Master’s Thesis in Cultural and Social Anthropology
Imagining the Homeland: The use of the Internet among Indonesian Exiles in the Netherlands
Supervisor : Dr. A.T. Strating Student: Ibnu Nadzir Daraini Second Reader : Dr. Fridus Steijlen Student Number: 11181192 Third Reader : Dr. Irene Stengs Word Count : 29485 [email protected] 2016/2017
Declaration on Plagiarism and Fraud
I have read and understood the Fraud and Plagiarism regulations for UvA Students. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
Name: Ibnu Nadzir Daraini Signature:
Abstract
Numerous studies have shown that exilic experiences influence how exile communities position themselves toward their homeland. However, discussions on these issues tend to overlook the dynamics and engagement within the community in negotiating that position through their daily practices. In the case of Indonesian exiles living in the Netherlands, there is a strong tendency to portray them as passive victims of the eradication of communism that followed the events of 30th September 1965. Hence, this community is often presented as one that is defined by its memory of exilic experiences. By looking into community members’ Internet practices, this research aims to show that these exiles are actively negotiating their positions towards their homeland.
Based on interviews and observations during fieldwork, I would argue that most of the values and ideals that are shared among this community were developed before they became exiles. These values were then reinforced into political opposition towards the New Order’s political regime after they became exiles. Their opposition was expressed through publications and participations within various organizations. In the early 1990s, the Internet was incorporated into the movement, providing more dynamic into their projection of ideals and values. Through online practices they projected ideals that they previously shared offline among community members. On the other hand, the new information they received from the Internet constantly reshape these ideals and eventually the notion of Indonesia as the imagined homeland. This simultaneous engagement in offline and online platforms enables them to reclaim a sense of agency, despite being separated from their homeland for decades.
Keywords: Indonesian exiles, Internet, agency, homeland
List of Terms and Abbreviations
ABRI (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia/Armed Forces of Indonesia)
Akademi Pertanian Egom (Egom Agricultural Academy)
Akademi Social Ali Archam (Ali Archam Social Academy)
Baperki (Indonesian Organization of Chinese Descent)
BTI (Barisan Tani Indonesia/Indonesian Peasant’s Front)
DIAN (Indonesian women's organization)
IPPI (Ikatan Pemuda Pelajar Indonesia/Indonesian Youth Student League)
IPT1965 (International People’s Tribunal 1965)
Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat/Institute of People’s Culture)
LKN (Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional/Institute of National Culture)
LPK65 (Lembaga Pembela Korban 1965/1965’s Victim Defender Institute )
Masyumi (Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia/ Council of Indonesian Muslims' Association Party)
Perdoi (Perhimpunan Dokumentasi Indonesia/Association of Indonesian Documentation)
Perhimpunan Persaudaraan (Association of Brotherhood and Sisterhood)
PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia/Indonesian Communist Party)
PPI (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia/Indonesian Student Association)
PTIP (Perguruan Tinggi dan Ilmu Pengetahuan/Higher Education and Science)
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Alex Strating for his valuable guidance, support, and patience throughout this writing process. I am also very grateful to Dr. Friedus Steijlen for his willingness to be my co-supervisor and for his valuable suggestions and support in finishing this thesis. I also would like to thank my professors and classmates who helped me grow intellectually.
My presence in this country would not have been possible without the opportunity given by Riset-Pro and LIPI, for which I am eternally grateful. My sincere thanks also go to my informants who shared their time and experiences to support this research. I also owe a debt of gratitude to friends in Netherlands and Indonesia without whose support I would never finish this thesis. Last but not least, the greatest honours are given to my family, for their encouragement, trust, and prayers have always provided me the courage to take steps in life.
Table of Contents 1. Introduction ...... 1 Background ...... 1 Theoretical Framework ...... 4 Offline-Online Research ...... 4 Internet, Storytelling, and Agency ...... 5 Research Setting and Population ...... 7 Methodology ...... 9 2. Exilic Experiences and Political Dissidence ...... 12 2. 1 Association with Progressive Ideas ...... 13 2. 2 Precarious Life after 1965 Incident ...... 17 2.3 New Life in the Netherlands ...... 23 3. Online Practices among Indonesian Exiles ...... 30 3.1 On Making Sense of the Internet ...... 31 3.2 Online Opposition towards the New Order Regime ...... 36 3.3 Online Debate and Past Fragmentations ...... 43 4. Offline-Online Engagement and Reclaiming Indonesian-ness ...... 48 4.1 IPT 1965 and the Long Pursuit of Justice ...... 48 4.2 Experiencing Indonesia on Diskusi Forum...... 57 5. Conclusion ...... 65 Bibliography ...... 69
1. Introduction
Background I utilize Facebook as an organizing tool, to organize people who share similar ideas to me. (Radi1, late eighties, Indonesian exile) Radi is one among many Indonesian exiles who live in the Netherlands. Although his opinion might not represent other exiles, it is hard to deny the fact that the Internet is widely used among them. Thus this research was started by curiosity about how these practices affect them as individuals and as a community.
The engagement between Indonesian exiles and technology is hard to understand without knowing why they became exiles in the first place. Their process of displacement could be traced back to affiliations developed between Indonesia and communist countries such as China and the USSR in Sukarno's2 era. The cooperation between Indonesia and those countries was not just limited to political and diplomatic relations, but there were also increased education and cultural exchange programmes (Hill, 2014; Liu, 2006). Liu (2006: 192) noted that in 1954, China invited 105 Indonesian delegations consisting of people from various professional backgrounds. Important figures from the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) like Musso and Semaun had already spent decades living in the USSR before Indonesia’s independence (Hill 2014: 622). These exchanges continued for several years during the era of Guided Democracy.3 Until 27th September 1965 for example, Indonesia still sent a delegation to attend a commemoration of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party (Hill 2008: 5). In the same year, the number of Indonesian students in the USSR reached around two thousand, thus making them the largest group of foreign students there (Hill 2014: 624). Nevertheless, this situation changed abruptly after the incident on 1st October 1965.
During the incident known as the 30th September Movement4, a group of people kidnapped and assassinated several Indonesian army officials. Amidst the confusion, the Indonesian army led by General Soeharto accused the PKI of initiating the movement, and started a military and political campaign against communists across the nation. These events led to the eradication of communists, and
1 Pseudonym 2 The first president of Indonesia. 3 Indonesian political system implemented from 1957-1966. It was introduced by President Sukarno in 1957 to ensure the stability of the country. 4 In this thesis, the incident will be referred to as the 1965 incident, while persecution and eradication of communists and other implications will be referred to as the 1965-1966 events.
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Soeharto replaced Sukarno as the Indonesian president. The details of the incident and the implications of the aftermath have already been discussed by many scholars (e.g. Budiawan, 2004; Roosa, 2008), and have become one of the central topic of social sciences in Indonesia.
While a major domestic change happened in Indonesia, there was much uncertainty for Indonesians who lived in communist countries. In China, they monitored the situation in Indonesia through international radio and newspaper before making any decisions (Hearman 2010: 90). Fear of persecution made the Indonesians living there, stay even after the Indonesian government broke its diplomatic relationship with China. In the USSR, it also took a while before Indonesian citizens living there understood the situation in Indonesia (Hill 2008: 5). A similar situation was also experienced by Indonesians in other countries such as Albania, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. Later, many of them were asked to condemn Sukarno and acknowledge the new Indonesian government under Soeharto. Those who refused then became stateless and political exiles. While some chose to stay in the country they lived in, many exiles later moved and sought asylum in countries such as France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Among those countries, the Netherlands was the most popular (Hill 2010: 38).
Despite the abundance of research on the impact of 1965 incident, there has not been much discussion on the implications for Indonesians who lived abroad. Hill (2008) for example, pointed out that even though there were numerous studies on 1965-1966 events by Australian scholars, a discussion of Indonesian exiles was relatively absent. Similar remarks on the small amount of research on Indonesian exiles is also mentioned by other researchers (e.g. Mudzakkir 2015; Dragojlovic 2012).
