'Tempo' chronicle shows words more powerful than bullets

'Tempo' chronicle shows words more powerful than bullets

Chris Holm, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Wars Within: A Story of Tempo,
an Independent Magazine in Soeharto's Indonesia

Janet Steele

Equinox Publishing

320 pp

"Why should the army fear us, when they are the ones with the
guns?" Janet Steele quotes Tempo magazine's former chief editor
Goenawan Mohamad at the start of Wars Within: A story of Tempo,
an Independent Magazine in Soeharto's Indonesia. Reading Steele's
book, the reader quickly realizes this question is less innocent
than it appears.

Of course, by the time Goenawan uttered these words in 1997,
Tempo magazine had been established as a public institution in
Indonesia for more than 20 years, and Goenawan was a public
figure, a media personality, admired and respected by many and,
no doubt, feared and perhaps hated by others in equal measure. It
was also a time when an admiring colleague called him "the most
dangerous man in Indonesia".

Wars Within starts three years after the banning of Tempo,
when an inflammatory article drew the ire of Soeharto's feuding
generals and technocrats, and the magazine, a suddenly ill-
fitting pillar of the Pancasila state ideology, was summarily
shut down.

While other journalists might have given up the fight and
found less-stressful desk jobs, the Tempo staff resisted, melting
into the city, guerrilla-style.

Armed only with computers, printers and a newfangled invention
called the Internet, they were difficult targets as they typed
furtively from Jakarta's "rat roads", becoming even more potent
emailing and pamphleteering underground than it was above ground.

But as Wars Within shows, Tempo had been engaged in a
subversive war for years, long before its writers had to take
refuge in safe houses. And it seems we have history, and perhaps
a bit of procrastination, to thank for the scope of Steele's
work.

Initially planning to write an article about Tempo as the
magazine that didn't exist, Steele's solid story idea got
eclipsed, as often happens, by events, which have an annoying
habit of ignoring journalists' and academics' deadlines.

The tumultuous months in 1998 that led to Soeharto's downfall
meant that, by the time the American media studies professor had
returned to Indonesia as an honorary Fulbright scholar, Tempo was
no longer banned.

But every story-gone-cold has a silver lining, and Steele
realized she now had a bigger tale to tell, and she was bold
enough to tell it, embarking on an ambitious overview of the
magazine's 30 years.

She has thus ended up covering the life of what some have
called the most important literary achievement of modern
Indonesia -- Goenawan and company's "prose poem" of epic
proportions, which, Steele finds, continues to influence speech-
patterns and writing in Indonesia today.

As the book's title suggests, Wars Within is about a series of
conflicts, and it is often more about cold wars than hot ones.

With unfettered access to Tempo staff, Steele's clear-eyed
chronicle spans the magazine's emergence from the ashes of the
first reformasi, a product and initial champion of the New Order
regime in the early 1970s, to a more questioning, financially
successful magazine by the 1980s. Continuing to the 1994 banning
and the magazine's reformation in the post-New Order era, Steele
even takes a look at Tempo's still-unresolved libel feud with
tycoon Tomy Winata in the epilogue.

An exhaustively researched academic study that reads like a
feature story, full of colorful quotes and anecdotes and free
from unnecessary media-lit jargon, Steele also spends time
examining the daily workings of the magazine, putting into
context the training and strategies of the Tempo journalists --
who, for most of the book, push the limits of New Order
censorship.

In one sense, Tempo's war through the written word is
recognizable to any writer or editor who struggles to make their
prose elegant, or at worst, simply make sense.

But as Steele shows, for most of Tempo's history, writing for
the magazine was also a war of code. Lyricism, mock-heroics and
innuendo were all ways of getting the truth out under the
government's radar without getting shut down or making
unnecessary martyrs of reporters or sources. In this war, "fair
and balanced" meant running the official line first, and then
subtly undermining it with an eyewitness account or a well-placed
phrase -- which meant no one was arrested by the secret police.

Of course, to survive, Tempo's war was also an underhand
campaign of influence and infiltration from early on -- of
"sucking up" to those in power. This form of real politik meant
journalists won over important figures face-to-face so that they
didn't have to toady to them in print. Flattery was also far more
preferable to bribe-taking, and Steele finds that Tempo still
leads the war against amplop, or "envelope" journalism, wherein
newsmakers pay reporters to give them favorable coverage and,
invariably, end up owning them.

Inevitably, however, these dalliances with power meant some of
the dirt stuck. As Steele shows, Tempo editors' perceived
closeness with members of the elite likely played a part in its
banning.

But even being shut down, in the end, proved to be a blessing.
Now free to write what they wanted, journalists working for the
"underground" Tempo ended up far better prepared than their
competitors for the post-Soeharto environment, and the re-formed
magazine has become arguably the sharpest critic of the
government in the reformasi era.

By the end of Steele's book, Goenawan's initial question seems
far more rhetorical. Wars Within shows us that words and ideas,
with all their shifting meanings, can be difficult targets, and,
in the right hands, can be far more dangerous than a carbine full
of bullets.