RP foundation defends award for Pramoedya

RP foundation defends award for Pramoedya

MANILA (AFP): The foundation granting Asia's most prestigious literary award yesterday rejected calls to withdraw its prize to a leftist Indonesian accused of once running a "witch hunt" on writers.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer will receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award even though two former winners from Indonesia and one from the Philippines have threatened to turn in their prizes in protest, the Magsaysay foundation said.

"The Foundation regrets having disappointed its esteemed former awardees but it remains firm in its decision to recognize Pramoedya" with its 1995 award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts, its statement said.

A group of 26 Indonesian writers and intellectuals last week wrote to the foundation criticizing the decision to grant the award to Pramoedya, given his role in the suppression of freedom of expression in the 1960s. Among the 26 were writer and journalist Mochtar Lubis and writer H.B. Jassin, recipients of the award for literature.

The foundation acknowledged that Pramoedya had been a member of the communist-run Institute of People's Culture, known as Lekra, which in the 1960s attacked a number of prominent writers.

"The attacks and counter-attacks of the times were harsh and we are indeed aware that some writers suffered badly," it said.

Current attacks on Pramoedya "bear little moral weight in light of the penalties already imposed upon him as well as a change in world attitudes toward communism accompanying the end of the Cold War," the foundation said.

The foundation conceded that Ramon Magsaysay, the popular Philippine president for whom the U.S.-funded award was named, had "despised communism."

But it noted that he also "carefully distinguished between the creed of communism and its individual followers" and that he fought communism in the Philippines by "righting the wrongs that made the leftist appeal seductive in the first place."