The particular interest in exiles did not grow until much later in the 2000s, a situation that is perceived as an irony by one exiled scholar (Dragojlovic 2012: 164). Among the research that has been done on Indonesian exiles, the topics are relatively diverse. Schaefter (2009) for example focuses on literature produced by exiles. Mudzakkir (2015) discusses how exiles created a counter-narrative to official Indonesian state history. Sipayung (2011) has also done research on Indonesian exiles' memories of homeland and displacement processes.
Despite the variety, much research on Indonesian exiles has still been developed within the framework that portrays exiles as a victimized passive subject (Dragojlovic 2012: 161). Without neglecting the contribution made from this research, such frameworks could deny any potential agency of exiles. Dragojlovic (2012) proposes that the act of mourning of displacement and homeland could be seen as an act of agency. From this perspective, the production of writing and narratives of loss may be regarded as a way for the exiles to mediate the past and present (Dragojlovic 2012: 170). Therefore, in
2 order to understand the kind of agency enacted by Indonesian exiles it is important to examine the materials they produced.
This research was developed within that assumption; that Indonesian exiles should not be perceived as a passive group who mourned their narratives of displacement. Conversely, these exiles have been practicing the sense of agency best shown by the production of materials. However, the materials we should refer should not be limited to narratives of displacement. It is also important to include the reading of other materials such as political or social discussion about modern-day Indonesia, or other mundane everyday life topics. Those materials are helpful to understand the practices of agency by Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. By using this framework, I argue that the sodality of Indonesian exiles is not only shaped by mourning narratives, but also from the simultaneous engagements with their imagination about modern-day Indonesia.
In this regard, it is important to look at the Internet as a technology because it has enabled Indonesian exiles to relate to their homeland through mediated pictures and information. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become an important medium to connect Indonesian exile communities in different regions (Hearman 2010: 97). Since then, various materials have been produced by Indonesian exiles on the Internet. There are people such as Ibrahim Isa and Waruno Mahdi who made their personal website/blog, while others such as Radi or Asahan Alham are more active on mailing lists and Facebook. On the Internet, these materials could also reach a younger generation in Indonesia who have developed their own curiosity about these exiles (Hill 2008: 9). Their practice of producing materials is enabled by modalities from Internet platforms.
This research then focuses on the use of the Internet among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. The research answers the following questions. (1) How do displacement experiences influence values and ideals which are shared within the community? (2) How do Indonesian exiles project those ideals on the Internet? (3) How do the simultaneous online-offline engagements affect Indonesian exiles as a community? By discussing those issues, I hope this research will contribute to the discussion of agency through the use of the Internet among exile communities.
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Theoretical Framework
Offline-Online Research Since its early development, Internet research has been pushing anthropologists to adapt their theoretical and methodological position on this new field site. In early discussions, there were dominant arguments that proposed the Internet as a new terrain separated from the actual world (Miller and Slater 2001: 1). Later, those arguments have been refuted by several researchers (e.g. Miller and Slater 2001; Pink et al. 2015; Postill and Pink 2012) who propose to perceive the Internet as a continuation of the offline world.
The latter arguments posit that the Internet is not an empty monolithic space that determines the way people behave. On the contrary, the use of the Internet is heavily influenced by various cultural background and locations attached to Internet users (Miller and Slater 2001: 1). This framework helps to explain how Internet users around the world have different ways of interacting with the Internet in a way that is familiar to their life. Kendzior (2011) for instance, shows how Uzbek diaspora use the Internet to criticize the government through a cynicism that is known as a distinct characteristic of Uzbekistan’s politics. Research in Spain by Postill and Pink (2012) shows a similar case where it is hard to separate online and offline activism. In fact, the dynamics of content used in activism spread fluidly between online and offline and across multiple platforms at the same time. This fluidity of using multiple platforms on the Internet led the researchers to refer the situation as ‘the messy web’ (Postill and Pink 2012: 3).
Another issue that is raised on the use of the Internet is the ‘authenticity’ of representation. There are many platforms on the Internet that allow people to actively select and configure their online representations. An anonymous website such as 4chan for example is used by many to convey racist messages that they would not do on their daily life. Hence, there are discrepancies between their representation online and offline. Yet even platforms that promote its user to be onymous, like Facebook, are still used to construct ‘false’ representation. This issue of authenticity is most likely based on the assumption that offline practices have more authenticity than online practices (Varis, 2014). However, this assumption can be problematic since, as discussed before, there are no clear boundaries between online and offline as a field site.
A similar point was raised by Miller and Slater (2001) on the fluidity of representation on the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is often perceived as having modalities that enable more fluid representations than previous media. Although many cases has shown that Internet users practice fluid representations
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(e.g. Bernal 2006; Aouragh 2008), such practices are not bound by the Internet as a medium. On the contrary, the constant deconstruction of identities was practiced by many communities before the existence of the Internet (Miller and Slater 2001: 5). For example, there are numerous cases in Indonesia where claims of tradition developed as a response toward the threat of capitalist expansions. In these cases, the identity portrayed and presented on the Internet is not really different from how people use offline identity. The Internet is thus a means with which one can enact—often in a highly idealized form—a version of oneself perceived as authentic (Miller and Slater 2001: 10).
Previous discussions on the online-offline dynamics are important to incorporate in this research because they are relevant to the situation with Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. First, since online- offline cultural practices overlap, the kinds of materials presented on the Internet should be seen as a continuation of the previous practices. Specifically, this is because numerous pieces of research (e.g. Schaefter 2009; Dragojlovic 2012) show that these exiles have been actively producing materials through different kind of mediums. Second, it has been discussed that offline specificities are essential to understand online cultural practices. For the context of Indonesian exiles, as will be discussed more in the following chapters, these specificities are developed through constant negotiation between past ideals and current information engaged with online.
Internet, Storytelling, and Agency In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Appadurai (1996: 3) posits “theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected diacritics and explores their joint effect on the work of imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity.” He argues that although neither are hardly new, the interactions between them produce unprecedented cultural phenomena. The examples of these phenomena vary throughout the world, from Chinese migrants who defended the Chinese minority in Indonesia (Ong, 2003) to the invention of an online nation by the Sikh community (Axel, 2004). These phenomena are driven by the work of imagination which is influenced by the use of the Internet.
This work of imagination is important because according to Appadurai (1996: 7) it has a projective sense that could initiate social actions. In this regard, collective imagination cannot just be seen as a form of escapism since it is capable of driving a group of people to pursue a certain cause. The use of electronic media such as the Internet is important because it could evoke the imagination through news, pictures, or videos. Apart from that, (Appadurai 1996: 8) stressed the capability of bringing those imaginations beyond the boundaries of nations. Videos of war in Syria, for example, initiated a sense of oppression
5 toward Islam, which later turned into mass demonstrations. Thus, the use of the Internet is essential for many kinds of solidarity projects all around the world. At this point, Appadurai (1996: 31) argues that imagination should be perceived as a social practice that is central to all forms of agency.
Considering that my research focuses on the use of the Internet among groups of displaced people, this framework is really essential. Appadurai’s thinking is very important to understand how the collective ideals among Indonesian exiles initiated the use of the Internet (chapter 3). On the other hand, the use of the Internet informed this community's offline social actions (chapter 4). Based on the observations and interviews, I found that their use of the Internet, particularly mailing lists, is related to the offline practices of storytelling (chapter 4). In this vein, the discussion of this subject by Jackson (2013) is of great use to explain this practice among Indonesian exiles in Netherlands. As he pointed out, the act of storytelling is often started by the experiences of crisis or loss (Jackson 2013: 31). Therefore, it is very relevant with the discussion of exiles where the existence of the community is highly influenced by the experiences of loss.
