Tempo Magazine
November 17, 2008
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Tempo Magazine, Reporting Indonesia: The Jakarta Post Story 1983-2008
By
David Jardine
IT'S 10:30am, Monday and I am on platform 3 at Gambir Station awaiting
the 10:43 Pakuan Express to Bogor and some cool mountain air; 11:30, and
finally the train pulls in. We reach Bogor at 1:30pm. The 55-minute
journey has taken two hours and my stomach is protesting but I am not.
Reason? I am totally engrossed in Bill Tarrant's history of The Jakarta
Post, Indonesia's only current English-language daily.
I am already on page 130 by the time I sit down in a warung in Bogor's
quirky Taman Topi (Hat Park) for chicken and vegetable soup. I am
thinking the author should take this as a compliment, no, not the soup
but my engrossment.
Bill Tarrant, an American who works for Reuters, was there at the JP's
birth in 1983. He has written a fascinating account of a newspaper's
first 25 years which is both a study of the development of the print
media in Indonesia but also of the nation's modern political history. It
is at one and the same time an insight into the personalities that have
shaped the paper and a record of the media struggle against a brutal
dictatorship, Suharto's New Order.
When I first came to Indonesia in 1987 to work (as a teacher) there were
three English-language dailies. The other two were The Indonesian
Observer and the lamentably bad Indonesia Times, both now defunct. I
have worked for and contributed to all three and for me the JP, whatever
faults it may have had, has always been light years in front. Soon
perhaps it will have competition if the scuttlebutt is correct. The
Jakarta Globe is on the horizon.
The Indonesia Times, it might be said, once disgraced itself by
reproducing in toto across two pages the long-debunked anti-Semitic
Tsarist-era Russian hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I feel
sure that the JP would never have done that.
What Tarrant has done particularly well is to describe the peculiar New
Order origins of the paper and its transformation into a paper of
substance critical of the regime. It may come as a surprise to many, as
it did to me, that such an egregious New Order figure as Ali Moertopo
should have been crucial to its formation. Moertopo, he of the sinister
New Order terror machine, was Minister of Information and the man to
whom founder Jusuf Wanandi, an anti-Sukarno activist, went with the idea
of forming the paper. The New Order connection of which I have been
unaware is further strengthened by the presence amongst its original
shareholders of Suharto's long-term Information Minister Harmoko, a man
who indeed wielded great power over the media!
The author describes the early and probably inevitable personality
battles of the early days. In the blue corner Amir Daud, managing editor
recruited from Tempo and in the red corner, chief editor Sabam Siagian,
later RI Ambassador to Canberra. There were later personality clashes
between Jusuf Wanandi and publisher Raymond Toruan, self-proclaimed
Fabian Socialist, the publisher, all of which Tarrant has covered.
The late Amir Daud, "a stickler for the facts" and "old-school editor",
is a man of my own fond remembrance at the Observer and the Times, where
he had been drafted in for the forlorn task of silk-pursing the sow's
ear. Tarrant says of him that it was either "his way or the highway",
which did not sit well with the circumlocutory ethos of the Javanese
amongst the staff.
You get a sense here that in the early days it was touch-and-go for the
paper but despite everything it stuck it out. It made its early
readership inroads by appealing to the then fast-growing expatriate
"community", many of them English-speaking. Later came the cohort of
educated Indonesians fed up with the pap served up to them by the
largely cowed Indonesian-language media.
One of the paper's great difficulties was the dearth of qualified
English-literate Indonesian journalists. Needs be, expatriate copy
editing staff were recruited and that remains the case today, although
it is always a formula for some tension, not least because of salary
disparities but also because of differences in approach to presentation
of content.
An early choice was made between British and American English and the
latter was taken up. This, I might say, was only ever an irritant to me.
I can never say 'traffic circle' (American) when I want to say
'roundabout' (British) but a choice did have to be made.
Sometimes it does lead to genuinely irksome usages such as 'England' for
the 'United Kingdom (UK)'. If anyone at the JP can show me where it says
'England' on my British passport, I'll eat my hat, or theirs!
So, Tarrant takes us through a battle with the censors which the best of
Indonesian media was waging in the Dark Ages of the dictatorship and
shows us how the JP tested the margins of censorship imposed by the
egregious Harmoko. Remember that that was a time when licenses could be
revoked and often were.
I must say that it has not ceased to amaze me how Harmoko has never been
called to account for his role in New Order repression!
The JP's ability to outwit the censors by placing critical material
where the largely English-language incompetent censors did not look for
it, in the final paragraph, say, or on the City page was matched by the
growing lucidity and forcefulness of its editorials and they remain one
of the paper's best features, lucid and judicious.
Raymond Toruan, the self-proclaimed Fabian Socialist and patron of the
1990s student movement, and later managing editor Susanto Pudjomartono,
wanted to steer the paper in the direction of the burgeoning Indonesian
NGOs and civil society. This they did but Jusuf Wanandi was not happy at
all with this new approach. Tarrant writes, "He watched up-close his
mentor Moertopo's machinations with civil society groups, he was not at
all sure he wanted to see that in the newspaper." Perhaps Jusuf's
greatest fear was that the regime would link him and the paper directly
to the radical students.
It was, of course, student-led protests against the background of the
severe financial and economic crisis of 1998 (krismon) and the brutal
military response to those protests that gave the regime its final push.
The JP has come a long way since its beginnings in 1983 in the laundry
room of Kompas newspaper. Its editorials, however, remain both judicious
and lucid for the most part, its letters page lively and some of its
regular columnists thought-provoking. Here have in mind its own Ati
Nurbaiti, now a managing editor, a founder of the anti-regime
Association of Independent Journalists (AJI), Harry Baskhara, a gracious
but plain-speaking man, and Kornelius Purba. Add in the non-staffers
such as Julia Suryakusuma and Professor Mochtar Buchori and you have a
goodly lineup of local contributors.
I do think nonetheless that the paper might lighten up its rather
serious tone. Perhaps bringing on board that veteran HK-based journalist
and wag Nuri Vittachi goes some way to meeting this need. Expatriate
Simon Pitchforth's Metro Mad column in the Sunday edition is always
likely to be scatological and provocative in the best kind of way.
A British expatriate friend of mine says he does not find the JP
'interesting' because there are always corruption stories, but I ask how
is the paper to avoid them? They are meat and drink to a serious paper
and it would be a dereliction of duty to ignore them. Rights abuse
cases, likewise.
There are on the other hand stories I wish they would pursue such as the
finance trail that leads, according to campaigning Aussie journalist
Mike Davis, from government ministries to the pro-Jakarta East Timor
militia. World Bank money was involved, Davis says. In general the JP
let the military and in particular the officer corps off lightly
regarding East Timor, I believe.
Bill Tarrant has, as I say, written a highly readable account of the
newspaper. Interviewing as many of the players as possible including
those such as current chief editor Endy Bahyuni and the veteran Harry
Baskhara, both there at the birth in 1983, he brings us authentic
insider voices. All in all, fascinating stuff and a powerful picture of
a regionally important media outlet. Very much recommended!
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