Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Fri, 17 Apr 1992 10:55:47 PDT
From:         "Indonesia Publications/Task Force" <apakabar@IGC.ORG>
Subject:      Asia Watch: The JJ Affair
X-To:         seasia-l@msu.edu

April 27, 1992

ANATOMY OF PRESS CENSORSHIP IN INDONESIA

The Case of Jakarta, Jakarta and the Dili Massacre

Jakarta, Jakarta, better known as JJ, is a weekly magazine
which its editors like to think of as Indonesia's answer
to Paris-Match and its reporters treat as something more
akin to New York's Village Voice. A brash, colorful,
trendy magazine, JJ has been consistently on the limits of
what Indonesian authorities regard as acceptable
journalism. It was completely in character, therefore,
that after the massacre in Dili on November 12, JJ sent
two reporters off to East Timor to see what they could
find out, and the two came back with some of the most
graphic eyewitness accounts available. The results
appeared in the issue No. 288, January 4-10, 1992. By the
end of January, three editors had been sacked, a result of
veiled warnings from the military and what appears to have
been an effort by the publisher to pre-empt more drastic
action. Asia Watch has obtained documents which offer a
fascinating insight into how the case developed and how
press censorship works in Indonesia.

1. The Original Story

Issue No. 288 contained a three-part report on Dili,
consisting of an interview with the new regional
commander, H.S. Mantiri whose appointment to succeed the
Bali-based Major General Sintong Panjaitan had just been
announced; an interview with East Timor Governor Mario
Carrascalao on some of the reasons East Timorese resented
the Indonesian presence; and a series of excerpts from
interviews with eyewitnesses to the killings and
subsequent arrests.

The eyewitness accounts caused the biggest stir. They
included the following:

Eyewitness, shot and wounded:

I was waiting in Santa Cruz around 9 a.m. I was in the front, got
hit, but was able to run and hide in the cemetery. From there,
there was no escape. Soldiers entered the cemetery. Several of
them beat us with their rifles. They hit my head...[blood] poured
out. I was taken away by truck. There were dead people on it. Dead
and living mixed. When we got to the hospital, we were taken to
the morgue. The dead ones were separated.

The lights in Dili went out. This was the time when they took away
the corpses. It was the night of November 13. The corpses were
taken from the hospital, but who knows where they were brought...


Demonstrator, 20 years old

On the day of the incident, I left at 6 a.m. to go to the mass at
the Motael Church. During the mass, Father Ricardo did not in any
way preach or direct us in a way that would have pushed us to
demonstrate. His sermon was about death. After the mass, there
were already many people outside, most of them young people, about
2,000 altogether. They all walked forward toward Santa Cruz. At
that point, I was in the back.

At the Motael Church, there were soldiers standing guard,
about 30 men; they only walked to and fro. On the way to
Santa Cruz, we were blocked by soldiers in front of the
Governor's house. But I was determined to break through
and ran to the front. In front of the police station, all
the police were outside. When we got to Santa Cruz, there
were many soldiers. We were cut off and could not get out
again.

At the time of the shooting, I was in the front but I was
able to escape and run into the cemetery. I couldn't count
how many died, but it was a lot. And the shooting was
coming from all directions.

When the shooting started, they [the troops] were divided
into two formations, one in front and one in back. Their
commander shot once in the air while shouting, "The front
lie down, the back, shoot!" At the moment the back began
shooting, the front ran into the demonstrators and began
stabbing them with bayonets. I could only run, it didn't
matter where, because around me, people were falling as
they were shot, just as in the film.

After shooting five or ten minutes, they blocked off the
cemetery so there was no escape. If they found someone
still alive, including me, they ordered us to strip, while
threatening us: "Now you better say your prayers, your
time has come, you're all going to die!" I was stripped
naked, then beaten with a piece of wood, then there was a
person who took a ballpoint pen from my pocket and
inserted it in my penis. I saw a friend beside me whose
head was stabbed with a knife.

After I was tortured, I was taken to an office. There were
about 30 people or more brought there. There we were
tortured again, beaten and kicked. And we were
interrogated, who among our friends had taken part in the
demonstration.

I was detained for two weeks, tortured every day, given
food, but it was late. In the morning, we got food around
10 a.m., then again around 3 p.m. and finally at midnight.
It was rice with one piece of tempe [fermented soybean],
every day. There were 20 of us in a cell. The torturers
changed. We were tortured in the cell too, beaten
together. After two weeks, they let me go home.


Demonstrator, 21 years old

...I was tortured in the cemetery. Then I was taken to an office
and there I was beaten again. I was taken in a truck with about 25
of my friends. On the way I was half conscious because my head was
bleeding. I was only in the office three hours and then, because I
was severely injured, I was taken to the Wira Husada [military]
hospital. There, there were many other victims, and there was
blood everywhere. There were a few buckets full of water mixed
with blood, left over from washing the dead and wounded. One
person ordered me and a few others to drink from the bucket. Our
heads were pushed over the bucket and we were ordered to drink.If
we didn't want to, we were beaten with a rifle. We had all been
stripped and were still in that condition, including three wounded
women and one who had been shot in the breast. At Wira Husada we
were not treated, but instead tortured again. Then we were brought
back to the office where we had been before, detained one day and
then released...


