Goenawan Mohamad

“I am no Nelson Mandela… and Indonesia is not South Africa”, Pramoedya Ananta Toer says in an interview, in reply to a criticism of his position on Gus Dur’s idea of reconciliation.

No doubt Pramoedya is right. In today’s Indonesia, no one, including him, is a Nelson Mandela. And true enough there are major differences between the Indonesian and South African experiences.

The evening of 22 June 1996 began with a spectacle of red bandannas. About 70 people, mostly in their twenties, packed the neon-lighted conference room of the Jakarta Legal Aid Bureau’s office. Almost everyone had a red scarf tied around the neck, almost everyone was skinny and emaciated, and the room had an air of excitement and of brazenness.

Obviously, it was an unusual evening. The young people were celebrating the birth of a new political party, the PRD (Partai Rakyat Demokratik, or the Democratic People’s Party). In one bold stroke, they produced two acts of defiance against the Soeharto regime. The regime had declared it illegal to set up a political movement or party without the government’s permission, and the PRD people challenged this openly. The Soeharto regime created a widespread fear of anything “leftist”, and threatened anyone fostering an opinion tainted with Marxist ideas. Against this, the young people with red bandannas stood up. Under the watchful eyes of government spies, they openly hoisted the banner of the Left.

The evening was also marked by an award-giving ceremony, honouring people and institutions regarded by some as the enemies of the regime, including among others novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Tempo news weekly.

Any Indonesian over the age of forty who witnessed the events of this evening would likely be either moved or apprehensive, or both. What was moving was the courage of these young people: here was a group of people who without restraint or inhibitions, rose up and threw off the cover of suppression forced on them for years. However, this experience was frightening at the same time. The Soeharto regime was very capable of eliminating anything or anyone it regarded as indicating the return of communism. Everyone in that conference room was acutely aware of the violent backlash awaiting those young people. Our fears were turned into reality when on 9 August 1996 the government charged the PRD with having committed treason, and in August 1996 all the leaders of the PRD who had gone into hiding were arrested. The PRD chairman, Budiman Sujatmiko, was sub-sequently charged and sentenced to 13 years in prison, and a number of PRD members were kidnapped and tortured, and one of them murdered.

However, the New Order regime also revealed a serious flaw in its strategy of attacking the ‘Left’. Suppressed, the Left grew and developed into something else: it is no longer a definite political view on certain matters in life, and it is even more than just a brand of ideology. It has become a badge of courage among the young and an enchantment for the uninitiated. To paraphrase the words of a Graham Greene’s character on communism, there is a ‘mystique’ and there is a ‘politique’ about the ‘Left’. [1]

The mystique grew from various whispering voices. Since books on Marxism were banned, they became a new form of pornography: young people surreptitiously sought and avidly explored them. They also photocopied these books, thus multiplying them. Some of these people even became publishers: ‘We used to get them in photocopy [form], passed on from hand to hand’, said one of the executives of Teplok Press Publishing, which published a volume of analysis on Das Kapital. So these activities, begun in 1989, continued as they held discussion groups in unlikely places, for instance while mountain climbing or in rooms lit only by kerosene lamps, known as ‘teplok’, a word they later adopted as their business name. [2] It is not surprising therefore, that barely one year after the fall of Suharto, books with left leaning contents have entered the market unhindered.

My own observation shows that, since 1999, there have been around 40 titles associated with socialism and Marxism published in Indonesia. Among these are Marx for Beginners, a translated work of Mao Zhe-dong about contradictions, a translated work of Che Guevara, and the writings of Tan Malaka. A book introducing Marxism has sold more than 20,000 copies within a year, reaching its fourth edition. There are seven publishers, managed mostly by young people, actively putting out this genre of literature. [3]

Apart from publications in book form, they also produce bulletins and journals. At least three periodicals are in circulation this year that carry ‘left-leaning’ contents: Majalah Kerja Budaya, Kiri and Kritik.

