Understanding Pramoedya's place in Indonesia's history

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 05/07/2006 11:15 AM | Life

Margaret Agusta, Contributor, Jakarta

The significance of any given individual's life, especially the lives of those, who, like the recently deceased author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, have made their presence known through their thinking and writing, cannot be comprehended fully without some understanding of the historical context in which they lived and worked.

Within the span of Indonesia's long and winding history, outside of the brutal suppression of the Dutch colonial period and the violent upheaval that brought the New Order regime crashing to it knees in 1997-1998, the 1960s stand out as perhaps the worst of times.

The 1960s was a decade of division, of massive socio-political gaps -- fascism versus communism versus capitalism, and democracy versus authoritarianism -- among the politicians, the military powers, intellectuals and artists that reached to encompass the teeming poverty-stricken populace desperate for even a glimmer of hope for their future.

At that time, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was to become both a literary icon and one of the most controversial of Indonesia's literary figures, was editor-in-chief of the Bintang Timur daily, the media mouthpiece for the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and an activist in the Lembaga Kebudayaan Ralyat (People's Cultural League, or Lekra).

Lekra was the cultural arm of the PKI, and was notorious for its polarization of the artistic community through the labeling of individuals and institutions as ""revolutionary"" or ""counterrevolutionary"".

In a political environment dominated by leftist ideology under the Nasakom (Nationalism, Religion and Communism) doctrine of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, being singled out as a ""counterrevolutionary"" meant being blacklisted and prevented from any meaningful participation in publishing, theatrical or other artistic activities. In support of the ""revolution"", Bintang Timur published articles attacking any writer who refused to take sides with the PKI.

The pressure exerted by Lekra and Bintang Timur provoked Pramoedya's literary contemporaries to compile and publicize the Manifes Kebudayaan (Cultural Manifesto), which stated that culture, including art, was the collective effort of human beings to perfect all aspects of human existence. For that reason, there was no aspect of the human endeavor that held precedence over any other.

The purpose of this Cultural Manifesto was to counter the PKI's claim that ""politik adalah panglima"" -- that politics controlled everything, including cultural activities.

The writers and signatories of this document also set forth the idea that no matter how badly a person behaved, there would always remain a glimmer of the divine light of the human spirit in that individual, and for that reason each and every person must be accorded all of the basic human rights, including the right to freedom to express their opinions.

This Cultural Manifesto, signed on August 17, 1963, by hundreds of intellectuals and literary figures from all over Indonesia -- including and Goenawan Mohamad, Wiratmo Soekito, H.B. Jassin, Trisno Sumardjo, Arif Budiman, Bur Rasuanto and W.S. Rendra -- drew a swift and angry response, including accusations of ""counterrevolutionary activities"" from the PKI, which motivated president Sukarno to ban that document on May 8, 1964.

Less than two years later, the political paradigm in which Pramoedya and his literary opponents had become entrapped shifted drastically in the wake of the bloody events of the night of Sept. 30, 1965, which was followed by the eventual ascent to power by then General Soeharto.

Even now, nobody is certain of the actual circumstances of that night, or who did precisely what or why. What is clear is that several high-ranking military men were murdered and that the PKI was named as the perpetrator. This triggered the slaughter of a still undetermined number of people across the archipelago and the arrest of countless others in the name of ""eradicating communism"".

Pramoedya was arrested on Oct. 13, 1965, at his home in Rawamangun, Jakarta, and remained imprisoned without trial for 14 years at various facilities, including on the infamous Buru island.

Despite the heated ideological polemic between Pramoedya and the Cultural Manifesto signatories, echoes of which were heard when Pramoedya was bestowed the Philippines' Magsaysay humanitarian award in 1995 -- and which can sometimes still be heard today -- throughout the imprisonment of Pramoedya and the other political detainees of that period, the signatories of the Cultural Manifesto, along with numerous other intellectuals, lawyers and human rights activists from within Indonesia and abroad repeatedly called for the detainees to be tried under due process of law or for their release.

Every effort to attain the freedom of the political prisoners fell on deaf ears, and as time passed and the true nature of Indonesia's ""Smiling General"" became increasingly apparent, other authors, artists, journalists and activists -- that is, anyone with the courage to speak out against the iron rule of Soeharto -- began to feel the grip of his tyranny.

Between the time Soeharto was named president in 1967 and when massive unrest nationwide drove him from office in 1998, the voices of countless other individuals whose ideologies or thinking brought them into conflict with the New Order -- including signatories of the Cultural Manifesto, who consistently, along with many others, called for the implementation of human rights, in particular the right to freedom of speech -- were limited or silenced in one way or another.

Among the many who have been either harassed, placed under house arrest, intimidated, detained without due process, hunted down, tortured, disappeared or killed under Soeharto's authoritarian New Order regime are: noted senior author Mochtar Lubis; playwrights N. Riantiarno, Ikranagara and W.S. Rendra; socialist Rachman Tolleng; politician A.M. Fatwa; senior journalists Goenawan Mohamad and Jakob Oetama; newspaper reporter Fuad Muhammad Syahfruddin, or Udin; street poet Wiji Thukul and labor activist Marsinah.

However, it was the long-term political prisoner Pramoedya who, in the eyes of the international community, became a socio-political symbol of the gross human rights abuses that occurred during Soeharto's 32 years in office.

Even after Pramoedya's release from Buru, the harshly suppressive Soeharto regime kept him under either house or city arrest or on a very tight leash until the late 1990s, when massive unrest led to Soeharto's resignation and the advent of a new era of reform.

That is not to say that anything ever silenced Pramoedya for long or, for that matter, ever stopped the voices of the Cultural Manifesto signatories and countless others, whose thinking and efforts fueled the reformation movement that eventually led to the downfall of Soeharto's repressive rule and to the improved levels of freedom of expression and other human rights Indonesians are experiencing today.

Now, as we ponder the passing of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of Indonesia's best writers, it truly is time to put the divisions of the past to rest -- as signified by the presence of Cultural Manifesto signatories Goenawan Mohamad and poet Leon Agusta among the many mourners at his burial in Karet Bivak cemetery on April 30.

It is also time to take a long hard look at what actually happened, to acknowledge the mistakes of the past, to learn from them, to make those responsible accountable, and to move on to create a better, more viable Indonesia united under the banner of humanitarian concerns.

The writer is an editor of Indonesia in the Soeharto Years (Lontar, 2005) and has been residing in the country since 1977.

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