Storytelling is equally an individual and social practice, because it “requires the presence of attentive others, (so) the process of shaping and reshaping one’s own subjectivity inevitably runs parallel to the work of shaping collective identity and solidarity” (Jackson 2013: 16). This ‘shaping and reshaping’ process happens because in storytelling the storyteller tries to connect his/her individual experiences to a group of people. In order to do that, the individual experiences are transformed in a way that makes sense to the audience (Jackson 2013: 15).
Apart from making the private into social, Jackson (2013: 34) asserts that storytelling is “a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances.” This second role draws on Jackson's reading of Hannah Arendt that posits humans as subjects actively shaping their own lives while also being subjected to the actions of others. Therefore, when humans do not really have control of their life situations, they nonetheless have control of creating its meaning (Jackson 2013: 35). In the case of exiles, storytelling thus enables them to reinvent themselves as subjects despite external situations that they cannot control. Nevertheless, it does not mean that stories are the pure reflection of an individual's mind, because it is “a result of ongoing dialogue and redaction within fields of intersubjectivity” (Jackson 2013: 40). Hence, it is important to note that the collective participation of other exiles is very much relevant to the storyteller for the creation of narratives among them.
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Research Setting and Population Previously, I have provided a historical account of the beginning of the Indonesian exile communities. If a community means a group of people who share similar symbolic values, how do we know if that is the case with Indonesian exiles? What if it is more appropriate to regard them as a group of individuals with more differences than similarities? To go into that trajectory will not be baseless at all, particularly since several pieces of research (e.g. Hearman 2010; Hill 2010) show the fragmentations within the group. However, I would argue that Indonesian exiles can still be categorized as a community. To support that point, I look into the discussion of the category of 'exiles'.
Edward Said defined an exile as “anyone who prevented from returning home” (Malkki 1995: 512). Although this definition is relatively general, I believe it represents the common perception of what people perceive as an exile. However, this definition would not be suitable for the case of Indonesian exiles, as although they were prevented from returning to Indonesia, after 1998 many of them visited Indonesia as Dutch citizens. Some Indonesian exiles even got new Indonesian passports (Hearman 2010: 102). Despite this change of situation, many of them still referred to themselves as an eksil (Indonesian transliteration of exile) or as a similar term such as ‘orang terhalang pulang’ that emphasizes their inability to return to their homeland.
The term eksil itself is commonly used among these exiles who embraced their status as a form of support toward leftist ideas (Dragojlovic 2012: 162). For them, though the political and social situation has changed, the moment when they were prevented from returning to Indonesia in 1965 remains an important reference for them to identify themselves. Nevertheless, this attachment for displacement process does not mean that Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands are a monolithic group. As several previous pieces of research (Dragojlovic, 2012; Hill, 2010; Sipayung, 2011) suggested, there are many differences among the exile community. Some are still attached to the ideals of leftist values, while others are less interested in discussing that issue. There is also ideological split connected to the competition between the USSR and China from the 1960s to the 1980s. They also have different displacement experiences since they left from different trajectories. Then how do we define exiles that may include these diversities?
Using Malkki’s framework, Dragojlovic (2010: 54) defines exiles as “specific individuals who act in the world and whose social activities and actions are informed by their status as exiles while not being entirely determined by it.” This explanation is a little confusing since it still does not clearly define ‘exile’. However, if we use the previous proposition from Said that emphasised the inability to return home as a
7 definition of exile, Dragojlovic's definition is useful to explain the situation of Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. Indonesian exiles requesting asylum became permanent residents in the Netherlands in the 1980s or 1990s. Therefore, formally there are no obstacles for them to return to Indonesia, particularly after the fall of New Order in 1998. Since they are able to return to Indonesia freely, it is hard to classify them as exiles in the classic sense. Nevertheless, their status as exiles is maintained by their self-identification as a group of people who are prevented from returning home regardless of how long they live in the Netherlands. In this regard, it fits the definition proposed by Dragojlovic where the exile status of Indonesian exiles does not come from their formal situation but from their attachment to displacement experiences in the past.
In this sense, I believe they could be categorized as a form of community. As Cohen (1985) suggested, as long as a community shares common symbols, its members do not necessarily have to have similar points of view. Symbols are effective because they allows individuals to attach their own meaning while speaking in communal languages (Cohen 1985: 22). For Indonesian exiles, Dragojlovic (2010: 162) suggested there are at least two common traits shared by most of them. The first trait is their association with the Indonesian left and with President Sukarno. The second is their concern for and interest in the Indonesian national project. I would also add a third trait that is suggested by the research of Sipayung (2011), namely their attachment to their displacement experiences. As will be shown in the next chapters, within the materials produced by the exiles, these traits often overlap.
No exact numbers of Indonesian exiles are known; estimations range from hundreds to thousands (Hill 2008: 2). In the Netherlands, there is no official number that records how many Indonesian exiles live in this country. A previous effort to compile this data was thwarted by other exiles due to concerns over security (Hill 2010: 40). Nevertheless, there are organizations of Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands that were useful to locate informants in this research. The first organization is Perhimpunan Persaudaraan (Association of Brotherhood and Sisterhood), which was established in 1988. This is one of the few organizations that have been involved in various activities regarding exiles in the Netherlands. The members of this organization have various ethnic, religious, and ideological affiliations. The diversity of its members is aligned with its purpose to be an inclusive organization, particularly because there are many tensions among exiles in the Netherlands (Dragojlovic 2010: 66). The average age of members in this organization is 70 to 90 years old. Other organizations of Indonesian exiles that were relevant to this research were DIAN (Indonesian women's organization), Perdoi (Perhimpunan Dokumentasi Indonesia/
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Association of Indonesian Documentation) and LPK65 (Lembaga Pembela Korban 1965/1965 Victims' Defender Institute). Despite structural differences, members of these organizations sometimes overlap.
For fieldwork preparation, I conducted two interviews and one offline observation for one event among the exile community. From these preliminary interactions, I contacted other informants and managed to do interviews with fifteen informants and two observation participations during fieldwork. In every interview, I asked whether I could report the informant's real name or if I should use a pseudonym instead. Among the informants, fourteen are exiles: nine males and five females. The other informant is a committee member of International Peoples' Tribunal 1965 (IPT1965), which provided some important data for this research as well. The informants lived in different countries when they became exiles, including: China, the USSR, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany, and Vietnam. Using information from these interviews, I located several online platforms they used on a daily basis.
In this research I observed several Internet platforms, including: personal Facebook pages, a secret Facebook group5, multiple mailing lists, personal and organizational blogs, and a database of old mailing lists. The latter was included because some of the Internet use was practiced in the 1990s, but the mailing list has now been closed. For ethical purposes, I always mentioned my identity and purpose for my mailing list membership application. During the interviews, I asked my informants for their consent to look at and use the materials they published online. I avoided direct identification of materials published by members that were not my informants.
Methodology This research is developed from the assumption that offline research is essential to make sense of practices on the Internet. This trajectory is chosen based on the notion that for most of Indonesian exiles, the Internet was introduced much later in their life. In this regard, the use of the Internet is seen as the continuation of previous media practices. This approach is not new in anthropology, however, as it has been done in many previous pieces of research (e.g. Miller and Slater 2001; Postill, John and Pink 2012; Aouragh 2008; Bräuchler 2003).
Those anthropologists offer various ways to exercise ethnographic research on the Internet, usually known as digital ethnography. Miller and Slater, for example, combined methods such as interviews in cafés with chat features to understand Trinidadian’s Internet use. On the other hand, Bräuchler (2003) modified participation observation by looking at a mailing list to comprehend conflict in Maluku. Postill
5 A Facebook group provides an option to set privacy to become a secret group. Facebook users could not find and become a member of these secret Facebook groups unless added by a member.