The expression ‘left-leaning’ is not restricted to literary publications. It has as much meaning in the arts as well. In Yogyakarta, a group of young artists sporting punk hairstyles and tattoos, calling themselves Taring Padi, or Fangs of Rice, founded in 1998, initiated a kind of art that opposes the business of art in galleries – obviously because of its association with capitalism –and produces images with political themes in public places. Co-operating with a number of organizations, they publish a short-lived bulletin with a slogan printed on the cover: ‘opposing imperialism’. They come across as wanting to be more ‘left’, more ‘collectivist’ and more radical than any organization which had existed since April 1997, Apotik Komik, which carries the message of social concern and takes their works beyond the galleries without shouting ‘social realism’ in their work. [4] Many depict, in empathic, drawing-like lines, against plain, primary colours, suggestive images of human bodies in pain or anger, as if to represent, with a surrealistic touch, grim realities of the New Order.

So, what does ‘Left’ signify for these young people? ‘Left’, ultimately, is an issue in the politics of memory under the New Order. To be sure, for various groups of pro-democracy activists born and growing up after 1966, the beginning of the New Order, ‘Left’ represents more of a statement of opposition rather than an attempt to recapture things past. However it is this memory that assumed a territory invaded by power, and it is the authority to weave that memory that the young people are fighting to seize. The struggle was not always an open protest. Every year since the 1980s until the end of New Order, they had to watch the film ‘The betrayal of G30S-PKI’, a propaganda film about the murders of the Army generals in 1965. In protest, they read with enthusiasm the works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer who was accused of being a ‘communist’ and whose works were banned. In various closed meetings, they welcomed former political detainees who had links with the PKI or the Indonesian Communist Party. The bandannas adorning the necks of the PRD members on 22 July 1996, was also a deliberate act in the politics of memory – reminiscent of the political consciousness amongst some student groups and others particularly in the 1965-7 period.

Thus, the important thing is not what is ‘Left’, but how it is expressed. An English language website which features the leader of Taring Padi, Yustoni Volunteero, describes him not only as having the appeal that lures “womankind”, but also as a reader of Das Kapital and Bakunin. One prolific publisher, LKIS, managed by young Muslim intellectuals in Yogyakarta, publishes books that link ideas of social emancipation with Islam. There is a trace of bravado in all this, but also an uninhibited desire to explore new territories of thinking transcending the border prescribed by society and religion. While lured by the mystery of the repressed past, the new commitment to the ‘Left” is not a copy of it. The PRD, for years regarded with various degrees of concern as a “new generation of PKI”, [5] promotes in its political agenda the need for parliamentary democracy with a multi-party system (and says nothing about the leadership of the proletariat). In a discussion about ‘The Left in Asia’ in Jakarta, PRD chairman, Budiman Sujatmiko, even attacked the conceptual mistakes of the PKI in its land-reform programs in the 60s. [6]

Kritik, one of the journals of the Left, expresses the need to explore new thinking for the “renewal of socialism”. PRD activists as well as young intellectuals following political ideas of “democratic socialism” sit as members of the editorial board. It is not clear what unites or divides them. In the past, it was the Indonesian Socialist Party, or the Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI), that represented the “democratic socialist” platform. The PKI branded the PSI as “right wing”.

On that account, the mystique of the Left, or its spell as the most feared enemy of the ‘New Order’, has not generated any coherent thinking about the current situation of Indonesian society and what is to be done to meet various challenges. While communist and socialist parties of the past all produced precise Marxist analysis of the social and political condition of the society – and official lines guiding strategic and tactical steps to be taken – only the PRD indicates an awareness of the need to have a theory based political platform. The problem is that it is not easy to draw a leftwing political agenda in an era defined by the success of market economy, both inside and outside Indonesia.

This may have an impact on the politique: ideologically on retreat, the ‘Left’ finds itself in uncharted water, unable to decide what should be done to the advance of capitalist ethos in the society. It has failed to make itself a lodestar. Despite the existing social disparity as well as the widespread resentment towards Soeharto’s regime and its link with “big capital”, the presence of the Left remains negligible, in terms of popular following and ideological prominence. In the 1998 election, the PRD only amassed 70,000 votes – not even enough to gain one single seat in the Legislative Council or DPR. In the meantime, another party, Justice Party or Partai Keadilan, which, like the PRD, was founded and supported by young people, and grown from partially underground discussion groups among university students, managed to obtain six seats. Partai Keadilan however has no connection whatever with Left ideology; it espouses instead Islamic ideas of the moral purification kind – quite reminiscent of the Ikhwanul Muslimin movement in the Middle East.

