The enemy is faceless

The American journalists I accompanied on a 2008 trip found plenty to admire about their Indonesian colleagues. They had camped out with guerillas in the jungles of Aceh, gone undercover to report on human trafficking in Kalimantan, been threatened and beaten up by police, soldiers, and hired thugs, been accused of inciting social and religious discord, faced lawsuits from politicians and business owners, and seen their organizations pressured by special interests and advertisers.

David Smith, a photojournalist from Cincinnati TV station WXIX, said that their experiences made his own daily concerns pale by comparison. “They’re facing real danger,” he said, “and we’re complaining about the parking situation at city hall.”

A decade after the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime, the journalists were still groping their way through a forest of shifting political and business alliances, balancing newfound freedoms against new pressures. They talked earnestly about the role of media in educating people, to make them aware of democracy and to serve as a watchdog on government and special interests. At the same time, they were conscious of the responsibilities that freedom brings in a diverse society.

“Before 1998, there was friendly persuasion,” Luki Sutrisni of the national newspaper Media Indonesia told us. “The censors would call and tell you to be careful about what you wrote on an issue. It wasn’t direct interference. We camouflaged how we felt and hid behind words.” Those who resisted faced economic and legal pressures; in June 1994, Suharto ordered the closure of the leading news magazine, Tempo, and two other weeklies.

Most formal restrictions on news were removed after Suharto’s fall, but old habits of media repression die hard. Political and religious groups, corporations, and the military still attempt to influence coverage and are not afraid to wield a range of weapons—from pressure on advertisers and expensive-to-defend libel suits to physical intimidation. Mobs have attacked newspaper offices, destroying equipment and injuring staff, and forced radio and TV stations to suspend broadcasting. “The enemy is faceless—you don’t know who you’ll offend when you cover a demonstration,” said Arief Suditomo, editor-in-chief of the TV network RCTI.

There is also a history of corruption, the so-called practice of envelope journalism, where reporters are paid to present stories with a certain slant. One reason is economic: journalists’ salaries, particularly in the provinces, are often very low. Culture is also a factor: in Indonesian society, it is considered rude to reject a gift. Many journalists who accept “the envelope” form close relationships with business and political elites. Those who refuse or criticize the practice have been harassed by the police and others in power.

Conflict coverage is particularly sensitive. A tried-and-trusted tactic by government and military officials to restrict coverage is to accuse the media of inciting violence through its reporting. “We try to avoid stories that could cause disorder,” one Metro TV journalist told us, while admitting that it was impossible to predict the impact of a story. “We try not to show footage of victims and bodies, and we identify combatants by their villages, not by their religion.” Another who had covered the conflict in Maluku said that he was able to provide balanced reports by traveling with two press cards: one identified him as Muslim, one as a Christian.

In his office in central Jakarta, we met the grand old man of Indonesian journalism, the modest, soft-spoken Jakob Oetama. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Central Java in 1931, he worked as a teacher before becoming editor of a weekly newspaper. In 1965, he and a colleague, the ethnic Chinese P. K. Ojong, with the support of the Catholic political party, started the newspaper Kompas (Compass) to counter propaganda from the Indonesian Communist Party.  A few years later, with Suharto in power and the Communists crushed, Kompas dropped its political affiliations to become an independent newspaper, or at least as independent as any could be under the New Order regime. Its daily circulation grew from under five thousand to more than half a million in 2015, making it the largest national newspaper in Indonesia. Oetama, now 87, manages the Kompas Gramedia empire, with at least fifty print publications, a TV network, and interests in the property sector. He is still active in journalism, campaigning for professional standards and independence.

“I am a Catholic, educated by Jesuits, but the newspaper is for general readers,” Oetama told us. “I believe in freedom with social responsibility. Freedom has its limits. We try to express this positively and when we cover religious issues, we are careful not to hurt any parties.” Oetama worries about his country’s fragile democracy and political institutions. “Democracy is in the making, in transition. I am concerned how it can survive with so many political parties and factions. Every issue needs to be discussed in parliament, so progress is slow. Our nation is a talking democracy—what we need is a working democracy.”

