A PEN Mission to Indonesia Finds Books Banned, Writers Jailed
By Siobhan Dowd, staff of the Freedom to Write Campaign of the PEN American
Center.
This article was published in The PEN Newsletter, Summer 1994. It included
photos of the maximum security wing of Cipinang Prison and Pramoedya Ananta
Toer.
-------------------
"Zeal," said the young political prisoner from East Timor. "You see, Bonar
found a use for the letter Z and he even put it on a double-letter-score
square.
The conversation, which took place in a cell in Cipinang prison, concerned
a game of Scrabble. Bharati Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, and I were concluding
a week-long PEN mission to Indonesia in April-which had included interviews
with government ministers, writers, human rights activists, publishers, and
students-with a guided tour of a men's prison in a Jakarta suburb.
The prison director and an official from the Ministry of the Interior
greeted us cordially, and offered us tea and a large bag of peanuts. Then
they showed us around almost the entire compound, allowing us to take
photographs freely. We inspected the trim lawns and flower beds, a
shimmering white mosque, a dusty carpentry workshop in which prisoners
peacefully wielded saws, hammers, and chisels ("You'd never find that in an
American jail," Clark observed), and a rather unprepossessing maximum-
security wing.
We found the object of our visit, Bonar Tigor, playing Scrabble in his
cell. Bonar is one of three students serving an eight-year term on charges
of distributing a book by the internationally celebrated author Pramoedya
Ananta Toer on their university campus. Toer's works are banned in
Indonesia and he himself is forbidden to travel abroad.
The arrest of the three students, in 1989, caused an international outcry,
but the authorities paid scant attention, and sentenced them nonetheless.
An Indonesian writer, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that the
authorities wanted to make an example of the three, that was all. But it
didn't work. Students are still passing around photocopies of Pramoedya's
work."
Bonar, thirty years old, appeared undismayed by the almost five years he
had spent in prison. In a private conversation with us, he said that he was
not being mistreated in jail; political prisoners seem to fare better than
common criminals. His only complaint was that the rice was sometimes
underdone. He cheerfully informed us that he was due for parole for good
behavior in a few months' time. "When I leave prison, I want to finish my
sociology courses, and learn English properly," he said. Hence the endless
games of Scrabble, which he vastly preferred to woodwork.
"Are you angry?" I asked bluntly.
He paused, then replied: "I am, but in a positive way. I want to remain an
activist. I want to change the laws."
An earlier visit to the offices of human rights lawyer Mulya Lubis had
illustrated the importance placed by Indonesia's reformers on working
within the laws, even though so many of Indonesia's laws do not meet
international human rights standards. Lubis, who studied at Harvard Law
School and wrote the book In Search of Human Rights, has worked in legal
aid for many years. He was apparently without fear: while we were in
Indonesia, he published an outspoken article in the Jakarta Post,
commenting on the irregularities in an ongoing trial concerning the murder
of Marsinah, a human rights activist. Also, unlike many other interviewees,
Lubis had no desire to remain anonymous. His advocacy consisted of
campaigning and educating, rather than attempting to refine the law -- a
sensible course, given the one-party state and the monopoly of power by a
small elite.
"We're preparing human rights textbooks and a human rights syllabus," he
told us. "And information on human rights documentation. The country lacks
a systematic database on human rights abuses." He added that the government
had offered him a place on a newly instituted Human Rights Commission but
he had rejected the offer. Later we would meet representatives of the
Commission and find them to be, by and large, apologists for the
government. The current head of the Commission is also the director of the
country's prisons.
"Bonar might be released in a month or so," Lubis concluded. "I discussed
his case with some army commanders. Bonar is committed, bright, idealistic,
energetic. He arranged meetings and discussions within the university and
criticized corruption and the security services. The charge of distributing
Pramoedya's books was merely an excuse to put him away for his other
activities."
We asked Lubis what PEN and other groups could do to help. He urged us to
keep up the pressure: "Mobilization of shame is the most effective way.