9 and Pink (2012) also mentioned that other researchers rely on computer-generated data mining. These variations show that there is not a single convention on how to do digital ethnography, although Pink (2015) suggested that these variabilities should be regarded as one of the characteristics of digital ethnography. She argues that there should not be a single set of methods to bound digital ethnography; instead the choice of methodology should be driven by the research topic itself. This ongoing process in her opinion is similar to the way Ingold describes the process of design (Pink et al. 2015: 11). Therefore, the definition and set of methodologies applied in digital ethnography is open-ended.
There are many possibilities to conduct research on the Internet, though many researchers (e.g. (Bräuchler, 2003; Miller & Slater, 2001; Postill & Pink, 2012a) who consider the importance of offline/online dynamic interactions apply and modify conventional methodologies from ethnography to this terrain. Following that trajectory, this research used participant observation and semi-structured interviews during fieldwork.
Participant observation in this research was implemented on two sites: online and offline. As suggested by Aouragh (2008), if you are doing research on the Internet, this technology can be perceived as a field site. Consequently, acts on the Internet may also be comprehended as cultural practices that are observable by a researcher. In this regard, a researcher may implement participant observation to grasp cultural practices enacted online. However, on the Internet, the degree to which researchers might observe and participate is not the same on all platforms. The method is bounded by different features provided by each of the Internet platforms. Hence, it is necessary to specify several Internet platforms that are used by Indonesian exiles. These platforms observed in this research were as follows: a. Organization Website: LPK 1965 (Blogspot) b. Personal Blog : Ibrahim Isa (Blogspot) c. Mailing List : Sastra Pembebasan (Yahoogroups), Gelora 45 (Yahoogroups), Nasional-list (Yahoogroups), Apakabar (Online Database) d. Facebook Group : Secret Facebook group related to IPT1965 e. Facebook Wall : Personal Facebook wall of informants
The selection of these platforms and its materials was influenced by pre-fieldwork interviews and observations. During fieldwork, some informants also suggested some more platforms to observe. These processes were necessary since their online activities, mainly on mailing lists, are not easily located using
10 a simple Internet search. It is also important to note that since my informants mostly used Indonesian language on these platforms, I translated those conversations to English to present it on this thesis.
During fieldwork I also managed to do two offline participant observations. The first event was the verdict announcement of IPT 1965 that took place in Amsterdam. The second event was a discussion event by Diskusi Forum that was held in Zeist. Both of these events are a central part of analysis on online-offline engagement (chapter 4). The other method that is important for this research is semi- structured interview. This method is useful to comprehend the mental aspect of actions conducted on the Internet. This process is also important because it provides insights into the kind of shared values and ideals that inform informants' Internet practices.
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2. Exilic Experiences and Political Dissidence
During my first few months in the Netherlands, I went to an Indonesian film screening held by Perhimpunan Persaudaraan (usually shortened as Persaudaraan) and PPI Leiden (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia/Indonesian Student Organization). At the time I was not aware that Persaudaraan is an organization established by Indonesian exiles that live in Netherlands. The event was held in a public building located in Diemen.
I was a few minutes early, so the event had not started, but there were already many people inside the room. Based on their physical appearances, I assumed they all originated from Indonesia. However, it was clear to me that these visitors could be classified into two groups: the older people that consisted of men and women who were in their seventies, and younger people who looked like they were in their twenties. While I could not comprehend the identity/ association/ affiliation of the first group yet, I assumed that the latter group consisted of Indonesian students just like me. It seems apparent to me that the older people were familiar with one another; they greeted and talked to each other. On the other hand, for the students - apart from those that were part of the committee - we were less familiar with each other. Hence, there were efforts to remove the awkwardness by introducing ourselves to one another.
Around twenty minutes past eleven, the event started. One Leiden student acted as a host and made an announcement for all participants to sit. She then asked Andreas, the head of Persaudaraan, to give an opening speech. Andreas stood up and took the microphone enthusiastically. He started his talk by expressing gratitude towards the event’s committee. He then elaborated how collaboration between the young and old generations is important for the development of a nation. However, he also mentioned how both of these groups experience different situations:
“After all, we are Indonesian people. The question is why we as Indonesian people are living here abroad? If that is asked to the young generation, the answer would be simple. They are here for study. We also went abroad for study; the only difference between us is that you have an ability to return to Indonesia, while we were not.” This remark illustrates the ambiguousness of an exile's position toward their homeland, which is Indonesia in this case. On the one hand, they share a similarity with these students, but on the other hand they were forced to separate from their homeland. At this point, I realized that these older people are part of the Indonesian exile community in the Netherlands. In the Indonesian language, this remark
12 was slightly confusing because there is no time reference6 when Andreas talked about their inability to return. Thus, I was not really sure whether he described the past or present situation for these exiles. Regardless of this ambiguity, the speech is important because it implies the inability to return is still an important reference for this community. Moreover, in that speech Andreas also stressed how that condition does not make them less Indonesian.
The speech thus seemed to aligned with many discussions on exiles that emphasized exilic experiences as the dominant marker of their communities (Delanty, 2003; Dragojlovic, 2012; Sipayung, 2011). While it is true that exilic experiences are important, in the case of Indonesian exiles I believe we should look beyond that period to comprehend the development of shared ideals that shaped and reshaped the community. To illustrate the changes of those ideals I present the individual narratives of exiles classified into three sub-chapters based on the period: before leaving Indonesia, living abroad as an exile, and life in the Netherlands.
2. 1 Association with Progressive Ideas In general, there is not much knowledge about Indonesian exiles apart from within the community itself. Even though there have been plenty of discussions regarding the 1965-1966 events, there has not been much research on this community, at least until several years ago. This absence was pointed out by several researchers (e.g. Dragojlovic 2012; Mudzakkir 2015; Hill 2010). Before their departure, these exiles had a strong association with the Indonesian left as well as with Sukarno, the head of state of that time (Dragojlovic 2012: 162).
These associations were expressed through participation in different organizations, which was influenced by discussions of socialism, Marxism, and nationalism. During my fieldwork, although sometimes the meaning was not very clear, many informants used these terms often and interchangeably. On several occasions, some of my informants would classify these terms under an umbrella term like ‘progressive ideas’7. Regardless of different labels and interpretations, it is clear to me that the ties with these ideals are really important for Indonesian exiles and are still major references in their community. The question is: how did these ideals become that important for these exiles? To understand that, I will look into informants’ personal life details to illustrate how these ideals were developed and shared.
6 It is important to note that unlike English, the Indonesian language does not have verb tenses (past, present, future, etc.) 7 This term will be used in this thesis because it is generally accepted within the exile community as covering many different ideological positions among them.
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For Radi, his interest in progressive ideals could be traced back to his childhood. He was raised in a religious family that lived in Subang, a small city in West Java. During his teenage years, he was sent by his family to an Islamic boarding school. At this institution he experienced sexual abuse that led him to question the relevance of religion on morality:
“…I believe I was matured (by the experience). I went to my parents and said, “In my opinion being a good person has nothing to do with religion, but because that person is (inherently) good. Thus, if that good person becomes Muslim, he will be a good Muslim. (If that person) becomes Christian (he) also will be a good Christian, etc. Thus, you do not need to have a religion to be a good person.” His parents expelled him from the house after this confrontation. The then sixteen-year-old Radi then involved himself with several leftist organizations. First, he joined a peasant organization known as BTI (Barisan Tani Indonesia/March of Indonesian Peasants). Later, he also joined Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth).