The winner in the election, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-Perjuangan, has a large constituency among the poor, carrying banners of Sukarno, who was a man of the Left and often taken for an ally by the PRD. And yet it did not reveal anything usually presented in the leftist and anti-government agenda during Soeharto’s rule. On the status of East Timor and the role of the military in DPR [House of Representatives) and MPR (the Consultative Assembly), this party, led by Megawati, was more in line with the Golkar Party, its actual political enemy. In seems that ideology and class backgrounds hardly play a part in the way Indonesian political parties choose their friends or enemies.

***

One of the new words Sukarno coined in the 1960s was “ komunisto-fobia”. The word was designed to castigate Indonesian political groups who showed aversion to the PKI and rejected any attempt to forge a “united front” with the Marxist-Leninists. But since 1966, Sukarno and his ideas have been wiped off the political constellation, and “komunisto-fobia”, or the fear of communism, indeed reigned supreme.

It began with the massacre of at least 500,000 people accused of being members of the PKI, and it has not yet come to an end. In a recent opinion poll conducted by Tempo on over 1,000 high school students in three major cities, 57% of respondents said “no” to the question of whether communism should be allowed to be taught and imparted to students as “knowledge”. Almost 60% said “no” to the distribution of books on communism in Indonesia. It seems that three decades of the New Order’s anti-communist campaign has left a deeply engraved trace in the national remembering. According to the poll, 97% of the respondents received their information on the “G30s” (the “30th of September Movement” involving the arrest and killing of Army generals – a violent act provoking the 1965 anti-communist massacre, from their teachers and school books. More than 80% believe the main message of the New Order propaganda film of the incident. [7]

The persistence of memory, in this case, may play an important role in shaping, or otherwise unsettling, Indonesia’s democratic political agenda. A traumatic past can, perhaps, push the nation towards the creation of a better practice and method of resolving conflicts. This traumatic history also impacts negatively on the collection of the kind of social capital Indonesia needs to accumulate, consisting primarily of a shared capacity to trust and peaceable management of differences. President Abdurrahman Wahid’s failed attempt to generate a reconciliatory platform in dealing with prosecuted PKI members is indicative of a deep-seated gridlock on the way to more intelligible and institution-alised political reform.

This story is a typical of Gus Dur ’s style: a bold presidential statement followed by no action. In March, the president reiterated what he said he always believed; namely the need to apologize to the victims of the 1965 anticommunist massacre. “Since early on, I have always asked for an apology… I’d like to apologize for all the killings of those people said to be communists”, he is quoted as saying in a public television talk-show on March 13. [8]

Remarkably, the president, who was once a NU chairman, also admitted that many NU-connected people (kalangan NU) had taken part in the massacre. He was aware that there was a dispute about whether PKI members, accused, but never proven, of being involved with the 1965 murders of seven top army officers, deserved punishment. The case should be opened, he is quoted as saying, and to settle the dispute one should bring it to court.

The talk-show, named Secangkir Kopi (A cup of coffee), had a rather convivial flavour to it, but the reaction to Gus Dur’s words was quite intransigent. The main target was the President’s suggestion that the 1966 MPR’s decision outlawing the PKI and the dissemination of Marxist-Leninist ideology should be revoked. Most Muslim political and religious leaders adamantly [9] rejected the idea. The Indonesian Council of Ulemmas or the MUI (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) issued an official statement of similar sentiment. The first week of April saw thousands of supporters [10] of the “Indonesian Muslim Community Front or the FUII (Front Umat Islam Indonesia) take to the street, voicing their protest in front of the Presidential Palace, burning PKI flags and symbols. [11]

Even Gus Dur’s natural constituency, the NU community, did not back him on this particular issue. His handpicked successor as the chairman of NU, K.H. Hasyim Muzadi, told a reporter that a policy of reconciliation with the PKI members should be gradual. For the time being, the 1966 MPR decision will stay. [12]

The support Gus Dur enjoys mainly comes from members of the PKB (Gus Dur’s own party) in the Parliament and human rights activists and intellectuals; they rank as a modest political influence in today’s Indonesia. Typically, the President, known for his contempt for parliamentarians, has done very little to generate a more powerful following in the legislative body. Small wonder that nobody raised his or her voice to urge the MPR’s annual session to revoke the decree the previous assembly issued in 1966. One curious voice is that of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The writer, who has become an icon of the 1965 victims, rejected Gus Dur’s apology.