President Clinton is due to visit Indonesia this year, so it's important to
put pressure on him too.
He stressed that although many people claim that there was greater freedom
of expression lately in the country, the slight loosening up might prove
temporary. Rendra, a poet and playwright, had had a play banned; an
exhibition of paintings about Marsinah had been closed down; newspapers and
publishing houses were still operating within strict limits.
What role could writers play in keeping the public debate from shrinking
again, we wondered. "The writers are now trying to bridge some of the gaps
among themselves," Lubis said. The time has come when they can sit down
together and exchange ideas. Old scores won't be forgotten, but they will
be forgiven. It is a good time to try to change the situation permanently."
What old scores was Lubis referring to? We soon discovered that among the
older generation of writers there exists a deep divide: on one side are
those who admire and support Pramoedya, especially those who, like him,
spent several years in prison after the watershed of 1965; on the other are
those who had their own problems under Sukarno, and who now claim that
Pramoedya himself was responsible for them. We found among these
individuals little sympathy for
Pramoedya, even with the thirteen years he had served in prison. One of his
friends explained the situation to me:
"Pramoedya was associated with Lekra, a left-wing, pro-Sukarno cultural
institute. There was another group, the Cultural Manifesto, whose members
didn't like Lekra for its belief that writers should use the political as
their commander. Lekra members felt political issues always influence
literature and culture. Cultural Manifesto members wanted to exist
altogether outside politics.
"Then-in the early 1960s -- we were new as a nation. We worried about
foreign invasion. We tried to stand up in our identities. Some of us had
trouble -- the authors Goenewan Muhammad and Moktar Lubis, for example.
"It is true that Pramoedya can be tough -- and he made no secret of his
dislike of the anti-Sukarno writers. Some books were banned by Sukarno --
but not by Lekra; and certainly not by Pramoedya."
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the divide, many younger writers wanted
no part of it. Many told us that most people wanted bad feelings to be
placed aside, as they had fractured a potentially influential literary
community. "I am friends with writers on both sides," said one.
"There was an attempt to form a PEN back in 1981," the poet Toeti Herati
told us. "Now it is a thirteen-year-old embryo." The divisions had seemed
insuperable then, she said, but now younger people could take a PEN Center
on, and allow writers to work in a unified way. Many writers told us that
an active PEN Center would come not a moment too soon. "We have up until
now been literary Lone Rangers," said one writer. All the writers we met
spoke of the struggles they had faced in their work. The support they
acknowledged having received was invariably from abroad, not from their own
colleagues. Many, indeed, raised fears of government infiltration if a
group such as PEN were to emerge.
One writer who asked to remain anonymous said a PEN Center was impossible
at this time. He mentioned the case of the three students, the many book-
bannings, and a general state of fear. "Nobody trusts anybody else, except
his oldest friends," he said. On the positive side, he allowed that the
censors were not especially subtle. "Everything I write is a kind of
literary shadow-play. If you know what labels to avoid, and stay clear of
bald statements, especially in your choice of titles, there is room to
maneuver."
"You can be subversive," agreed Toeti Herati. "If you are also prepared to
run the risk of being an obscurantist."
The saddest meeting was perhaps that with Pramoedya. "I have writer's
block," he told us. "I can't write anything nowadays. I don't even answer
letters. The only thing I do is keep my journal." Of course, any writer can
suffer from writer's block; yet Pramoedya is temperamentally a prolific
writer-the author of thirty-eight books-and as the meeting continued, there
emerged a picture of a hardened, implacable spirit that felt unsafe outside
its immediate surroundings. "I would like to go to a quiet country place
and write," he commented, "but the security considerations prevent me." He
admitted to fear that an assassin might one day catch up with him if he
removed himself to a Javanese backwater.