These involvements with several organizations gave Radi opportunities to interact with important political figures at national and international levels. For example, D.N. Aidit, the head of PKI, asked him to become a member of the party. However, Radi turned down the offer because he believed in certain ideals of being a communist, which he perceived could never be achieved. The notion of this ideal communist came from his experience with a PKI member when he was a teenager:
“He was considered a father figure for the whole village. People from PKI, Masyumi8, and any group perceived him as a respected senior figure. He helped every person regardless of their ideology. He was my idol; he was a representation of communists for me. Thus, for me, a communist is the best person. I knew him when I was young. I would not be able to be like him…” Despite the rejection, Aidit offered Radi another position to serve the party, which he accepted. He was recruited as part of Aidit’s research team, as well as the chancellor of Akademi Pertanian Egom (Egom Agricultural Institute). Radi recalled that his decision to not become a party member made Aidit label him as an 'independent Bolshevik’. Aidit borrowed this term from Lenin who used the same label for a group of peasants that were loyal supporters but not party members. It became the term that Radi uses to describe his stance on Marxism and communism.
Another informant, Chalik, also interacted with progressive movements from his neighbourhood. He grew up in Kisaran, North Sumatera. He recalled his youth as a spirited teenager who had a lot of interests. When he was a student, he joined Ikatan Pemuda Pelajar Indonesia (Indonesian Youth Student League). At that time, this organization was renowned for its activities struggling for students’ rights. At this organization, he was appointed as a chief for the regional level. On the other hand, he was also
8 Islamic political party, active from 1945-1960
14 interested in various forms of art. Hence, he joined Lekra, an art organization that was affiliated with leftist ideas. Lekra in his opinion was different from other cultural organizations:
“At that time, the progressive one in term of writings was Lekra. Peasants and labourers joined Lekra. There were other organizations that were affiliated with Muslims or nationalists, such as PNI9, and LKN (Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional/Institute of National Culture) created by Soekarno.” Chalik's time in Lekra was spent doing different forms of art, from writing and reading poetry to participating in plays. Many of his plays were adapted from scripts created by other Lekra figures like Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Utuy Tatang Sontani. These were aligned with his educational experiences. After he graduated from middle school, Chalik joined literary and cultural programmes at high school. He continuously pursued his interest in art by joining the Art Academy in Medan. Around the same time he also worked as a journalist in Harapan Daily, which was later banned by the government. His activities in Lekra eventually led him to become the head of Lekra in Medan.
Since Chalik had a strong interest in progressive ideals, he applied for a membership of PKI. Around the same time, PKI provided opportunities for selected members to learn more about Marxism, communism, and socialism. The selected members were invited from all over Indonesia to come to Jakarta, to attend Ali Archam Social Academy. This university was specifically established by PKI to provide its member with knowledge on social sciences, particularly Marxism. Chalik Hamid was one of the selected few that were invited to this academy. Before he completed the programme at the Art Academy, he moved to Jakarta to join this academy in 1964.
At this point of the interview, Chalik reminded me that PKI was an official and legal party just like other parties that held religious or nationalist ideologies:
“At that time PKI was a legal party, acknowledged by the government. Sukarno even aspired to create Nasakom10 at that time: nationalist, religion, and communist. But before he achieved that goal, the Nasakom government was already annihilated. As I said, the party was legal and official, thus all of its activities were also official. Those we fought were bloodsuckers, loan sharks in villages, capitalists in cities.” I did not ask Chalik why he felt the need to explain PKI’s legality. However, I assumed he tried to avoid any judgement towards him caused by the stigma associated with the PKI for decades. It was probably even harder for him because the period when he was involved with leftist organizations is one that he feels very proud of.
9 Nationalist political party, active from 1927-1971 10 Nasakom is an abbreviation of three words, Nasionalism (Nationalism), Agama (Religion), and Komunis (communism). It was a political concept proposed by Sukano to unite three ideological forces from that era.
15
I believe Sarmadji’s narrative is also important to illustrate how these exiles learned progressive ideas in Indonesia. He is a renowned figure among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. Not only is he one of the most senior exiles, but for many years he dedicated his time to collecting various print publications, particularly ones related with communism and socialism in Indonesia. Sarmadji came from Solo, in Central Java. Before he went to China in 1964, he worked at a sports inspection institute in Solo. His job made him interact with many children. Thus, he was also trusted to guide children in a Boy Scouts' programme. Eventually, Sarmadji was posted to Jakarta by the Ministry of Culture and Basic Education. However, it was hard to live in Jakarta on a civil servant's salary. Therefore, he decided to leave the job and apply for another job on a national newspaper.
Sarmadji was recruited to manage a children’s column at Harian Rakjat, a national newspaper owned by PKI. Sarmadji recalled that his responsibility was not limited to the column itself, but he also managed the readers’ group. He established readers’ group in many areas. Apparently, this occupation made him realized that he did not have enough knowledge about education. Therefore, he sought an opportunity to study education.
At this time, the relations between China and Indonesia were very strong. Many Indonesians received the opportunity to study in China as a result of these diplomatic relations (Liu, 2006). Sarmadji then applied for a scholarship to learn more about children’s education, particularly children’s education outside of school. For him, this particular subject was important because many PKI cadres were very active outside their houses. Hence, there was a necessity to take care of their kids. Sarmadji paralleled this situation with experiences in Russia where the communist party would take care of its members’ children. He added that similar kinds of practices were also implemented in China. Therefore, in his opinion it was important for Indonesia to learn these methods as well.
Sarmadji was accepted into the scholarship programme, and just like other students, he had to take some preparatory programmes. Part of this was the Tujuh Bahan Pokok Indoktrinasi (Seven Fundamental Indoctrination Materials) that served as political education for these students. This programme, according to Sarmadji, was specifically created to mould students into Sukarnoists11. Sarmadji added that later the head of the programme became a Soeharto supporter, which made the situation rather ironic.
11 Generally, this means the supporter of Sukarno and his political ideology. As previously mentioned, since Sukarno's teachings also used many sources from Marxism and Socialism, for many informants being Sukarnoist has a strong affiliation with other terms such as ‘progressive’.
16
This preparatory programme was not his first experience with progressive ideas. His living area in Solo also influenced how Sarmadji interacted with progressive figures. Many of his neighbours participated in the early development of communism in Indonesia. They participated in several struggles against the Dutch colonial power. Afterwards, according to Samardji, many of them were captured and exiled to another island in Digul. Later, they were also exiled to Australia, where they learned more about Marxist literature. When they came back to Solo in 1946, they spread these progressive ideas.
For young Sarmadji, these figures were really interesting for many reasons. First, he witnessed how his neighbours transformed from being uneducated to articulate orators. Second, they also initiated various struggles against the Dutch. So in 1952, he applied to become a PKI member and associated himself with progressive ideals afterwards.
These narratives illustrate how these exiles interacted with progressive ideas from a relatively young age. Their involvements also came from personal interactions in their neighbourhoods, where they could see how these ideas were translated into social actions from different kinds of organizations. On the other hand, the state under Sukarno also accommodated these progressive ideals into its policies. This structure reinforced previously existing ties with these ideals. Other exiles might have different personal experiences in terms of their association with progressive ideals. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that these associations have been important in shaping how these exiles addressed themselves, whether as individuals or as members of the community. These associations with progressive ideals were brought by these exiles when they left Indonesia.
2. 2 Precarious Life after 1965 Incident Before departure, many of these exiles went through preparatory programmes run by the ministry of PTIP (Perguruan Tinggi dan Ilmu Pengetahuan/Higher Education and Science). As mentioned before, this programme prepared them not just for studying abroad but also to represent Indonesia’s political ideology under Sukarno. It is thus no wonder that many of my informants described their departure as some kind of mission where they were not just mere individual students, but part of collective groups that represented Indonesia internationally. It is important to remember these positions and the pride they had as selected elites representing their country when considering how the 1965-1966 events abruptly changed that into precarious situations. To illustrate this point even further, I would like to present some more narratives of exiles.
Ana lived in Jakarta since junior high school. After graduating from senior high school, she studied at college and worked at the same time to finance her studies. Ana then found an announcement in the
17 paper about a scholarship from the Soviet Union. Ana explained that, in this period, Soviet experts were influential in various development programmes under Sukarno. This involvement was not separated from the large amount of funding that the Soviet Union provided to Indonesia (Hill 2014: 623). Thus, the education system in the Soviet Union was highly regarded in Indonesia.
