“OH what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.†Sir Walter Scott
On May 21, 1998, then president Suharto ended his thirty two years reign over the New Order by announcing he would step down from power.
His successors -- B.J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Soekarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- passed a series of democratic reforms that would rightly earn them kudos from the international community.
Free and fair elections were held, the press was released from the repressive shackles of Suharto’s New Order, freedom of expression and the right of assembly were respected, and political persecution came to an end. It was, in retrospect, an amazing transformation for a country that had been under the boot of authoritarian rule for several generations.
May 21, 2019, might be written in some future history books as the date on which Indonesia’s democracy came under fierce attack. When the results of the presidential elections were announced, widely-held suspicions of fraud triggered an unprecedented number of people to gather in the streets of Jakarta and protest in front of the nation’s electoral authorities.
Scores of innocent people were injured as a result of police brutality, and seven people were killed. Public figures and even lesser known citizens in support of the opposition were intimidated and criminalized on trumped up charges of hate speech, spreading fake news and treason. In other words, Indonesia’s democracy had been stolen.
At least for the moment.
Jokowi and his men would like Indonesians and the world to believe in a different narrative. They insist the elections were clean and the opposition has no evidence to prove otherwise. They claim the protestors were a bunch of hooligans backed by treasonous masterminds planning to overthrow the government, and they are saying there was even a sinister plot by an unnamed group of powerful people to assassinate senior officials inside Jokowi’s cabinet.
They have heaped praises upon the police, who they say are the real heroes in this story. Finally, they are telling us to be patient, that the Constitutional Court, which is fair and impartial, will bring this dispute to a happy ending and our singing Kumbaya in unison.
To make this fiction sound credible, the Jokowi administration has resorted to the oldest trick in the book: co-opt, and if necessary, intimidate the press. In off-the-record discussions, owners of television stations and print media have revealed they were threatened by the government to tow the party line.
Most, with the exception of one television station, obeyed. Practically every media outlet dutifully reported what the government wanted the people to believe about the 21-22 May protests.
There were no instances of objective, on-the-ground reporting with protestors, victims of police violence and opposition leaders being given the chance able to tell their side of the story. And when the real story did appear in social media, the government acted quickly and shut them down under the pretext of stopping ‘hoaxes’ and fake news from being spread to the masses and hence potentially more unrest.
Jokowi and those who are working behind the scenes in creating this incredible storyline, almost worthy of a Tom Clancy novel, have revealed their hand for what they truly are and stand for: By using brutal force against protestors, issuing charges of treason where there is none and exploiting laws on electronic news to ensnare and imprison innocents on so-called fake news and hoaxes, this administration has proven themselves to be the vanguard of what can be understood only as a neo-authoritarian regime.
Well-informed insiders have a very good idea of the identity of these grand masters, the ones who are skilled in propaganda. They have no compunction in bending the law and having the state apparatus commit acts of violence against the opposition in order to meet their political ends.
These are the same men who served for many years under the Suharto regime and can recite the authoritarian’s playbook by chapter and verse.
Yet we can’t mention their names (otherwise we are charged with slander), neither can we easily refer to specific instances of their abuse of power (without the risk of being charged with spreading fake news).
In spite of these men and the setbacks we have seen in Indonesia’s democracy, there are good reasons to remain optimistic. This is because ‘they’ fail to comprehend that the nails in the coffin of Suharto’s New Order were put in place more than two decades ago and history shows that once the proverbial democratic genie is let out of the bottle, it is near impossible to put it back in and revert to the old days of authoritarianism without there being serious repercussions.
Most Indonesians will not sit idly on the sidelines and allow the government to destroy their democracy. The people will not buy their lies and false narratives such as dark forces plotting a coup, for in an age of social media the truth inevitably prevails.
And what ‘they’ don’t understand, in their excess of hubris, is the more they resort to intimidation, brutality and suppression, the more they will reveal themselves for what they are to the wider public as well as the international community of democratic nations who, eventually, will make this government a target of condemnation.
In other words, this government, if it persists in its fabrications and cover-ups, will show the world that the real perpetrator of hoaxes are not its critics, but the government itself-which, in the final analysis, will make it even more difficult for them to maintain their argument that the elections were clean.
Light has already started to appear. The Alliance of Independent Journalists, a local NGO, recently issued a press release about acts of violence against reporters that were undertaken by security forces when they were in the vicinity of protestors being brutalized during the May protests.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York City, is already investigating these incidents, which will eventually lead to an international spotlight being shone on this government’s unsavory attempts to hide the truth by intimidating the media.
In response there will undoubtedly be more cover-ups. But for the neo-authoritarians -- yearning for a return to the ‘good old days’ of Suharto -- it is only a matter of time before they find themselves finally entrapped in the webs they shall have woven.
The author is formes Economic Coordinator Minister and Maritime Coordinator Minister.