I wondered how, in such a volatile situation, Kompas and its sister media maintained their independence. Oetama smiled. “It’s simple,” he said. “We are not a publicly traded company. If we were, we would lose our independence.”

Another perspective on rights and responsibilities came at Republika, Indonesia’s largest mainstream Islamic newspaper. It was founded by Islamic scholars in 1993, with future Indonesian president B. J. Habibie as its first chairman. Although it has less than half the daily circulation of Kompas, its owners claim each copy is read by at last four people and is shared among students at pesantrens, the Islamic boarding schools. Today, Republika is part of a group that includes media for general and targeted audiences—TV and radio stations, a Mandarin-language newspaper, and sports magazines, including the Indonesian Golf Digest. As radical Islamic groups have gained strength, Republika has attempted to represent many views while ultimately serving as the voice of moderate Islam.

“Muslims must turn to Mecca five times a day to pray,” said then editor-in-chief Syaiful Syam, “but Republika needs to turn both right and left because of the diversity of the Muslim community. Our message is that every Muslim must create peace within himself. Islam should spread peace and protect every group in society.”

Syam said that there was little difference between Republika and secular newspapers in the topics covered—the usual mix of politics, business, culture, and sports—but the sources and perspectives differed. “We focus on the mainstream Islamic community while still providing a forum for liberal and fundamentalist views,” he said. In conflict reporting, Republika journalists avoid words that identify religious groups. But, as Syam noted, “it’s not easy to run an Islamic newspaper and offer balance.” He cited the example of polygamy, which is legal in Indonesia. “Modern Muslims reject polygamy, but if the newspaper does not support it, some leaders get mad and we have demonstrations outside the office.”

The boat above the house

It sits, incongruously, across the roofs of two houses—a one-hundred-foot fishing boat, slightly tilted as if still rocking in an ocean swell. Except that it is nowhere near the sea.

The boat was left high and dry by the tsunami that struck the province of Aceh in northwest Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island on December 26, 2004. It’s estimated 170,000 people in the province died or disappeared, their bodies swept out to sea or crushed beyond recognition against buildings and trees. In Banda Aceh, the capital, the tsunami swept ashore most of the fishing fleet. Many boats were destroyed, but a dozen or so ended up stuck in buildings.

In the cleanup operations, most boats were removed. This one was left where it landed, a stark memorial to the lives it saved. It’s now on the tsunami tourism trail, with street signs pointing to Kapal di atas rumah (the boat above the house).

After the earthquake struck, Fauziah Basyariah and her five children found a house that was still standing and reached the second floor. Water started filling the room. “We were floating with our heads touching the ceiling—I thought we would drown,” said Basyariah.

All around them, buildings collapsed, and people, animals, vehicles, and market stalls were swept away. Among the victims was Basyariah’s husband, who had taken the family motorbike to go shopping, and her parents. After the disaster, the widow, with five children to support, lived in a temporary shelter and learned new skills. Today, she owns a small business that packages and sells dried tuna. A picture of the boat is on the label. No wonder local people call it Noah’s Ark.

Two miles inland, the Apung I, a power-generating ship owned by the local electrical company, crashed down on two houses, killing the inhabitants. I joined tourists from Jakarta, pushing past the postcard and souvenir sellers to climb the metal gangplanks, stand on the top deck, and survey the city below. The twenty-six-hundred-ton ship is mostly intact, and some say that there are still bodies beneath it. To many, it testifies to the awesome power of nature.