In 1962, Ana was selected as one of the few women to receive the scholarship. At the age of 22, she arrived in Moscow and registered as a student in the Department of Agricultural Economy at Lumumba University. Ana chose this programme because she believed it would be relevant to Indonesian development, which emphasized the agricultural sector. She recalled,
“Unfortunately (the knowledge) could not be utilized. We studied hard and enthusiastically. That was one of the things that I regret. I could not channel the knowledge that I had learned into Indonesia.” In Moscow, Ana interacted with many international students. At that time, each country had their representation committee to bridge communications between students and the Soviet Union. For Ana, it was a proud moment because she could participate with others in introducing Indonesia to international students, although she recalled that Indonesia was already quite known among international students from its association with Sukarno. “Every time Asian or Latin American students met Indonesian students, they would directly refer to Sukarno”, said Ana. Sukarno was renowned at that time because of his involvement in the Asian-African conference.
In 1965, the first batch of Indonesian student that came to Moscow finished their studies. Several months before they returned to Indonesia, Sukarno came to the Soviet Union. Many students and military officers that studied in Moscow gathered and met Sukarno. Several months later, these students who returned to Indonesia were employed in different kinds of government institutions. Some of them even sent letters to Moscow, and encouraged other students to finish their studies and return to work in Indonesia. Therefore, no one anticipated the important event that occurred in September 1965, including Ana. Reading those letters, she was inspired to graduate and return to Indonesia as soon as possible. Little did she know that most of her friends would later be prisoned after the 1965 incident.
After the incident, many Indonesian students lived through a traumatic period since there were many uncertainties regarding the situations in Indonesia (Hill 2014: 628). It was not until 1966 that the embassy made a strong move toward Indonesian students in Moscow. It was the time when Ana almost finished her studies and was preparing to return to Indonesia. The Indonesian embassy gathered Indonesian students and interrogated them one by one. Ana was asked about her family in Indonesia and requested to report herself to the government when she returned. She was worried and stressed to
18 embassy officials that she was sent by the Indonesian government and there was no correlation between her activities and her family in Indonesia. She also refused the embassy’s request to sign several documents in relation to the 1965 incident, particularly the one that condemned Sukarno as the one who was responsible for that situation:
“What is the 30th September Movement? We did not understand; it was impossible that Sukarno would coup himself. And I was a supporter of Sukarno, thus I decided not to sign the document.” After the event at the embassy, her passport was no longer valid to use. Her anxiety was even bigger because she did not know anything about her family and friends’ conditions in Indonesia. Once, she sent a letter to her father, but a reply never came. Later, her sister informed Ana that their father was fired from his job and returned to his village. It was a really hard situation for her because even though her father was not even involved in PKI activities he was treated badly. Of course, Ana could not return to Indonesia. She lived in the Soviet Union until 1967 before moving to several countries and finally arrived in the Netherlands in 1979.
Just like Ana, Florensia12 was one of few females who were sent to the Soviet Union. At the end of 1960, Florensia went to Moscow to study medical science at Lumumba University. In the first few months, she attended preparatory classes on language and basic medical knowledge. Apart from that, the students were also able to take extracurricular activities that were provided by the university. Florensia chose to take ballet classes and a driving course. It was a memorable experience for her because in her opinion, courses provided by the Soviet Union were rigorous. Even for a relatively simple driving course, she was expected to learn about car engines.
The medical courses she took were also very demanding, even more so because there was a request from Latin American countries to modify the workload of the programme. Originally, the programme was intended to be completed in 1967. However, there were urgent needs for medical personnel in several Latin American countries, so they demanded the programme have an earlier graduation. Lumumba University granted the request but as a consequence the students need to study more hours every day.
In 1965, Florensia was shocked to learn about the 1965 incident. At the time, no one really knew what was happening in Indonesia, and Indonesian students were anxious. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union guaranteed their status as students so they could continue their education. They even offered opportunities to Indonesian students to work or study after completing their bachelor's programmes.
12 Pseudonym chosen by the informant
19
Despite the uncertainties, Florensia managed to complete her program in 1966. In the same year, she was invited by the Indonesian embassy to present and sign several documents. Florensia recalled that the situation was quite intense. There was one incident where the embassy officials were violent to Indonesian students, an event which later made the Soviet Union issue a regulation that forbade any kind of disturbance in public areas.
Similar to Ana, Florensia refused the demands from the embassy and chose to work as an intern doctor instead. Several Vietnamese students knew her situation and offered her the chance to work in Vietnam. At that time Vietnam needed a lot of medical personnel because of their war against the USA. “Then I thought, it is probably a good (opportunity), because I could not serve for Indonesia, since I could not return,” said Florensia. She was 24 years old when she went to Vietnam in 1967 to work as a military doctor. There, she met another Indonesian exile who had come there earlier, and married him.
It was not an easy situation for anyone to live in, let alone start a marriage. The whole country was under constant threat of bombardment, and Florensia and her husband were posted in different units. When she gave birth, she needed to leave the baby around the borders between China and Vietnam to avoid the dangers of war.
In 1972, Vietnam issued a policy that every foreigner needed to leave the country so they could serve their own nationals. Florensia, her husband, and their two toddlers then moved to China. China was perceived as a feasible country for them to go to since it is located near Vietnam. However, when they arrived, there was a Cultural Revolution in China. Foreigners like Florensia and her family were placed within camps that were heavily guarded by local military. The residents of the camps were also forbidden from doing any of professional work.
As a consequence, Florensia could not use her medical knowledge and was not able to learn the Chinese language. In 1976, there was a conflict between Mao and other political figures that led to new policies that allowed foreigners to work. After this, Florensia could work as a doctor at a hospital. However, in the 1980s, China’s foreign policy caused Florensia and her family to move again. China wanted to mend their broken diplomatic ties with Indonesia; hence they needed to comply with the Indonesian government requests not to accommodate Indonesian exiles anymore. In 1989, Florensia and her family moved to the Netherlands with help from an old colleague who also came from Indonesia.
Esti also had precarious situations after 1965 incident. He was 23 years old when he went to the Soviet Union in September 1962. Around that time, he estimated there were probably two hundred Indonesian students at Lumumba University, while other students were at Lomonosov University and other places
20 in Soviet Union. Esti chose to take an economics programme that was in line with his previous job as a public servant.
In 1965, he received knowledge about the incident from the radio. Many students in the Soviet Union regularly listened to the radio for the weather forecast. From the radio they could also listen to various broadcasts from different countries such as Australia, the UK, Germany, and Indonesian broadcasts from China. Despite these broadcasts, Esti and other students did not really understand what was actually happening in Indonesia.
Several months later, the Indonesian Embassy responded to the incident by calling Indonesian students to the embassy. Apparently, they were asked to sign several documents as a sign of loyalty to the Indonesian government. The first document presented was a request for the students to condemn the incident. Esti and many others signed the document because they did not support the act of 30th September 1965. However, they refused to sign the other documents that asked them to condemn Sukarno. Afterwards, a friend of his could not extend his passport at the Indonesian Embassy and was asked to return to Indonesia. Since then, Esti and many other students decided not to give their passport to the embassy. The Indonesian Embassy then issued a warning to everybody not to help Indonesian students who refused to comply with their request.
(List of names whose passport revoked, issued by Indonesian embassy, private document of Florensia)
During his time in the Soviet Union, Esti married another Indonesian student. When he finished his studies in 1967, he left the Soviet Union and went to China because of his wife’s illness. Back then, China was regarded as having more advanced medical treatment for kidney disease. Esti and his wife lived in China until 1973, before they moved to West Germany. He chose to go to Germany because it was
21 possible for them to enter this country without a visa. Esti and his wife went to the country as tourists, so they did not have residence permit. They were accepted to stay in a house managed by the Southeast Asian Students' Organization. Despite the name, the house was occupied by students from other areas like Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. In the house, Esti met other Indonesian students that came from East European countries. “So we joined because we shared the same cause in supporting Sukarno’s government,” said Esti. He recalled that at that time Indonesians in Berlin regularly published Mengabdi Rakyat as a bulletin to oppose the New Order regime. At the same time, Indonesian students in Albania and China also had their own publications. Some similar forms of opposition could also be found in Albania (Hill 2010: 33).