The poet Rendra, a florid extrovert living in a splendid Sumatran-style
wooden house outside Jakarta, seemed, on the contrary, to have thrived on
his troubles with the authorities. A large and mirthful orator, he received
us with great enthusiasm in the middle of a tropical thunderstorm. We sat
politely drinking tea and biting into his home-grown lychees, while he
regaled us for two hours with his various philosophies.
"Although I'm fifty years old," he said, "I'm happy to fight. I am still
banned from appearing at any state university." While he was comparing
subjective truth and objective truth to the laws of man and those of
nature, a most ferocious thunderclap reverberated overhead. (Afterwards he
reassured me that there was a lightning rod on the roof.)
Rendra concluded his exposition with a prison anecdote: "In 1978, 1 was put
in an isolation cell. First, I resolved to think about Gandhi, resistance,
and control. After a while, in the darkness, I slipped. First I lost sense
of time. Then I lost sense of myself. I didn't know where to sleep. I felt
hungry. Then I smelled something. I realized the smell was me. I thought I
had died. Then I felt a splinter. It pricked me. I tasted my own blood. And
then I knew I was alive. It was one of the happiest moments of my life."
One person we met was at pains to impress on us that human rights abuses
were not all in the past. The subject of East Timor was often brought up.
Estimates suggest that 200,000 people -- a third of East Timor's
inhabitants-have died since the 1975 invasion by the Indonesian army. The
killings apparently continue.
"When I was in jail for a short spell," this person recounted, "I spoke to
some soldiers on duty in my compound. We struck up a friendship. They told
me that they had served in East Timor. Every night they had been ordered to
swoop down on villages and kill all the inhabitants. They were to use
bayonets, not guns, to avoid alerting the next village on the march. The
soldiers told me that on average they had killed four to five people a
night."
Nobody, however, was able to tell us much about PEN Honorary member
Filomena da Silva Ferrera, a translator from East Timor who is serving a
five-year prison term. Nor could we discover much about Adnan Beuransyah, a
journalist from Aceh (in Sumatra) who is serving an eight-year term. We
brought the two cases to the attention of three members of the Human Rights
Commission, who promised to look into the cases, and at the same time
impressed on us the necessity of banning books. "This is a country where
the people arc not educated enough to know how to respond to radical
writings," said Professor Miriam Budiardjo, who is on the Commission. The
only concession we managed to obtain from the three was an admission that
the legally enforced ostracism of ex-political prisoners (known as Ex-
Tapols, or ETs) and their families was unjust.
Pramoedya and his friends had explained to us that in 1981, the Ministry of
the Interior had passed a regulation proscribing ET's from becoming
priests, teachers, journalists, army officers, government employees,
puppeteers, and writers. Many writers and their families had suffered as a
result. One young man told us with great distress that his dream of
becoming a journalist was dashed when a potential employer discovered that
he was the son of an ET. Our encounter with him was among the most
upsetting: until then, the optimism and determination of those too young to
remember the horrors of 1965 held out a hope for the future. Here we found,
on the contrary, a legacy of destroyed lives, which Bharati termed
"artificially prolonged bitterness." We determined to criticize this spirit
of vengeance at the press conference we had scheduled for the end of the
week.
Meanwhile, the newspapers we read were an education in censorship and self-
censorship. The burning issue of the week was whether or not the movie
Schindler's List should be banned. The Jakarta Post quoted examples of
Muslim hostility to the film, but did not seek comments from dissenting
voices. On the other hand, the paper was careful to note that the film was
about the Holocaust "in which six million Jews actually lost their lives."
Similarly, the Post did print Mulya Lubis's attack on the country's legal
shortcomings, although according to Lubis he had to put significant
pressure on the paper. An article about President Suharto's condemnation of
the West's decadent influence on the country announced that beginning in
September, CNN signals would be scrambled. Yet it added that descramblers
could be purchased-from a firm owned by Suharto's son. Even censorship can
be a useful market force.
