Sydney Morning Herald
Monday, August 21, 2000
Feature
Indonesia's killing fields are Soeharto's worst legacy
In his first lecture on Indonesian soil after being banished for 26 years,
Professor Benedict Anderson spoke about the bewildered expression on the
faces of his Indonesian students over the years at Cornell University
whenever he asked them "who in Indonesia today do you admire and look up
to?"
Anderson regards the inability of his young Indonesian students to name
their national heroes as a terrifying indictment of a deformed political
culture, dominated in recent years by monsters such as Soeharto, Murdani
and Wiranto.
The same question posed to young Australians would have elicited a similar
response. In the Australian media, Indonesia has been a regular source of
bad news. This is not entirely surprising, given the brutality and
corruption of the Soeharto dictatorship and the occupation of East Timor.
But why have we not heard about the inspiring and courageous dissenters
who, at great risk, resisted the New Order regime? Why did they remain
anonymous when their counterparts in Eastern Europe - the "refuseniks" -
were so publicly lauded in the West? The answers to these questions tell
us much about our own diplomatic culture.
While Alexander Solzhenitsyn was feted in the West for his indictment of
Stalin's gulags, Indonesia's Pramoedya Ananta Toer never appeared on the
radar screens of Western political elites. The author of the acclaimed
Buru Quartet and The Mute's Soliloquy, the second of which recounts his
horrific experiences while incarcerated on the island of Buru from 1969 to
1979, wasn't the kind of political prisoner that interested Washington or
Canberra during the Cold War - he was a man of the Left.
No-one who has read Pramoedya's memoirs would be under any
misapprehensions about the true nature of the Soeharto regime, which
probably explains why his books never found their way onto the shelves of
the Jakarta lobby in Australia: for them, Soeharto's crimes were always a
case of see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.
Similarly, Carmel Budiardjo's detention without trial (1968-71) and her
efforts to free her fellow political prisoners, detailed in Surviving
Indonesia's Gulag, was unlikely to be reviewed by those promoting the
closest possible relationship between Canberra and Jakarta.
Budiardjo also founded an organisation called Tapol to campaign on behalf
of Indonesia's prisoners of conscience; remarkably its name and cause are
almost unknown in Australia.
There are hundreds of others with lower profiles who work with
extraordinary courage to account for the crimes of their country's
leaders. These remarkable people deserve Australia's support, but are
unlikely to ever receive it.
Pramoedya, Budiardjo and thousands more were not only the victims of a
cruel regime, they shared another unfortunate fate. They had the
misfortune to be the political prisoners of a government ideologically
allied to the West. By definition they became invisible.
Soeharto was not only anti-communist, he was also admired by politicians
in Australia for bringing "stability" to the region. Over 32 years
Soeharto's "stability" took a minimum of 800,000 lives and possibly as
many as 2million in both Indonesia proper and East Timor, a record as vile
as Pol Pot's and infinitely worse than Saddam's or Milosevic's.
A reckoning is due, if not immediately. An editorial in The Jakarta Post
in April puts this and Soeharto's coming corruption trial in their proper
perspective: "If the goal is to show that justice will be upheld in this
country, then surely corruption, as bad as it is, is the least sinful
misdeed that Soeharto committed during his 32 years of tyrannical rule.
"What about the atrocities, from the summary executions of suspected
communists to the killing of people in East Timor, Irian Jaya, Aceh and
Tanjung Priok? If the Government wants to show that justice and the rule
of law prevail in this country, then these and other heinous crimes
committed during his reign should be the reasons for the prosecution of
Soeharto. Not corruption."
A growing number of courageous Indonesians are no longer frightened of
speaking and confronting the truth. They are the real heroes of their
country. To find them, however, our leaders will need to stop consorting
with "the elite ... that implemented fascism and ran the country by
terror", as Pramoedya put it, and focus their attention on those
Indonesians struggling against enormous odds to restore pride and honour
to their country.
Scott Burchill is a lecturer in International Relations at Deakin
University.