Pakpahan relishing life on the outside

By Ati Nurbaiti

JAKARTA (JP): The sun was shining on a small garden with a tiny brook and bridge reminiscent of Japanese landscaping. The view was irresistible to Muchtar Pakpahan, who was released May 25, after his year-long bed-rest and five months behind prison walls.

"Can we stand over there?" he pleaded with television reporters preparing to shoot an interview. "It's been quite some time since I've seen a garden."

No, the light was not favorable, he was told. He had just opened a seminar held by SBSI, the Indonesian Prosperous Labor Union, at the building of the Indonesian Family Planning Association. Another function was going on in the neighboring room. As the camera rolled, participants in civil servants' uniforms were in a coffee break.

Pakpahan seized the opportunity -- and so did they.

In the budding "reform era" civil servants have recently, in a few sporadic incidents, expressed courage rarely seen in the previous three decades.

Jostling state employees joined Pakpahan on air as he said, "... as long as civil servants must join Korpri (the compulsory civil servants' organization under the Golkar ruling party), they will never struggle for the betterment of their welfare. Their wages ..."

A pretty employee butted in, "And rice! The rice is awful!" and more colleagues approached.

"Yes, and their monthly ransom of rice ..." he complied.

He continued, "... also, because civil servants are entitled to the state's Astek health insurance, they should be served first, and not ..."

"like second class citizens!" interjected an elderly man.

When the camera was switched off he continued his "campaign" with the employees of the National Land Agency.

Convinced

"Now you can shake my hand without fear anymore," he said, offering his hand, "Join SBSI, or set up your own unions ... If one day I arrange my land documents with you, I will no longer have to pay you to get them processed," unlike civil servants in the past who would have succeeded in improving their wages and productivity, he said.

SBSI was officially registered as a union on June 1, six years after it was set up, and Pakpahan is now convinced that civil servants and other workers will have the pluck to join his union.

"The wall has crashed," he said of the end of the ban on SBSI. At the end of the week Pakpahan was scheduled to fly to Geneva to an International Labor Organization convention.

Unlike at earlier conventions, SBSI is now in the government delegation. Officials will no longer be embarrassed being seen with Pakpahan, who in an earlier convention turned up as he was invited by international unions.

Pakpahan said workers afraid to speak up against their superiors, or hesitant to join the only legal union under Soeharto, FSPSI (the Federation of the All Indonesian Workers Union), could now turn to SBSI.

His prison guards in Medan, where he was detained for allegedly instigating a riot in 1994, and in Cipinang, Jakarta, where he spent the last part of his term, are among the civil servants who have joined his union, he said.

Among the Cipinang guards' complaints was that they had become victims in the escape of convicted tycoon Eddy Tansil; the special treatment given to him was on the request of a senior official, Pakpahan said.

Pakpahan acknowledges the huge task facing the union following its official recognition: "We only have idealism and militancy, we are in dire need of intellectual and bargaining skills."

With this task in mind he repeats that SBSI, claiming a membership of 500,000, will never be a political party.

The two-day seminar, SBSI's first ever legal event, "and the first one in an air-conditioned room," he quipped, included the best minds in labor studies and labor practice. It was an immediate response to the union's challenge. "The results will serve as our platform for action," the chairman said.

His address to the seminar was strewn with apologies for his schedule: "After these few weeks, I will be back at home." He wasn't referring to his family -- "I'll be back with SBSI."

He told participants he understood that "political rhetoric" wouldn't help priorities like overcoming growing unemployment and lack of access to basic food supplies.

"But how can we improve the economy without taking care of politics first?"

He cited firsthand experience. "We've helped to set up foodstalls to help boost the income of laid-off workers." But few were buying meals: "Office people say now they try to have a full breakfast and bring something from home, or only eat some bread for lunch." Among the foodstalls is one set up by his wife under the Cikini train station in Central Jakarta, to supplement the family income since Pakpahan could no longer earn from university teaching.