Standing on the beach that evening with American and Indonesian colleagues, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, it was difficult to imagine that this idyllic place had been the scene of such death and destruction. The tsunami was triggered by the world’s second-largest recorded earthquake—estimated at 9.1 to 9.3 on the Richter scale—with its epicenter off the west coast of Sumatra. I had watched the TV reports of devastation across the Indian Ocean—from Indonesia to Malaysia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

Some of the video from Aceh was taken by one of my companions on the beach that evening. Dendy Montgomery, a freelance videographer based in Banda Aceh, was in a group of eighteen Indonesian TV journalists who took part in a training and exchange program funded by the US Department of State that I managed. The group spent three months in the United States in 2007; the next year I accompanied journalists with whom they had worked on a visit to Indonesia. Dendy and two others were our hosts for a tour of Banda Aceh.

Dendy had been out on the streets soon after 8:00 a.m. on December 26 to shoot the earthquake damage. Then the first wave hit. “I heard my wife yelling, ‘Come on—we need to go. The water is coming.’” Dendy kept on filming; he had seen other floods and was not worried. “Then I saw the first water coming from behind the Grand Mosque—it was maybe five to six meters high.” A few seconds later came a second, higher wall of water. Dendy started running. “I jumped in my jeep with my wife. Usually, I need at least three times to start the engine, but this time only once and then—vroom!” With other survivors packed inside and hanging on the outside, Dendy sped off. Somehow, he found his mother and younger brother on the street and picked up a blind woman who was begging for money. “Mine was the last car to get out of the area,” said Dendy. “The others were swept away.”

Members of Dendy’s extended family were killed or lost in the tsunami. It was more than a year before he could return to the beach. Ten years later, on the anniversary of the tsunami, he told Britain’s Sky News, “I’m still really shaky when I’m at the beach. I’m yelling as loud as I can, ‘I’m not scared anymore.’” He will never forget the lives lost. “It was as if all my family was going to Mecca in one big group and never coming back.”

Except for boats on houses, Banda Aceh seemed to show few scars from its near-destruction less than four years earlier. An extensive rebuilding program, funded by the Indonesian and foreign governments and international aid agencies, had transformed the city, with new apartment and office blocks, schools, mosques, hospitals, and government buildings. The roads were wide and well maintained. The markets were busy. A provincial election was coming up, and billboards along the highways featured photos of candidates, all promising a bright future for the province. Banda Aceh looked like a prosperous place.

We visited TV and radio stations and newspapers and met with the mayor. Almost everyone talked about how people had come together to respond to the disaster. The earthquake and waves toppled mobile phone towers and telephone poles and destroyed local radio and TV stations, making communication almost impossible. Aid agencies flew in “suitcase” low-powered FM radio transmitters to broadcast information about shelters and pickup points for food and water, and to air messages from people looking for family members. The daily newspaper Serambi (literally “front porch”) Indonesia lost thirteen journalists and thirty-seven staff, half its workforce, when its building collapsed. Yet, within a week, Serambi, with support from its parent company, the Kompas media group, was printing on temporary presses and distributing free copies, helping families reunite by publishing photos of survivors.

Metro TV, Indonesia’s first twenty-four-hour news channel, had reporters and videographers on the ground within hours. With local TV and radio stations off the air, national TV channels played a key role in disaster recovery and relief. For a time, Metro dropped all advertising spots and ran uninterrupted coverage, while collecting $18 million in contributions from viewers. TV crews brought in food and medical supplies, and many stayed for extended assignments; a year after the tragedy, Metro still had almost one hundred staff in Aceh. The tsunami had psychological effects on journalists, and some needed counseling. “Four days after the tsunami, you could still see hundreds of dead bodies,” one told me. “I know I was breaking the rules about showing emotion, but I just cried.”

            Then the fishing boat became wedged on the roof. Basyariah’s fourteen-year-old son punched a hole in the ceiling, lifted himself through, and pulled the family out, one by one. They climbed aboard the boat and were joined by others. Huddled together, the fifty-nine survivors prayed as the boat, which had taken on water, wobbled on its perch. They were stranded for seven hours until the waters receded.