“How easy!” he said with a spark of sarcasm, commenting on Gus Dur’s call for reconciliation. He said he did not trust the President, who in his view was someone who, among others, should also be held responsible for the massacre and the establishment of the New Order. “Those who suffered from the beating still feel the pain, while the beaters remember no more. Reconciliation is a nonsense… reconciliation is a mere talk of the people in power.” [13]

Instead of reconciliation, Pramoedya insisted on retribution; what is more, he wanted it to be done through legal means. For him, there ought to be justice through trials of the perpetrators. However, he did not offer to tell the interviewer how and whether the government would have the capacity to do it, given the absence of a credible legal institution to deal with political crimes committed by a large number of people more than three decades ago. [14] His recipe was simple: “If the government cannot do it, it should step aside.”

Pramoedya’s uncompromising voice (with a trace of bitterness, I must say) is a lonely one. He has received no support even from his close friends. In my various meetings with former political prisoners associated with the PKI, I discovered that many of them did not share his sentiments. They even resent it, since they think it will lend support to political groups spreading the fear of a future pro-communist backlash. For some of them, Pramoedya is a political philistine, alienating would be allies and strengthening existing foes. At least one of them told me that no one had a moral right to reject a public expression of apology from a person as well meaning as Gus Dur is. Many of them believe in Gus Dur’s sincerity, since they know that even before he became the head of the state, Gus Dur has often expressed his idea of reconciliation in various private communications. [15]

Today, however, the idea has disappeared from the scene. It is yet to be seen whether anything will eventuate from the nation’s effort to deal with its traumatic past. There is a possibility, no matter how remote it is, that something is in the making. A draft was prepared by an NGO team to create the legal basis of a “truth and reconciliation commission”. The drafting team is composed of members from different departments, including the Attorney General’s Office, the Ministries of Law and Legislation, Internal Affairs, and Security. This team hopes to submit a final draft of proposed legislation to the DPR for discussion. Beyond this, however, it has progressed very little and no one is quite sure what might occur. Given the strong reaction against any reconciliatory gesture towards communists and communism, in a time when Indonesia is preoccupied by “separatist” movements in Aceh and Papua and continuing violence in Maluku, it is unlikely that the government will pay attention to it. On top of that, Gus Dur ’s decreasing political support will make him difficult not to focus his efforts on making his presidential seat secure and his political future assured.

***

“I am no Nelson Mandela… and Indonesia is not South Africa”, Pramoedya Ananta Toer says in an interview, in reply to a criticism of his position on Gus Dur’s idea of reconciliation. [16]

No doubt Pramoedya is right. In today’s Indonesia, no one, including him, is a Nelson Mandela. And true enough there are major differences between the Indonesian and South African experiences. [17]

Indonesia lacks a pool of national leaders who can provide credible moral guidance like Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Unlike the ANC in South Africa, the new Indonesian political elite is not a coherent group (in the South African case, it is represented by the ANC). It has no consolidated opponent, or even counterpart, like the white political groupings in the South African state. Gus Dur, although he is persistent in pursuing his policy of reconciliation, appears to have no allies really committed to the establishment of procedures to work together and create visible change quickly. In other words, unlike South Africa, Indonesia has no unified and functioning political elite committed to opening up past crimes to pave the way for a better future.

The diversity of Indonesian grievances and crimes presents another difficulty. While in South Africa reconciliation mainly occurred between two sides, in Indonesia multiple forms of reconciliation must take place. In the New Order history of prosecution, one cannot single out the victims of the 1965-66 anti-communist purge as the only witnesses of political terror. As a former communist student activist told me, the Indonesian communists were not totally blameless in the outbreak of violence in 1965-66. It is morally questionable and politically fatuous to claim, “the victim, that’s me”. Failure to address the different violations may give certain victims the impression that they are being further discriminated against or disregarded. Such a perception will undermine both justice and reconciliation efforts.

In some cases reconciliation cannot be achieved without meeting at least some demands for justice. However, to advocate justice one has to rely on an acceptable level of institutional capability. Indonesian legal institutions are very weak. It is not clear that they will be able to provide a trial that all parties consider fair.

Given this, it is difficult to envisage how a consistent method of dealing with aspects of the dark side of Indonesia’s past will be constructed. Ultimately, the nation may have to develop a recognition of its limitations – for the foreseeable future at least – in dealing with such matters. This is particularly important in grappling with questions such as what justice is when the case we have on our plate is a large-scale crime, committed amidst widespread frenzy and horror as occurred in the political cataclysm of 1965-66.

