'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.