Sabam Siagian - JP

He made a great ambassador for Indonesia. He loved history although he would probably have made a mediocre historian. But Sabam Pandapotan Siagian was a journalist par excellence and an exemplary leader.

With his passing on Friday, Indonesia lost one of its finest journalists.

Sabam was the founding editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post and served in the role from 1983 to 1991. He became Indonesia’s ambassador to Australia from 1991 to 1994. He remained active and passionate in diplomacy and journalism until the end.

Whether as a diplomat or journalist, he was legendary in his own right.

The Australian ambassadorship was considered a hardship post in those years because Australian journalists were critical if not hostile toward Indonesia over its military occupation of East Timor (now Timor Leste). Any ambassador sent by Jakarta would be grilled to the point of ridicule.

The Australian media remained unforgiving when Indonesia sent a journalist to Canberra. But many fondly remembered Sabam as the Indonesian ambassador who explained East Timor to them over a beer. They were not necessarily convinced, but they loved his approach.

Upon his return, Sabam continued to be active in diplomacy, mostly in an advisory capacity, and to speak on Indonesia’s behalf atinternational conferences.

Few Indonesians of his generation spoke as eloquently and articulately, while his deep baritone voice made him particularly authoritative.

It is in journalism that Sabam made his greatest mark. One legacy he left behind is the Post itself.

Any new newspaper takes years to make its presence felt. The Post took a shortcut when it was launched in April 1983, thanks to Sabam, who had already made a name for himself in the diplomatic and business communities as a journalist for Sinar Harapan.

For its first two years, most people had not heard of the Post, and reporters struggled to get access to news sources. Some corrected the reporters, saying “You mean you’re from Pos Kota?” But at the mention of Sabam, many would say “Why didn’t you say so?”

In those years, it was a lot easier for reporters to just say they worked for Sabam rather than identifying the paper they worked for. He was the perfect editor to help launch the newspaper.

As a journalist and writer, Sabam was a perfectionist to the letter, with strong attention to detail and a deep sense of history. These are rare qualities found among journalists of his generation and today’s, for whom speed is the overriding objective.

There were legends in the early years of the Post, when printing had to be delayed to wait for Sabam to return to the office (after national day receptions and a few glasses of wine) and for him to read through the editorial or the main headline of the paper.

There were times when he asked for a delay because he wanted to change a word or a sentence. Others would have absorbed and lived with the mistakes. Not Sabam. But then he was the boss.

I had the privilege of co-writing articles with him in recent years, mostly on Indonesia-Australia relations. He would revise the articles over and over, adding finer details, anecdotes and important historical perspectives.

The pieces ended up longer than the space permitted. The page editors would not dare cut them, and ended offering to publish the pieces in two takes.

Yes, a baritone voice is God’s gift to anyone aspiring to be a leader, and you did not want to be on the wrong end of Sabam’s scorn.

But he was able to crack a joke and ease the tension barely a minute after shaming an editor or a reporter in public. The message was clear. Move on.

He was always immaculately dressed, and when newsrooms in those years were typically filled with smoke, Sabam stood out from the rest, carrying or smoking a pipe.

Given his appearance, few would have guessed that Sabam was so street smart. Everything he learned, he learned by doing.

He dropped out of three colleges, two in Indonesia and one in the US. On rare occasions, when he was really angry, would he reveal a side we rarely saw. He could talk like a true preman Kwitang, a thug from Kwitang, the infamous district he grew up in Jakarta.
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The writer is editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post, and was personally interviewed by Sabam Siagian for a reporter’s job in 1983.

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