Advertisement

Outrage at conviction of journalist in Java

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0

The Indonesian media is up in arms after a journalist was sentenced to prison for repeating a 27-year-old quotation describing government prosecutors as 'slow-witted'.

Eddy Suprapto, broadcasting co-ordinator at the Alliance of Independent Journalists, said the one-month suspended prison term handed down to Bersihar Lubis last month was an indication that the country was going back to the dark days of censorship.

'The government is worried about the dynamics of the media, and it is not ready to carry out reform. But we are telling the government it cannot return to the past,' Suprapto said.

Columnist Bersihar wrote a column in the Koran Tempo daily in March last year in which he criticised a government decision to burn certain school textbooks. To illustrate a point, he borrowed a turn of phrase from Suharto-era publisher Joesoef Isak, who, in 1981, described prosecutors who had interrogated him as 'slow witted'.

Even though Bersihar's column singled out no prosecutors and did not even target them as a group, he was convicted of defamation in a criminal case brought by a Javanese district administration.

Suprapto said that in provincial Indonesia, press freedom was in worse peril than in the main cities.

'In small towns, many people don't understand what democracy is and don't know its rules, including the value of freedom of expression,' he said.

Advertisement