Page 165 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

the relationship between press and people. First and foremost among these were
the competition surrounding the governorship of the new North Maluku prov-
ince, the outbreak of violence between the communities of Kao and Malifut on
the neighboring island of Halmahera, the circulation of an illicit and forged let-
ter allegedly issued by leaders of the GPM (Gereja Protestan Maluku) or Prot-
estant Church of the Moluccas and calling for the Christianization of Maluku, 4
and the movement into the area of refugees and other persons with recent his-
tories of displacement and violence or complex agendas of retaliation and ret-
ribution, or both.
Pak S. explained how under increasingly tense circumstances the newspaper
appealed to “the people” to guard against being in®uenced by the events and
how together—newspaper and people—they should take care to subdue and di-
minish the situation. Notwithstanding such gestures, however, or the practice
of “weighing against each other the side of the whites and the side of the yellows
whenever an article went to press,” Pak S. claimed that both the forces of the
Sultan of Ternate or “yellow” (kuning) and those of “white” (putih), a combi-
nation of Makianese and Tidorese—accused the paper of partisanship. The re-
sult, as he put it, was that “even we were swept up by the event [kasus].” Radar
Kieraha went to press for the last time on December 27, 1999. Circulation on
the 27th was already dif¤cult, and that night, during the height of the confron-
tation between “yellow” and “white,” Pak S. ®ed to the police station. Either that
same night or subsequently the of¤ce of the newspaper was vandalized (in early
May 2000 when we ¤rst spoke it had been occupied by refugees from the North
Moluccan island of Halmahera), phone lines in the city were dead, and much
of the city had been burned to the ground.
Both Pak S. and Pak A. recognized the limitations of the kind of proactive
journalism they preached and put in practice. Pak A. insisted, for instance, on
the much larger and immediate reach of television and especially radio broad-
5
casting in an area where newspaper circulation was limited, and the economic
and intellectual level of the local population—as they put it—“lower than the
prevailing one” so that even if “we publish a news item to cool down the atmo-
sphere it is not sure that they will read it, also even if they know how to read
maybe their region cannot be reached.” At the same time they did their utmost
in their reporting to intervene in the con®ict with the aim of diminishing the
chances of additional outbreaks of violence.
Reporting now from Manado, Pak S. explained,
We make comparative news like here, its like this, life in Manado is like this, the
newspaper is sent there, like this, so that whatever thing happens there we just
obliterate it, what I mean is just let it be since they are already so violently impli-
cated, we shouldn’t articulate anything . . . just hush it up, to prevent the Muslim
community from killing Christians or the Christian community from killing Mus-
lims but that should not be in [the newspaper] . . . but once a violent outbreak
happens which causes so many dead, so many dead, so many dead, it should not
be said who did it only that there was a violent outbreak here, don’t say Christians
died, don’t, just say how many died, directly, the number of dead. 6

154 Patricia Spyer