia.

The protest movement did not revive again until the late 1980s. The new wave produced a new generation of people who stood up and defended themselves and their ideas in court: Budiman Sujatmiko, Dita Indah Sari, M. Saleh, Coen Pontoh, Yenni Rosa Damayanti and several more. Like Aini Chalid and Akbar Tandjung in the 1970s, they were student activists.

Like Aini, they were tried for "crimes" of opposition, not corruption. Being with or being against the New Order regime seems to make all the difference when it comes to political values and political culture.