Page 67 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

56 Jonathan Woodier
Protection of Journalists 2002). Paradoxically it was Sukarno’s daughter who was
reviving these ‘reviled habits’ (Scarpello 2002), but they reflect a constant unease
with foreign reporting on Indonesia.

Foreign media
Criticism from foreign journalists has often irked Indonesia’s political elite, leading
to some high-profile expulsions under President Megawati’s administration—the
first since the fall of Suharto. Like the domestic media, the foreign media faced
tight controls for most of Suharto’s autocratic, thirty-two-year rule. The Suharto
government had welcomed foreign media content as the globalised media sought
audiences around Southeast Asia. Suharto saw these products as having a narrow
audience and thought it was of little threat to the status quo. Indeed, local broad-
casters could fill airtime with US programming, like Dallas, filling space that
could have harboured potentially more controversial local products. As the coun-
try developed, the availability of these global media products was also seen as
part of the modernisation process. Satellite, the symbol of modern Indonesia,
brought cable television and foreign channels.
But Suharto remained keenly sensitive to criticism. The Australian news media,
in particular, which is ‘frank and, at times, confrontational’, was seen as ignoring
the Indonesian values of respect halus and deference hormat, and becoming a
‘cultural straw man’ to be knocked about by the Indonesia government when
politically expedient (Kingsbury 1997: 112). In 1975, six Australian journalists
were murdered in Timor after ignoring instructions from the military to leave the
Island. In 1986, Sydney Morning Herald journalist, David Jenkins, was expelled
for reporting on the Suharto family wealth. This was followed by a general ban
on Australian foreign correspondents, and, although they were slowly readmitted
over the next decade, it was made clear they were expected to ‘understand the
Indonesian government’s perspective’ (Harsono 2000: 81). The constant presence
of foreign, particularly the Australian, media in the Indonesian subconscious led
to tensions over East Timor’s vote for independence in 1999.
Clearly, the difficulties between Indonesia’s political elites and the Western
media have stemmed from the Indonesian government’s ‘disinclination to accept
that it could not control external – sometimes critical – commentary’ (Kingsbury
1997: 113). This uneasiness with criticism continued through to the government
of Megawati Sukarnoputri as, in the post-Suharto era, Indonesia is forced to learn
‘how to cope with more intense and sustained attention from the Western media’
(Tiffin 2000: 49).
In May 2002, when the government refused to renew a journalist visa for
Australian Lindsay Murdoch, concerns about the Megawati administration’s atti-
tude to a free press began to gel. The move against the Jakarta correspondent for
the Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age was said to have come
from the National Intelligence Body (BIN), headed by retired General
A.M. Hendropriyono, as part of a general resurgence of military influence within
the government, and came after Murdoch wrote unfavourable articles about the
military’s actions in East Timor and Aceh, including revealing a military plan to