Criticism from foreign journalists also irked Indonesia’s political elite, leading to some high-profile expulsions under President Megawati’s admin- istration; the first since the fall of Suharto. Like the domestic media, the foreign media had faced tight controls for most of Suharto’s autocratic, 32-year rule.
The Suharto government had welcomed foreign media content as the globalized media sought audiences around Southeast Asia. Suharto saw these products as having a narrow audience, and thought it of little threat to the status quo. Indeed, local broadcasters could fill airtime with US
programming like CBS’s Dallas, using space that could have harboured potentially more controversial local products. As the country developed, the availability of these global media products was also seen as part of the modernization process: satellite, the symbol of modern Indonesia, brought with it cable television and foreign media channels.
Thus, Indonesians who could afford cable television had access to news channels from CNN and the BBC to CNBC and Bloomberg, as well as sport and entertainment courtesy of providers such as Star, National Geographic, HBO, Hallmark and Disney. There were stations from Japan (NHK), Korea (KBS World) and Hong Kong (TVB). There are also the localized versions of Viacom’s MTV and Star Television’s VTV.2
By 2006, Southeast Asia’s largest economy had 11 national TV stations and dozens of provincial broadcasters. Many of the stations were strug- gling to compete in the crowded markets. Foreign investors had shown an interest in the local television industry hoping to tap the Southeast Asian nation’s $2.1 billion advertisement market. In October 2005, News Corp made an exploratory foray into Indonesia’s local media market. Through subsidiary Star TV, it bought a 20 per cent stake in PT Cakrawala Andalas Televisi, which ran ANTV, for a reported US$20 million. Outright owner- ship was prohibited. Foreign investors were not allowed to hold more than 20 per cent of any local TV station. Minister of Communications and Information, Sofyan Djalil, said this was ‘to guarantee our media is not influenced by foreigners’ (AMCBSeptember–October, 2005 p. 16).
This sensitivity to foreign criticism was not new. Suharto was keenly aware of his image in the outside world. The Australian news media, in par- ticular, which was ‘frank and, at times, confrontational’, was seen as ignor- ing the Indonesian values of respect (halus) and deference (hormat). It became a ‘cultural straw man’ to be knocked about by the Indonesia gov- ernment when politically expedient (Kingsbury 1997, p. 112). In 1975, six Australian journalists were murdered in Timor after ignoring instructions from the military to leave the Island. In 1986, Sydney Morning Heraldjour- nalist, David Jenkins, was expelled for reporting on the Suharto family wealth. This was followed by a general ban on Australian foreign corre- spondents and, although they were slowly readmitted over the next decade, it was made clear they were expected to ‘understand the Indonesian gov- ernment’s perspective’ (Harsono 2000, p. 81). The constant presence of foreign, particularly Australian, media in the Indonesian subconscious led to tensions over East Timor’s vote for independence in 1999.
Clearly, the difficulties between Indonesia’s political elites and the Western media have stemmed from the Indonesian government’s ‘disincli- nation to accept that it could not control external – sometimes critical – commentary’ (Kingsbury 1997, p. 113). This uneasiness with criticism con-
tinued through to the government of Megawati Sukarnoputri as, in the post-Suharto era, Indonesia is forced to learn ‘how to cope with more intense and sustained attention from the Western media’ (Tiffin 2000, p. 49).
In May 2002, when Megawati’s government refused to renew a journal- ist visa for Australian Lindsay Murdoch, concerns about the Megawati administration’s attitude to a free press began to gel, and was symbolic of the post-Timor crackdown. The move against the Jakarta correspondent for the Sydney Morning Heraldand The Melbourne Agewas said to have come from the National Intelligence Body (BIN), headed by retired General A.M. Hendropriyono, and part of a general resurgence of military influence within the government after Murdoch wrote unfavourable articles about the military’s actions in Timor and Aceh. These included stories revealing a military plan to separate East Timorese children from their parents and bring them to orphanages in Java after Timor voted over- whelmingly to separate from Indonesia in 1999, and claiming Indonesian troops had poured boiling water over a baby who later died in Aceh (Timberlake 2002).
In 2005, an Australian academic, Dr Edward Aspinall, was barred from entering Indonesia. The immigration authorities sent the Australian back to Sydney shortly after he arrived on a business visa at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. He was on his way to Aceh to help an aid agency there. Although the authorities gave no reason for the ban, it was suggested in the media that Aspinall worked as an advisor to a Free Aceh Movement (GAM) activist in Aceh (Simamora and Anggraeni 2005).
This was not the first attempt to curb foreign commentary on the situa- tion in Aceh. In July 2003, an American journalist was arrested for ‘misuse of his visa’. A year before, two western women, an English academic and an American nurse were sentenced to several months in prison by a court in the Acehan capital Banda Aceh. The two women were accused of violating visa rules after they were accused of associating with GAM (ABC 2003).
But it was an incident in the run up to the presidential elections in 2004, when the government expelled an American researcher, that was seen as the first example of a new determination by Indonesia’s political elites to try to control the flow of information across as well as within its borders. Ms Sydney Jones was working for a ‘well-respected’ think-tank, the Brussels- based International Crisis Group. Her expulsion was seen as part of the ongoing efforts of President Megawati’s government to crack down on its critics, including the detention of peaceful protestors and the conviction for libel of several newspaper editors (The Economist5 June 2004).
Jones was a long-time source for foreign journalists, and she was known to have very good contacts with some of the radical Islamic groups.
Hendropriyono’s name emerged again when Jones was expelled. In an interview with Tempo magazine, in June 2004, Hendropriyono labelled the organization’s reports on Indonesia, particularly those on Islamic Radicalism and the separatism-racked provinces of Aceh and West Papua as inaccurate, biased and subversive, though he gave no details (Tempo 2004).
In an ICG report on JI operations and the Christmas Eve bombing in Medan, however, published in December 2002, ICG had suggested, although not conclusively, that the Free Aceh Movement, Indonesia’s mil- itary (TNI) and JI may be surprising bedfellows. In addition, it recom- mended that the government strengthen the capacity and coordination of intelligence, with an emphasis on the police rather than the BIN or the TNI, and also pay serious attention to corruption among police, the military and the immigration service, particularly in connection with the trade in arms and explosives. It was also a police report from the head of BIN that had the executive editor of the Rakyat Merdeka daily charged for defamation.
This was not the sort of information the Indonesian military and its backers were keen to see from a source which had credibility with Indonesian and foreign journalists.