INDONESIA PUTS MORE CRITICS ON TRIAL

September 29, 1996

The Minister of Information, Harmoko said that three magazines, TARGeT, Mutiara and Paron, had been given warnings because they were covering news in a way not indicated by their original licenses. The editors of all three were summoned to the Min istry of Information to receive the warnings in person.

According to Moxa Nadeak, the editor-in-chief of Mutiara, the government said that Mutiara, a weekly publication, had become a news tabloid and not a family magazine as specified in its license. The comprehensive coverage by Mutiara of the July 27 riots was cited as evidence. In particular, the ministry cited an interview with Hendrik Sirait, an activist with the Pijar Foundation, who discussed his arrest and torture by plainclothes security officers.

D&R was cited for an interview it published with prominent Muslim scholar Nurcholis Majid, in which he said that President Soeharto came from a culture of the rural hinterland, tied to bureaucracy and feudalism, that was not particularly democratic. The Ministry of Information also noted an interview with an activist priest, Father Sandyawan., who had given sanctuary to PRD activists shortly after the July riots.

The warning to Paron, generally regarded as pro-government and owned by Soeharto crony Bob Hasan, was seen as a kind of cover for the warnings given to the other two. Mohammad Kusnaeni, the editor, did acknowledge that Paron had changed from being a tabl oid listing of employment opportunities into more of a regular newspaper. The news it published, however, tended to portray pro-democracy activists in a negative light. It was Paron which exposed the diary of student labor organizer Dita Sari and her act ivities within PRD. (Dita Sari is now on trial in Surabaya, East Java on subversion charges for those activities.)

Sumber: http://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/1997/02/08/0074.html