Manuel Carrascalao (member of provincial parliament, elder brother
of Governor Mario Viegas Carrascalao who met the National
Commission of Inquiry for one hour) and a businessman friend of
Manuel's

...It was about 8 a.m. and the atmosphere around the Santa Cruz
cemetery was chaotic. I asked permission to enter the cemetery but
it was not allowed. Finally, while waiting and looking for my
child, my friend here was counting the corpses piled on the
trucks. He counted 35 and there were still 15 on the ground. There
were three trucks at that moment, two of them were filled with
what, we didn't know because they were very high and the back
parts were covered up.

The image we got then was of brutality. I had the occasion to see
one person who perhaps had only fainted, but as soon as a soldier
caught sight of him and saw that his head was moving, he pounded
him with a rock. And one more case, I saw that there was one
person still alive in the truck full of corpses, and the soldier
pulled this person down and beat him on the head. Then he threw
him back on the truck.

2. The Press Council Warning

The report on Dili was published one week after the
National Commission of Inquiry, appointed to investigate
the massacre, had reported to President Suharto. The
reaction of the army was swift in coming. The executive
editor of JJ, Seno Gumira Ajidarma, and two other editors,
Usep Hermawan and J.J. Waskito Trisnoadi were summoned by
the Information Center of Armed Forces Headquarters and
accused of spreading tendentious stories that could only
exacerbate the situation. Nine sets of interviews
belonging to one of the JJ reporters were confiscated. The
problem was not only with the content of the published
report, but also with its timing. Why, the army wanted to
know, did JJ only arrive on scene in late December after
the rest of Jakarta's press corps had left? Why did it
wait until the Commission's report had been submitted? Why
did the two JJ reporters return to Jakarta only one day
before General Try Sutrisno, commander-in-chief of the
armed forces, left for East Timor to celebrate Christmas
in Dili? (General Try is a Muslim but his predecessor,
Benny Murdani, a Catholic, established a tradition of
going to Dili on Christmas.) Was JJ just trying to stir up
trouble?

A few days later, the Indonesia Press Council held its
annual meeting in Bandar Lampung, Sumatra on January
10-11. The head of the governing board of the Press
Council was the publisher of JJ, Jacob Oetama, who as head
of a publishing conglomerate known as Kelompok Kompas
Gramedia or the Gramedia group, is also the publisher of
Indonesia's largest daily newspaper, Kompas. The Gramedia
group also included the tabloid, Monitor, which was closed
down and its editor jailed after it printed an opinion
poll which inflamed Muslim sensibilities by ranking the
Prophet Mohammed eleventh among most admired leaders.
Oetama himself shut down another part of the Gramedia
empire, a weekly called Senang, after a letter to the
editor was printed accompanied by an illustration of the
Prophet. Muslims consider any attempt to depict the
Prophet as blasphemous. According to sources within
Gramedia, Oetama was still "traumatized" by the Monitor
affair when the Timor issue arose and did not want another
confrontation.

One of the speakers at the Press Council plenary, however,
was Brigadier General Nurhadi Purwosaputro, head of the
Armed Forces Information Center. He told the assembled
Council members that he wished to convey a message from
General Try Sutrisno regarding accounts from witnesses in
the East Timor affair. He specifically mentioned
descriptions of a ballpoint pen being inserted in a
witness's penis and someone's head being stabbed with a
bayonet. Without once mentioning JJ or Jacob Oetama by
name, Nurhadi said that General Try asked him to convey
the necessity of making the editing process and editorial
staff more "functional" and to ensure that editors were
responsible for preventing factual errors. For example, in
the reporting on Dili, the press, he said, had to prevent
information from leaking out which could be exploited by
the foreign press. The nationalism and patriotism of
journalists needed to be increased. He said printing
information that had not been checked and rechecked was
unpatriotic, especially if it was quoted the next morning
by Radio Hilversum (Dutch radio).

Jacob Oetama, according to a Gramedia source, interpreted
Nurhadi's speech as a warning that the editorial board of
JJ had to be reorganized. As soon as he returned from
Lampung, Oetama called a few people from the Magazine
Division of Gramedia to discuss the issue, then summoned
the three editors held responsible for the East Timor
report -- Seno, Usep and Waskito. They were told they were
being sacked from JJ although not from the Gramedia group,
but were asked to submit letters of resignation so it
would look as though they had left JJ voluntarily. They
refused.

News of the action against the three spread quickly
through Gramedia, and on January 14, Oetama called a
meeting of all employees to announce their "resignation"
effective January 20. Seno, who had been on the JJ staff
for seven years, and Waskito left Gramedia altogether;
Usep decided to stay with Gramedia on the staff of the car
magazine, Otomotif.

