How media - as the fourth estate - purged Indonesia of communists

MUCHA Q ARQUIZA

Direct and detailed accounts of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966 have been little reported not until 1969 when the silence was supposed to have been broken with the three-week long running news of the renewed extensive killing in the Purwodadi area in Central Java which Jakarta broadsheets, HarianKMI, Indonesia Raya and Sinar Harapan variously headlined and featured in stories about abduction, illegal detentions, torture and interrogations and summary execution and exhumation of mass graves of the alleged PKI ‘middle sector’, the religious and intellectuals. What made the stories most grippingly intriguing and exciting were the muddled up versions of its almost Rashomon-like quality of combining rumors, superstition, and employment of modern-fiction techniques of intrigue, scandal, cliff-hangers and inverse or counter-stream surprise endings that kept such questions hanging as ‘did the PKI do it?’, ‘where the police, local authorities and political Parties infiltrated by PKI?’, ‘where the churches and mosques all the while in collusion with PKI?’, etcetera.

Reading and listening to stories that must have gone through various processes of distillation and distortions in its many retelling and rehashing and only after three years have passed, must lend not only incredulity but highly glossed it over with the evanescence of a myth and so much bloated with sensationalized air that one could only attribute to a work of fiction but it nonetheless lessened the sale-ability of the stories to an audience hungry not for truth but for a justification of an inhuman act. Accounts and retold tales of the killings would therefore hardly elicit the desired sympathy and passion for the victims that would have accompanied ethics of care and ethics of justice that the immediacy of a fresh and real documentary news or information would have affected audience and receptors. And media must have known it and used it to its utmost advantage, where in fact by ‘doing its mission’ it was actually circumventing such ethics and instead aiming for other purposes namely legitimizing a state discourse. The journalistic accounts of Indonesian killings and scholarly reports that included supposed academic researches compiled by non-partisam UGM field researchers that Cribb described as assuming a ‘victor’s account’, while generally towing the official line of the New Order, did not actually add anything of value or served the interest of supposed demand for ‘truth’ and pursuit of ‘justice’. If at all, it just reinforced the rumors spread by the officials and military and fortified their justification of the mass slaughter of at least a million of its population to purge society with the most dreadful infection of communism and its evil ideology.

The news paper reports or creative non-ficition accounts, however vigilantly meticulous and thoroughly investigative an effort they might have claimed in the production and reproduction of stories, only succeeded in reinforcing and affirming the already smoothly rolling well-oiled information and education machinery of the post-Sokarno and anti-communist regime that the Indonesian killings was a justified ‘war against terror’. This is what McLuhan in 1970s would later refer to in mass media theory as “the medium is the message”. And wittingly or unwittingly media has been complicit in Soharto’s psychological war and, whether it likes or admits it or not, had its hands bloodied as well.

Reporting stories such as those that impacts on the religious sentiments is indeed hard-hitting the core of human pathos: anger, fear, hatred, although audience were hardly critical and did not fight back or talk back as a matter of reaction to these stories, neither were willing to leave it alone; to the contrary, audience were most likely to be hooked to it.

In a lot of sense, religious sentiment might very well be one of the most sensitive and security-threatening of all human psychic concerns for it touches not only the physical aspect of human core of being but endangers the confidence and stability of the perceived divine order, of pure and sancrosanct heavenly and metaphysical realm- the final rest and highest sanctum of human existence – polluting it with evil and ungodly ideology such as communism would be putting human psychical future in line and rendering at risk of annihilation of our eternal existence, which to many is more important than the physical one. Media and news sensationalism then, when hitting on at this very weakest link in human cognition, have stumbled upon a journalistic mine-field. This is why George Bush’s rhetoric of war against terror when framed within the discourse of religious war or clash of civilization easily catches fire on media and explodes up in the world’s imaginations more than sex and scandals ever did.

In comparison with the Indonesian communist hysteria pepped up by media, I could see a parodic parallelism here of a little journalistic tweaking by glossing-over otherwise mundane activities of cattle-rustling, petty extortion or bullying of Abu Sayaf and catapulting this rather ragtag village bandits into overnight sensation by profiling and projecting it as dreary and monstrous ‘global islamist terrorists’ that seriously rocked the psychic boat and religious serenity of the dominantly catholic Philippines.

To tell news and stories profiling communists and aliran sasat who were beheld as anathema to religion [i.e. especially Islam] then, and to claim that this campaign was with the noble aim of establishing order, effectively perpetuated a myth disguised as a ‘cleaning-up’ or ‘purification’ (a.k.a tata tantrem or ‘everything orderly’) drive at retelling Indonesian religious history, and here, journalism and literature (i.e. as were films such as Arifin C. Noer’s Pengkhianatan G30s/PKI and similar literary and artistic works that popularized the New Order version of the killings and were routinely viewed and read by school children and civil servants for the entire duration of Soeharto administration) effectively serviced and played a complimentary role not too unlike a dwifungsi [i.e. in reverse civilian role of military] to the military and civil authorities in the bio-politics of surveillance and controlling functions of governmentality. Where the military and government authorities had been widely deploying its best efforts to control and manage through physical [i.e. bodily] and geographic marshalling i.e. through the imposition of Martial law and repressive rules such as curfew hours, warrantless arrests and detentions, torture with interrogations and summary execution; the sensationalized coverages by media were successfully complimenting it by effectively marshalling the society’s psychic selves through feeding them with the ‘right’ information and opinion ‘properly’ tempered [i.e. and peppered] to elicit the desired reaction of subservience, submission to and support of authority; and hence suitably preparing the stage for the ushering of the New Order era that was soon followed.
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Readings:

Robert Cribb. 1990. The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966. Introduction. Pp.1-44 (Monash Paper on Southeast Asia no.21 Center of Southeast Asian Studies)

Maskun Iskandar and Jopie Lasut in R. Cribb (1990) The Purwodadi Affair: Two Accounts., p.195-226.

Keith Foulcher in Cribb (1990) Making history:recent Indonesian Literature and the events of 1965. pp.101-120