The Press: Risky Mission

For ten months, Indonesia’s boldest and best-known newspaper editor, Indonesia Raya’s Mochtar Lubis, 35, has been under house arrest for speaking up against President Sukarno’s drift toward Communism. Last week Sukarno’s government took another step toward its goal of “guided democracy.” On pain of suspension, other Djakarta newspapers and magazines were warned not even to mention Editor Lubis’ name.

Not content with keeping Mochtar Lubis out of circulation—and out of print—Sukarno’s government has shut down his crusading paper three times in less than a year. From the day of Lubis’ arrest, anti-Communist Indonesia Raya (circ. 40,000), the nation’s leading independent daily, started carrying a Page One box each morning reminding readers of its editor’s arbitrary imprisonment. Ordered last month to drop the box, Raya pointedly substituted three inches of white space, plus another big gap where it would normally have carried an editorial explaining the omission.

Last week, after being suspended for this wordless protest, Raya was allowed to publish again on condition that it make no attempt to tell readers why it had been banned. By contrast with Keng Po, Indonesia’s biggest paper (56,000), which in five months has not run a single editorial, Raya vowed an editorial last week: “We’ll continue to fight for truth in so far as it is possible to do so.”

Fighting for the truth has become a risky, lonely mission in strife-torn Indonesia. Since Sukarno’s declaration of martial law last March, 17 papers have been padlocked for as long as eleven days at a time on the pretext of maintaining “peace and order.” For editorial criticism of the government or even running “unofficial information,” eleven editors have been arrested in the past ten months. None have been held as long without trial as Lubis. Embarrassed by his stubborn stand, the government offered to send him out of the country on a “scholarship.” Indignantly rejecting the chance to retreat, Mochtar Lubis replied: “Either set me free or give me a fair trial.”