For long years, the Indonesian press cowered beneath the vengeful power of the Soeharto dictatorship. Bold writers and editors tested the system's limits from time to time, and clever ones maneuvered around them. But caution was the watchword. The habits of caution, however, did not prepare Indonesia's media for the breathtaking change that followed Soeharto's fall from power in 1998. This is something ATMAKUSUMAH ASTRAATMADJA often points out. As head of Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, he has labored to make press freedom a cornerstone of Indonesia's new democratic edifice and, at the same time, to inculcate in the Indonesian media the profound responsibilities that freedom brings.
ATMAKUSUMAH learned the fragility of press freedom early. He was a nineteen-year-old cub reporter at Mochtar Lubis's crusading Indonesia Raya when, in 1958, President Sukarno abruptly closed the newspaper down. After working abroad as a radio broadcaster in Australia and Germany, ATMAKUSUMAH returned to Indonesia in 1965, just prior to the coup d'etat that ushered in Soeharto's New Order. Working with Lubis again from 1968, he rose to managing editor of the revitalized Indonesia Raya. When Soeharto banned the paper in 1974, ATMAKUSUMAH was blacklisted. Finding steady work at the American embassy, he joined a quiet dialogue among thoughtful dissidents and waited for better times.
In 1992, ATMAKUSUMAH joined the staff of Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, a postgraduate training school for journalists. As executive director from 1994, he guided the Institute through the waning days of the Soeharto dictatorship and became a spokesperson of stature in defense of a freer press. In the courts, he testified on behalf of editors and publishers accused of defaming the president in underground publications. And at the Institute, he taught students to investigate, probe, evaluate, and analyze the world around them aggressively. In time, he told them hopefully, they would be able to practice these skills in Indonesia.
When Indonesia?s new government abandoned many Soeharto-era controls after May 1998, ATMAKUSUMAH worked assiduously behind the scenes to ensure that a draft media bill carried no vestige of government regulation. The result is a milestone. Passed in September 1999, the law denies government the authority to ban, censor, or license the press or to withhold any pertinent information. It also mandates the creation of a wholly independent National Press Council. ATMAKUSUMAH was an architect of the council and in May 2000 he was elected its first chairman.
In the meantime, publications of all kinds proliferated in Indonesia?s new democratic space. Some were shockingly raw and sensational. Even journalists began to wonder if an unfettered press was a good thing. ATMAKUSUMAH assured them that, yes, it was. While acknowledging excesses, he defended the right of publishers to violate good taste just as staunchly as the right of reporters to investigate stories aggressively. Reining in abuses was a job for the profession itself, he said, not government. He urged his colleagues to submit to discipline by their peers and to adhere to a strict code of ethics. He then helped them draft such a code. The Press Council is now guided by it. Without a moral compass, he says, "the press is like a ship that has lost its beacon in dense fog."
In the midst of his busy life, sixty-one-year-old ATMAKUSUMAH remains a famously genial and dedicated teacher. As one of his colleagues says, ATMAKUSUMAH "can't pass up a single conversation with a young journalist." As for the future, he is sober. His country remains in the throes of a tumultuous political transition. "The struggle for media freedom," he says, "is not yet over."
In electing ATMAKUSUMAH ASTRAATMADJA to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his formative role in laying the institutional and professional foundations for a new era of press freedom in Indonesia.
