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Country Summary
Mounting opposition to the ruling Golkar Party erupted in the largest wave of demonstrations and rioting in Indonesia since President Suharto’s cataclysmic assumption of power three decades earlier. Indonesian journalists--already battered by the banning of three leading weeklies and the jailing and blacklisting of activists from the country’s only independent journalists unionÑwere caught in the military crackdown that followed.
A government-engineered congress in June of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), one of three officially recognized political parties in Indonesia, saw the ouster of its increasingly outspoken leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Her supporters within the party refused to vacate the PDI headquarters in Jakarta, precipitating a month-long standoff with the authorities that culminated in the July 27 army seizure of PDI’s offices. Soldiers severely beat four local journalists who were covering the seizure and subsequent protest demonstrations, while two foreign broadcast news organizations had their footage confiscated. In the weeks prior to and following the seizure, senior army officers bluntly warned Indonesian editors against criticizing Megawati’s removal or the crackdown on her supporters.
Indonesia’s only independent journalists union, known as the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), was a conspicuous target of government repression, as it has been since its founding in August 1994. Two AJI members--Eko Maryadi and Ahmad Taufik, who is the union’s president and a CPJ 1995 International Press Freedom Award recipient--had their three-year prison terms upheld by the Supreme Court in March, despite appeals for their release that were signed by more than three hundred American journalists and media executives and presented to Indonesian officials by CPJ. Taufik, Maryadi, and a third imprisoned journalist, Tri Agus Susanto Siswowihardjo, continued to write from prison, smuggling out articles--including an interview with a fellow inmate, East Timorese leader José Alexandre (Xanana) Gusmaõ--to underground magazines. Their persistence earned them an abrupt transfer to a more isolated prison facility.
In an unusual development for Indonesia, a journalist lost his life, for reasons that his colleagues say may have been related to his reports on land disputes and government corruption in Yogyakarta. A correspondent for the Yogyakarta daily Bernas, Fuad Mohammad Syafruddin, died on Aug. 16 of injuries sustained in a beating by unidentified assailants three days earlier.
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