Commentary: Thank God we still have free speech. But for how long?

Endy M. Bayuni ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 05/03/2008 11:14 AM  |  Headlines

Today we mark World Press Freedom Day. As always, this is a good time for us to reflect on the situation in Indonesia, and to ask if the media here is really free to perform its functions in a democracy -- ranging from keeping the public well informed to providing checks and balances on state institutions.

It has been 10 years since Indonesia began the journey of political and economic reforms, essentially trying to build the nation's prosperity and well being on strong democratic principles and values. From the outset, freedom of expression, and its subset freedom of the media, has been well recognized as one of the freedoms that has to be guaranteed for the democratization process to take root in the country.

Although we have made significant progress through wide-ranging reforms, this has not been an easy journey. The process of democratization has had its share of obstacles and setbacks. If better prosperity all around is the ultimate objective of this exercise, then democratization has not delivered the promised dividends.

Naturally, we hear grumbling everywhere. Street demonstrations and protests, the staple diet of TV news, are symptoms of an unhappy society.

It's all the more reason why free speech has to be defended at all costs.

Everything else may fail, and some of our freedoms (like freedom of religion for Ahmaddiyah followers) are even on the verge of being taken away from us. But please don't take away the right to express ourselves. For many of us, that is probably the only thing left.

At the end of the day, as long as we can still complain, grumble, protest or vent our anger, we can at least say, thank God we still have free speech. And thank God we have a free media that is providing the public space and chance for their voices to be heard.

The cry for justice, and there is never any shortage of such cries here in Indonesia, must be given space, and the free media is the best place for that.

Sadly, however, events in the past year show that even our free speech and the public space are on the verge of being taken away from us. The ghosts of Soeharto are still haunting us, 10 years after his regime collapsed and four months after his death.

The blocked access to Internet site YouTube, the popular file sharing online community, for two days last month is the clearest example that Soeharto's censorship mentality prevails in the government today.

The action itself may seem laughable, for closing down Youtube did not prevent people from viewing the anti-Islam documentary Fitna if they wished. It shows a government that does not fully comprehend the complexity of the Internet. But the fact the government went ahead nevertheless shows some dark forces at work to bring government censorship back in vogue.

The court's decision in February to jail Tempo columnist Bersihar Lubis for "insulting" government prosecutors is a sign of rapidly thinning tolerance among the people in government to criticism from the outside. The prosecutors, being men of law, found a rarely used article in the penal code, a leftover from the Dutch colonial era, that makes it a crime to insult a government officer.

Again, it's not the one month in prison that Bersihar received that is disturbing so much as the decision to convict a person simply for voicing his opinion (he was so angered by the government's decision to burn school textbooks that he called state prosecutors "dumb").

This censorship mood is found in the new law regulating Internet transactions, in the draft to amend the press law, in the white paper to draft a new penal code and in many other instances.

More than at any other time in the last 10 years, World Press Freedom Day this year comes amid a barrage of really bad news as far as press freedom and free speech in general are concerned.

Those who are really concerned about the gradual loss of freedom of expression must use this occasion to convey the clearest message to those in power that the end of free speech in Indonesia, and the end of freedom of the press, would also spell the end of democracy.

Say no to government censorship.

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