Still, as much as I believe that justice is probably impossible to achieve, it is necessary that Indonesia as a nation tries to come to terms with these issues. In other words, even if the attempt at reaching justice will in all likelihood fail, the nation will be able, in the search for that impossible thing, to solve a number of problems. In the end, one may have to settle for a selected justice of one kind or another, but with a nagging feeling of incompleteness.

My approach implies a certain degree of humility. In an open letter to Pramoedya, [18] I write:

In an age when the victim is easily sanctified, one who thinks himself of a higher degree of victimisation will, with ease, also believe in the right to become the ultimate arbiter of justice. But, as with every claim to sanctity, this too could give rise to arbitrariness. Mandela knew this… [He has] humbled [himself].

To be sure, there is a link between humility and the will to forgive. But for me, forgiveness does not mean absolving the guilt or the guilty. Forgiveness is in fact an affirmation of the existence of wrong. And with each affirmation of wrong, life can take flight again, with wound, with trauma, but also with hope. Revenge bears with it an element of justice, but there are those who will distinguish revenge from justice. In each act of revenge waits the turn of another victim.

End Notes

[1] “Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism… is more than the Roma Curia. There is a mystique as well as politique…. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.” From Dr. Magot’s last letter, in The Comedians (1966), part 2, Chapter 4.

[2] Kompas, “Buku-Buku Kiri Menyerbu Pasar…,” 15 April 2000, page 7.

[3] Ibid.

[4] On the difference between Taring Padi and Apotik Komik, see Gamma, 27 June 2000.

[5] See a report by Human Rights Watch/Asia, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, August 1996, No. 8 (C). More recently, a statement by a deputy chairman of MPR suggests PRD’s plan to bring communism back to Indonesia.” See
Media Indonesia, March 20, 2000.

[6] Notes from a seminar on “Kiri di Asia” (The Left in Asia), organised by Jurnal Kalam, at Teater Utan Kayu, 25 February 2000.

[7] Tempo, October 8, 2000, p. 14.

[8] Kompas, March 15, 2000, p. 1 and p. 11.

[9] Gus Dur reaffirmed his position by stating that the 1966 MPR decision violates one’s legal rights. Media Indonesia, April 1, 2000.

[10] Media Indonesia, March 24, 2000. The paper also publishes a quote by Hussein Umar, a PPP member of DPR, who mentions a judgement issued by Kongres Alim Ulama (Congress of ulemmas) in Palembang from 8-11 Sept, 2000, opposing Gus Dur’s idea of reconciliation by declaring communists as “infidels” (kafir). Any marital bond with them is illegitimate, Hussein Umar says, quoting the ulemmas’ statement.

[11] Media Indonesia, April 8, 2000.

[12] Forum Keadilan, April 9, 2000, p. 72. Earlier, he is quoted as saying that “communism should stay banned in Indonesia” and that “MPR members should stay firm to refuse revoking [the 1966 MPR decision].” Media
Indonesia, March 20, 2000.

[13] Forum Keadilan, March 26, 2000, pp. 24-27.

[14] Views differ on the killings in 1965-66. There is increasing evidence that these killings were part of a systematic and coordinated plan, but the historical record plainly shows that the pattern of action differed quite dramatically from place to place. Local political conflicts between parties (NU and PKI supporters in East Java and PNI and PKI supporters in Bali) also played a significant role in the bloodshed. See, e.g. Hermawan Sulistyo, Palu Arit di Ladang Tebu (Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2000), pp. 232-247.

[15] See an interview with Rewang, a former Politbureau member of the PKI, in
Forum Keadilan, April 2, 2000, p. 75. Gus Dur also met with D.N. Aidit’s daughter who lives in Paris, France, and regards himself as a friend to the woman whose father was the murdered chairman of the Party. As a President, in his latest visit to Paris, he allowed his picture to be taken sitting next to her – which was quite a gesture, since she is an exile who cannot return to Indonesia. See Tempo, March 5, 2000, p. 93.

[16] Tempo, April 16, 2000, p. 22.

[17] I borrowed most of this argument from a draft document prepared by the International Crisis Group (ICG) Asia Report No. 9.

[18] Tempo, April 9, 2000.