The reaction of some of the Gramedia employees was
instructive. They appear to have been more upset over what
they perceived to be Jacob Oetama's overreaction than to
the warning from the army. Faced with such a warning,
direct or indirect, a newspaper or magazine needs to
respond, but it should respond, they felt, with the
minimum measures needed to neutralize the threat. In this
case, according to one source, it would have been enough
to transfer the executive editor, Seno, to a different
part of Gramedia. He should not have been sacked, and
there should have been no action taken against the other
two editors. Moreover, the character of JJ should have
remain unchanged, but there was concern that the new
editorial team would turn it into an entertainment weekly
only; the outspoken exuberance would be stifled.

The Gramedia sources say that Jacob Oetama had undergone a
noticeable change after the Monitor affair. Nothing in the
Gramedia organization was as open or free as it had been
before. There was much more interference from above in
reporting and editing, and a sharp increase in
self-censorship. Given that climate at Gramedia, the
feeling among the staff was that after the army's reaction
to the publication of the Dili report, Oetama panicked and
went too far.

3. Further Consequences

On January 31, the Honorary Council of the Indonesian
Journalists Association -- a government-controlled body --
called a meeting specifically to discuss the question of
how to evaluate eyewitness testimony. The Council decided
to appoint a commission to guard against "exaggerated and
unreliable" reporting from eyewitnesses -- such as stories
like the ballpoint pen torture. In doing so, a member of
the Council said the aim was to prevent "gutter
journalism."

The Association's decision was part of a broader effort to
control reporting on East Timor.  In the immediate
aftermath of the massacre, there was a tightening up on
journalists entering East Timor as tourists rather than as
fully accredited correspondents. Two American journalists,
Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman who were eyewitnesses to the
shooting, were blacklisted --that is, banned from
returning to Indonesia -- by the Indonesian government in
early December for "security reasons because they are
suspected of involvement in the Dili incident" and because
they "abused their tourist visas," according to Director
General of Information Roni Sikap Sinuraya. On December 3,
1991, Indonesian Information Minister Harmoko issued a
broadside attack on the foreign press, accusing it of
"alcohol journalism" and "007 journalism." Despite these
statements, Jakarta-based foreign correspondents had
generally been able to enter East Timor since the massacre
and do fairly in-depth reporting, although they were
closely monitored and some found that intelligence agents
visited their East Timorese sources immediately after
their interviews were finished.

At least one fully accredited journalist was stopped early
on, however. On November 18, six days after the massacre,
the Jakarta bureau chief of Kyodo News Service, Kenichi
Asano, was stopped in Denpasar, Bali, from boarding a
flight to Dili on the grounds that he did not have a surat
jalan or travel permit from the Ministry of Information.
Such permits had not been required of other journalists
who flew to Dili to cover the aftermath of the killings,
and it was not clear why the Kyodo correspondent was
singled out. But the need for a travel permit began to be
demanded more systematically. On February 12, 1992 the
Jakarta-based correspondent for the Japan Times, an
American named Peter Goodman who also did freelance
writing, was confronted by immigration officials at his
hotel in Dili, East Timor on February 12 and asked for a
travel permit, which he did not have and had not thought
he needed. On February 18, he was ordered back to Jakarta.

On February 26, East Timor was effectively closed to
foreign journalists. The Ministry of Information announced
that all applications for travel permits from foreign
journalists and Indonesians working for foreign news
agencies would be "suspended."  The applications were not
turned down but simply went unanswered. Indonesian
journalists working for the Indonesian press were not
banned. The move was thought to be part of a general
effort to restrict reporting on East Timor as well as a
specific measure to prevent coverage of a crackdown in
East Timor prior to the departure from Darwin, Australia,
of a Portuguese "peace ship" called the Lusitania
Expresso.  According to Jakarta papers, "scores" of East
Timorese were arrested in an effort to prevent any
demonstrations in support of the ship, which was turned
away from Indonesian waters by the Indonesian navy. On
March 21, an Australian journalist, Dennis Schulz, was
deported, after being searched by intelligence and
immigration officers and his notes and film confiscated.
Schulz had entered Indonesia as a tourist, and was accused
by Indonesian officials of photographing military
installations, after he snapped a picture of an old navy
warship anchored in Dili's harbor. Schulz had been in East
Timor at the time of the massacre and had written a widely
publicized story about reports of a mass grave.

     * * * *


For More Information

Sidney Jones (212) 972-8400

Asia Watch was founded in 1985 to monitor and promote
internationally recognized human rights in Asia.  The
Chair is Jack Greenberg and the Vice Chairs are Harriet
Rabb and Orville Schell. The Executive Director is Sidney
Jones and the Washington Director is Mike Jendrzejczyk.

Asia Watch is part of Human Rights Watch, which also
includes Africa Watch, Americas Watch, Helsinki Watch,
Middle East Watch and the Fund for Free Expression.  The
Chair of Human Rights Watch is Robert L. Bernstein and the
Vice Chair is Adrian DeWind. Aryeh Neier is Executive
Director and Kenneth Roth is Deputy Director. Holly
Burkhalter is Washington Director.
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