Page 62 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Indonesia: perning in the Gyre 51
announced his resignation. Yudhoyono wants Endriartono to stay at the TNI’s helm
for the meantime (Kurniawan 2004). While this looks like Yudhoyono is attempt-
ing to limit the conservative element, it will do little to lessen the scrutiny of
Indonesia’s media, given the central determination of the development of the
industry in the country and the importance of image in the ‘war on terror’.

Imagining a nation: the media and the creation
of the Indonesian State
The history of the development of the mass communication media in Indonesia is
a story of the ongoing efforts by the authorities to use the media as an instrument
of state development and rein in the press each time it reflected or articulated pop-
ular dissent. As with the rest of Southeast Asia, the idea of mass media was a ‘tool,
born, bred and developed in the West, transplanted to Indonesia’ (Makarim 1978:
261). Similar to the experience of its neighbours on the Malay Peninsula, the intro-
duction of the printing press and the creation of newspapers was a radical depar-
ture from traditional rule, expanding the public sphere, ‘providing the space in
which social identity or political policy might be debated’ (Milner 1995: 292). The
newspaper, like the novel, provided the ‘technical means for representing the kind
of imagined community that is the nation’ (Anderson 2000: 414–434).
Radio, in the early days of its development, was a government information
service, and was used to ‘prepare the hearts and minds of the people’ for inde-
pendence (Sued 1989: 41–56). The birth of television in Southeast Asia coincided
with the creation of the new post-colonial political state, and it quickly shoul-
dered radio’s mantle, becoming a vital part of government efforts to forge national
unity. The widely held view that the media was influential meant it became caught
between different and competing interests, religious, political, ethnic, reflecting
the complex structure of Indonesian society, the multi-layered nature of
Indonesian identity, and an ‘overvalued’ medium (Makarim 1978: 265).
But, the close connection between the media and the birth of nationalism – both
modern ideas, transplanted from the West – created a tradition of Indonesian
freedom fighters who were also writers who understood the power of media to
spread the message of independence. These thorns in the side of the Dutch
administration soon began to prick their post-colonial successors, with journalists
like Mochtar Lubis and Pramoedya Ananta Toer banned and imprisoned by the post-
independence regimes. The post-colonial authorities were equipped with the tools of
control set out by the Dutch, in particular a 1931 law (pressbreidel ordonantie)
allowing the Governor General to ban a publication for up to thirty-eight days for
‘disrupting public order’, and the ‘notorious’hate sowing articles (haatzaai artikelen)
of the Dutch Criminal Code which were regularly used to silence journalists.
Sukarno and Suharto made some modifications in the language, but in effect they
were the same laws used widely particularly by Suharto (Harsono 2000: 79–80).
Thus, control by the central government was a characteristic even of the early days
of the development of the press in Indonesia. While the first printed news in
Indonesia, what was then known as the Dutch East Indies, was a bulletin for employ-
ees of Dutch East India Company, ‘Memorie Dex Nouvelles’, published in 1615, the