The Post, an English-language paper read by only a small percentage of the
population, has greater latitude than the Indonesian-language press. A
journalist from the latter -- who asked for anonymity -- painted a grim
picture. He spoke of the "telephone culture," of the "soft warning," and of
bribery going both ways -- bribery by journalists to wrest a story from a
police officer, and bribery to persuade journalists to print the official
version. Like many others we talked with, this journalist said that in
Indonesia truth is subjective.
The publishing industry appeared similarly trammeled. There is no pre-
publication screening; banning orders are issued only after a book is
printed. Thus publishers risk losing an entire print run if they
miscalculate. What results is ultraconservatism. "I don't publish anything
that might be a close call," one publisher told us. We heard of texts that
had failed to find favor -- a story about a man who went to Mecca and came
back unchanged; a story in which a character wonders briefly if God exists;
a book claiming that Suharto's role in the political upheaval of 1965 was
more underhanded and complicated than hitherto appreciated.
Arswendo Atmowiloto spent more than two years in jail for publishing a
popularity poll in which the prophet Mohammed came in eleventh. "I was a
fool," he reflected sadly. "I published the poll without realizing what it
would lead to." Clark asked if his action helped push the boundaries of
free speech forward, or if they fell back again? Arswendo did not even have
to consider his answer: "They fell back again."
The day of the press conference arrived. We had been told that repre-
sentatives from all the major newspapers would attend. In the event, the
only media present were the Jakarta Post, the foreign press, and the state-
owned television, which normally, we were told, has to be bribed to go
anywhere; we wondered whether it was there to monitor our words rather than
broadcast them. Was this absence of local media the result of the
"telephone culture" at work?
While acknowledging the government's cooperation in meeting with us and
arranging the prison Visit, we criticized the banning of some two thousand
books. Bharati and Clark synthesized their sentiments about the week into
two short statements:
"Vengeance has no place in a culture that prizes harmony," Bharati said.
"The official rhetoric emphasizes persuasion and consensus. What we have
heard about from Indonesian writers, however, is better described as
artificially prolonged bitterness and capricious suppression. We hope that
by pointing out this discrepancy we might contribute to a process of
healing and an acceleration of the creation of constructive debate."
Clark said: "Indonesia is the home of the shadow play. Unfortunately the
shadow play we investigated holds terrifying consequences for Indonesian
writers, editors, publishers, critics, students, teachers, and finally,
readers. Behind censorship lies the shadow of self-censorship. Behind
imprisonment lies a lifetime of half-imprisonment and professional
dismemberment, even into the second generation. We have been witness to
tragic stories and to heroic resistance. What we hope to see, in the
Indonesian context, is an opening toward honest harmony, so that bitter
memories can be allowed to heal, and so that the mission of writers to be
witnesses to their time and place can be allowed its natural growth."
The press conference concluded our week of work. As we flew away, we looked
back on Java, at the miles of incandescent shrimp farms along the coast,
and at the green volcanoes inland, and hoped that Indonesian PEN would
revitalize itself and strengthen and unify writers in the face of the
government's intransigence. What one can do from a distance of ten thousand
miles is, after all, limited in comparison with what one can do in one's
own community. Would the minister of culture keep his promise and press the
issue of unbanning Pramoedya's books at his next meeting with the attorney
general? The chances of his doing so after our departure depend largely on
the existence of a local group keeping the pressure on.
To return to the surrealistic Scrabble game with Bonar and his prison
friends: They were delighted at the distraction we provided from their
routine lives.
"Here, take Bonar's letters, the young man from East Timor told me. "Take
his turn."
I studied the little rack of letters. It was an unprepossessing batch --
three R's, two E's, one A, and an I.
"I think he pulled a short straw." I wished I could think of something to
complement Bonar's earlier offering, "zeal."
"It's hopeless," I concluded. I could only add ear to W to make wear, for a
dismal four points, and had to apologize for not having helped matters
much. The prisoners laughed, shook their heads, protested politely,
apparently content with my contribution. "Every little bit helps," they
seemed to say.