(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ press release: Indonesia’s Press Strives to Maintain Its Hard-Won Freedom; Upcoming Election Tests Government’s Commitment to Media Rights New York, N.Y., June 2, 1999 – The flowering of press freedom in Indonesia in the year since President Suharto was forced from office is one of the few tangible […]
(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ press release:
Indonesia’s Press Strives to Maintain Its Hard-Won Freedom; Upcoming
Election Tests Government’s Commitment to Media Rights
New York, N.Y., June 2, 1999 – The flowering of press freedom in Indonesia
in the
year since President Suharto was forced from office is one of the few
tangible reforms of interim President B. J. Habibie, but also one of the
most fragile, says the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in a special
report released today as Indonesia prepares to go to the polls Monday in the
country’s first free national elections in decades.
While Indonesia now has more than a thousand new publications and 24 new
press associations, and a Minister of Information, Yunus Yosfiah, who claims
that “freedom of the press will help our democracy,” many journalists are
concerned that repressive press laws remain on the books, CPJ says. Nor has
the government’s power been used to ensure the safety of journalists working
in embattled East Timor, the territory facing its own historic vote in a
month, the report notes. “Despite evidence that elements of the Indonesian
military have armed many of the pro-Jakarta militias in East Timor that are
responsible for attacking both foreign correspondents and local journalists
there, the president and other high-ranking officials say they can do
nothing to curb the violence,” says CPJ.
Also contained in the report, No Turning Back: Indonesia’s Press Strives to
Maintain Its Hard-Won Freedom, available on CPJ’s website at
, are:
Excerpts from interviews with President B. J. Habibie, Information Minister
Yunus Yosfiah, political opposition leader Abdul Wahid, East Timorese
publisher Salvador Ximenes Soares, Tempo news magazine publisher Fikri
Jufri, and Indonesian Newspaper Publishers Association head Leo Batubara;
Information about the draft press law supported by journalists groups in
Indonesia, and a pending law regulating broadcast media; and
An analysis of threats to correspondents covering East Timor, where
political instability has prompted fears of a full-scale civil war.
The report was co-authored by Kavita Menon, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator,
and A. Lin Neumann, regional consultant in Asia for CPJ. It is based on
recent meetings in Indonesia held by a delegation from CPJ and the
International Press Institute, and on CPJ’s research and documentation of
press freedom abuses.
Details about the joint IPI-CPJ mission to Indonesia are available at
.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, is an independent,
nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide.