In 1978, Esti and his wife's passports could not be used to stay any longer in Germany, so they moved to Algeria. By that time, most of their friends had already requested asylum, but they had decided not to do so. “We did not want to seek asylum, we wanted as Indonesian, to remain (Indonesian), if there was a possibility to go home, (we wanted to) go home,” said Esti.
During his time in the Soviet Union, Esti had established connections with Algerian students. Some of the other Indonesian students were also involved in many Algerian development projects. Esti recalled that one marine engineer from Indonesia wrote a book that became important reference in Algeria. “If we are talking about knowledge, they had a lot of knowledge that could not be utilized by the Indonesian government,” said Esti. At the end of 1978, Esti decided to return to Germany and planned to apply for asylum in Hamburg. When he talked to his friend in the Netherlands about this plan, the friend suggested that Esti and his wife should move to the Netherlands instead. They moved to the Netherlands in 1979.
As described above, these exiles went from Indonesia with certain awareness that they were part of ideals developed under Soekarno. This awareness was an important part of how they positioned themselves particularly towards the international colleagues they met abroad. However, the 1965-1966 events put them in a precarious situation. The Indonesian government that sent them as its best representatives suddenly alienated them and treated them as pariahs.
Despite the guarantees from their host countries, the exiles still faced many uncertainties. The future they had planned, to use their knowledge to participate in the Indonesian development project, became impossible. This loss of opportunities became one of the most common narratives shared by Indonesian exiles. There was a common sentiment that their inability to return was also a loss for Indonesia, since
22 the nation could not utilize their knowledge. This loss was inevitable since there were almost no possibility to contribute knowledge from a distance at that time.
The uncertainties were even greater for those who moved around multiple countries. The movements were motivated by various reasons. Some found the situation in their host countries already uncomfortable. Other exiles, like Florensia, looked for opportunities to utilize the knowledge they had gained from earlier studies. There were also many exiles that moved around to try to find a way to return to Indonesia.
Each of them faced different social and political difficulties in the many countries they lived in. The ones who went to Vietnam, for example, participated in a war, so experienced the constant danger of losing their lives. On the other hand, the ones who went to China during the Cultural Revolution lived under heavy monitoring and could not continue their education programmes. Furthermore, many were also caught in a power struggle between China and the Soviet Union (Hill 2008: 6).
The precarious situation did not only come from their own life’s experiences, but also from not knowing their relatives’ situations in Indonesia. As described by Ana, before the incident many of them still received good news from their colleagues who already worked in the country. However the contact was disrupted after the incident, thus they relied on news from radio and newspaper that amplified their anxiety even more. Moreover, during their interrogations, the embassy thoroughly screened their connections to their family in Indonesia. Thus, they were already given the impression that their families might be threatened simply because of the connections with them. Until today this anxiety is still very apparent among Indonesian exiles. Many of them are still worried about sharing any information about their family in Indonesia, although they may be very open about themselves.
These insecurities eventually led the exiles to look for other places to settle; many considered Western and Northern European countries as ideal destinations. Among these countries, most Indonesian exiles decided to go to Netherlands.
2.3 New Life in the Netherlands Although many exiles perceived the Netherlands as an ideal safe haven, it was not easy for them to position themselves within the new country. When they came to the Netherlands, many of these people already had a family. Some, like Esti, married other Indonesian exiles they met in host countries13, like the Soviet Union. Other exiles, like Florensia, met their partners in transit countries like Vietnam, even
13 Host countries refer to countries that were the first destination for these exiles when they left Indonesia, while transit countries refer to numerous countries that they visited before settling permanently in the new country.
23 though they similarly came from Soviet Union. There were also people, like Chalik, who married local people from their host countries.
For most of them, the existence of family played an important factor in their decisions to come to the Netherlands. They looked for a more stable and secure country to live in, especially because many places they had moved to before had later become unsafe. Apart from family, there were also many concerns regarding occupation, residence, and embracing new citizenships. These liminalities will be illustrated through these next narratives.
As previously mentioned, Esti listened to his friend's advice to move to the Netherlands instead of Hamburg. This friend was the one who established Mengabdi Rakyat that he encountered in Berlin. At the end of 1978, Esti moved to his house in Amsterdam. Previously, the same person had already helped many other exiles come to the Netherlands. Several months later, Esti and his wife applied for asylum in the Netherlands. This first request was rejected by the Dutch government because Esti’s passport showed that they had previously come from Germany, so they were expected to apply for asylum in Germany instead of the Netherlands. They previously expected to have an opportunity to return to Indonesia, but the time living abroad stretched out much longer than Esti had expected. Despite the initial rejection, Esti could appeal for their rights to stay in the Netherlands.
While waiting for the opportunity to work, Esti was involved in several organizations: Indoc14, Komite Indonesia15, and PPI Amsterdam. He recalled that the latter student organization was renowned for being progressive in comparison with another, similar student organization. PPI Amsterdam at that time published a bulletin called Berita Indonesia (Indonesian News). This bulletin compiled many issues and was distributed to various places including Australia and the USA. Esti's involvement with these organizations also allowed Esti to interact with Indonesian national figures like Gus Dur16 and Adnan Buyung Nasution17. These organizations held a great importance for Esti. “My activities were focused on struggles to oppose Suharto’s regime policies. And I could only do that through Komite Indonesia, Indoc, and PPI,” explained Esti.
14 This NGO was established in Leiden in 1979 that aimed to collect and disseminate information about Indonesia, particularly on human rights' issues. 15 An organization initiated by Professor Wim Wertheim in 1968 to support the struggle of human rights' issues in Indonesia under the governance of New Order. 16 It is a popular name of Abdurrahman Wahid who was a political and religious figure actively involved in human rights' issues. Later, he served as Indonesian president from 1999 to 2001. 17 Indonesian advocate and activist who participated in the struggle to support democracy and human rights during the New Order period.
24
There were various reasons for Esti to join the struggle against Soeharto’s regime. Like many activists, he disagreed with the oppression exercised by the government under Soeharto. Apart from the oppression, Esti believed that this government deliberately changed the interpretation of Pancasila, the philosophical foundations of Indonesia. The other reason was related to his personal experience as an exile:
“We were sent to study abroad and return to develop our homeland. So, before we went, we signed a contract in three copies at PTIP. The document mentioned that after we graduated, we were prepared to be assigned in every area in Indonesia. We had that official contract. But Soeharto did not allow (us to return). Whose fault was that? It was problematic. Was it my fault for not fulfilling my obligation? But my obligation to study was completed, and I wanted to return.” Around the same time, Esti and his wife moved to a living residence provided by the Dutch government for asylum seekers. They lived in an ex-sailor's dormitory where the Dutch government also provided them food and basic allowances. They lived in this place for a year, and then Esti had to look for another place to stay. Eventually, Esti and his wife were posted in one of the housings by the asylum agency and stayed there until they received full asylum status in 1985.
During this process, they could not do any kind of work because they did not have their asylum statuses yet. So they relied on the allowance from the Dutch government. After Esti received asylum status, he had an opportunity to learn the Dutch language. This skill allowed him to work as an intern in the social department. One day, a position opened for him to become a permanent employee. Esti at that time actually did not have right to apply for the job, but many of his Dutch friends encouraged him to pursue that position. “They said that I have to be brutal here, the Dutch said so. The rule needed to be broken,” explained Esti. He then decided to follow that advice and was accepted to work as a public servant in the social department from 1985 until 1995. After his retirement, he decided to visit Indonesia for the first time since his departure in 1962.