Other people are afraid to open stalls in case mobs begin rampaging again, he said. "This is all because of the uncertain political conditions."

Pakpahan, who earned his doctorate in state administrative law from the University of Indonesia, has reiterated what he sees as necessary immediate changes such as those regarding elections.

Removing the police from the Armed Forces is one priority, to enable them to become law enforcers. "At present, they use the security approach and shoot first before investigating."

Another repeated appeal is "Please do not take over alleged stolen property yourselves, Soeharto's or anybody else's; let's leave it to the courts." The courts should also be made independent from the government immediately, he said.

God

Pakpahan cites "God's hand" in his risk-filled life. One example, he said, was when he was convicted for allegedly instigating labor riots in Medan in 1994, but then had to be hospitalized.

The resulting lung tumor, said the devout Christian, must have been God's doing; it led to international advocacy for his freedom and access to medical services. Most of his prison term was spent at the Cikini hospital. "And the C-3 ward became the center of SBSI meetings."

The tumor, he thinks, "disappeared the minute (former president) Soeharto stepped down."

He reflects that in prison "I increasingly understood what God expects of me."

It appears that Pakpahan's sincerity has won hearts although he has no experience of, for instance, organizing labor in a factory. He was once a self-employed pedicab driver in Medan to pay his way through university.

Born in Bah Jambi II, Tanah Jawa, in Simalungun, North Sumatra on Dec. 21, 1953, his father Sutan Johan Pakpahan died when he was 11; his mother Victoria Silalahi passed away a few years later. "I was brought up by my older brother; he's the only person that I have never opposed."

He says his achievement in gaining a bachelors degree in law was "strange" ("How could an orphan get a degree?") and he says he felt an obligation to the downtrodden.

He helped set up a few unions before finally founding SBSI in 1992. It gained popularity mainly because the legal union, then SPSI, frequently proved impotent, and also because it was banned.

SBSI gained an international reputation but Pakpahan and his secretary-general Sunarti, a former factory worker, remain modest and without pretensions. She giggled when Pakpahan, shouting into his mobile phone, turned out to be holding it upside down.

Also, Pakpahan's public addresses lack rhetoric but to most people that does not seem that necessary. At a strike by drivers of the state-owned PPD bus company, also on Wednesday, he basically told the crowd what SBSI understood their problems to be, what the proposed solution was, and enthusiastic roars filled the air.

Though modest, the labor leader is far from naive. He recites an unexpected causality of his mission; another brother lost his business because of Pakpahan's activities. "He begged me to help save his business. I was to sign a statement brought by the authorities that I would be loyal to the Constitution and Pancasila (the state ideology)."

"I apologized ... I told him that if I signed this it would mean I have never been loyal" and that his activities would be tantamount to being subversive.

Pakpahan promises that once his obligations following his release are over -- addressing students and various other functions -- there should be time for the family.

The youngest of his three children, Ruth Damaihati, 12, has said, "I wish we could all spend some time together again, like going swimming."

The last time they plunged in the pool near their home on Jl. Kayu Putih in East Jakarta was before Pakpahan was arrested in Medan in 1994.

The family had previously managed to go swimming on weekend mornings, "before union gatherings," Pakpahan said, because workers only had time for organization activities on weekends.

"I know I should have been there for them ... asking who they're dating," Pakpahan said. "I've asked for their understanding." Ruth's brothers, Johanes Dartha and Binsar Jonathan, are 16 and 17 respectively.

His wife Rosintan Marpaung Pakpahan, who teaches physics at a high school, says she had a hard time "being both father and mother" to the teenagers during his detention. But his family is firmly behind him.

Rosintan was an activist with GMKI, the Indonesian Christian Students' Movement, when she first met Pakpahan in Medan.

"We hope he will never be arrested again," says Rosintan. "No one should ever be arrested again (for organizing labor). That's why we need to fight for democracy."