Ana came into the Netherlands in 1979. Before that, she travelled around several countries. When she applied for asylum, the interviewer asked her the reason she chose the Netherlands. She answered:
“The Netherlands has ratified the Geneva Convention that guaranteed asylum politics. Secondly, the historical relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands spanned more than a hundred years. Thus, the Dutch are familiar with Indonesians.” When Ana came to the Netherlands, she was already married to another exile she met after she left the Soviet Union. Ana and her family were helped by VVN (VluchtelingenWerk) to handle the asylum application process. The VVN employee said that they would help Ana and her family to immediately
25 receive residence rights and social allowance. At this institution, Ana could also learn the Dutch language lessons for free.
In the Netherlands, Ana met with many other exiles who came from various countries. She also met the Indonesian Ambassador to the Netherlands who was one of the officials that interrogated Indonesian students in Moscow. She recognized this person because she often went to the Indonesian Embassy during special occasions. On one occasion, Ana met the ambassador at the church and she greeted him but the ambassador did not seem to recognize her.
After Ana applied for asylum status, she had to report to the police station every week. On one occasion, one of the police read her birth date and said, “Why don’t you apply for Dutch citizenship? If you are like this, it is hard for you to go anywhere. But if you have a Dutch citizenship you could see your family in Indonesia.”
Then Ana thought, “It is just on paper, my soul will remain Indonesian. This is just an identity so that we could go outside the Netherlands.” On the other hand, her ex-husband insisted on keeping his Indonesian citizenship and refused to become a Dutch citizen. Later, her ex-husband applied for a Dutch citizenship after his brother came to the Netherlands and asked him to visit Indonesia. To encourage him, Ana said, “It is just a paper. Your heart still does not belong to the Netherlands; you are still Indonesian.”
In 1993, Ana went to Indonesia because she really wanted to return after several decades separated from her homeland. At the airport’s immigration desk, she stated that her visit was for a holiday. She also carefully chose people whom she met in Indonesia. For family, she planned only to meet her brother and sister. However, later, her brother asked Ana to meet their uncle who was a military officer. Since her uncle knew she had been in Moscow, he asked, “Ooo, you returned, are you a communist?” Ana was upset and questioned her uncle, “Uncle, why don’t you ask first why I did not return? Aren’t you just the same as Soeharto?”
During this period, Ana was also involved with the church to collect money and clothes that were sent to help ex-political prisoners in Indonesia. She sympathized with their situation because most of them found it hard to find livelihoods after they finished their sentence. Later, when one of her friends was interrogated by the military, they could no longer send any help to Indonesia.
While Ana and Esti departed from the Soviet Union, Chalik lived in Tirana until 1989 before he decided to leave Albania. One of the main factors in Chalik’s decision was the declining economy of Albania in
26 that period. He then requested the government to go to the Netherlands with his wife and children. The Albanian government allowed him to leave but requested that he only take his family after he had settled in the new country. Chalik agreed, and flew to Netherlands. When arriving at Schiphol Airport, he met a police officer and said that he wanted to request asylum from the Netherlands.
Before he arrived, Chalik knew that there were many Indonesian exiles that had come before him. There were various routes often used by these exiles to go to the Netherlands. There were many that came through the German border; there were also some exiles that came with an invitation from the church. Chalik and his friend chose to come via the airport and stated their intention directly to the police officer. This officer discovered that Chalik used a fake passport, but Chalik replied that it was the only means that he could use to go by plane. Chalik and his friend were given tickets and letters that explained their situation. They were asked to go to Roosendaal to process their asylum application. But Chalik and his friend asked permission to stay in their friend’s house in Amsterdam instead. They only reported to the hotel at Roosendaal the next day.
When they got to Roosendaal, they were surprised to see the hotel receptionist was Moluccan, who they identified as Indonesian. But they were greeted in Dutch language because it was a formal reception. Five weeks later they received their residence permits from the Netherlands. Chalik said that their process was the fastest among other exiles in the Netherlands. For many cases, it usually took months or even years to receive this permit. The whole application process was helped by a lawyer who was also a member of the CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands). He had a lot of experience in helping Indonesians apply for their asylum status, so it was not hard for him to help Chalik and his friend to receive their residence permit.
Although he had received his residence permit, Chalik did not have permanent residence yet. He stayed at his friend’s house in Amsterdam, while having his official address at another friend’s house in Utrecht. In 1990, Chalik rented a house from his friend in Amsterdam. He then invited his wife and children from Albania to come to the Netherlands. Later, they moved again to another unit that was offered by the government. However, Chalik then divorced, and based on Dutch laws his ex-wife received the rights to live in the original house. Chalik then moved out and found another place to live in Amsterdam.
These narratives show the kind of struggles that Indonesian exiles faced during the early years in the Netherlands. The asylum process, for example, was very different for many people. As mentioned before, there were a group of people like Chalik who received their asylum status after a relatively short amount of time, while there were also those like Esti who went through a much longer process. On the
27 other hand, while Esti went through the process with his family, Chalik had to wait for a while to be reunited with his family in the Netherlands.
For these exiles, it was also not easy for them to find occupations, for many reasons. First, many of them found that their degrees were not acknowledged by the Dutch education system. Even when there was a way to make them acknowledged, the information was not easily accessible for many exiles. Secondly, they were in their 50s or 60s, and so were not young when they came to the Netherlands. Despite the rules that prohibited employers using age as a basis for judgement, many institutions still preferred to hire local and younger workers instead of them. Third, some came with serious illnesses that prevented them from working.
These situations led some of them to choose not to work and live solely dependent on the social allowance from the Dutch government. Plenty of other people settled for different kinds of occupations that did not relate to their previous expertise. Radi, for example, worked in a cleaning service company that was not relevant to his background as an agricultural expert. A few exiles could pursue another education and worked at a university or research institution. An example of this was Farida, who received a graduate degree from the University of Amsterdam and worked at the IISG (Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis/International Institute of Social History).
David Hill (2010: 39) suggested that since they were occupied with these day-to-day difficulties, Indonesian exiles presented neither unity nor an effective political resistance towards the New Order regime or subsequent governments. In this regard, he agreed with points raised by Hersri Setiawan (2010) that these exiles were more unified in grieving their dead than showing some form of party loyalty or singular ideological commitments. I found these arguments problematic for several reasons. First, there is a romanticized assumption that PKI had a singular ideological commitment, which leads Hill and Setiawan to use it as a reference for an ideal form of resistance. In one example, Setiawan (2010: 17) analyzed a painting produced by an exile and argued that Indonesian exiles no longer represent PKI, particularly because it is hard to find any spirit of resistance in their work. However, he did not specify at which point PKI was a party where its members held a singular ideological commitment. By the time its members needed to organize resistance abroad, there were already many conflicts among themselves. These political differences are even more complex given that there were many other exiles that did not have any affiliation with PKI. Therefore, the notion that Indonesian exiles lost their ideological commitment to the party is problematic since there was no monolithic loyalty to PKI in the first place. This problem then leads to the second point, which is that Hill and Setiawan's
28 fixation on loyalty to PKI as a reference of resistance meant that they tended to neglect other forms of resistance exercised by Indonesian exiles. One of those forms of resistances is their use of the Internet as a medium to project their ideals, which was reinforced by their exilic experiences.
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3. Online Practices among Indonesian Exiles One afternoon, I visited Radi’s house to conduct an interview. This was our second meeting after we met at one informal meeting with other exiles in Amsterdam. I was interested to know more about Radi because I learned that he is very active on Facebook. When I walked in front of his house, he noticed my presence from his front windows. He smiled and pointed to the front door beside the window. Apparently, he had been waiting for my arrival while being online on Facebook. It is usual for him to wait for guests while being online because his computer is perfectly placed for him to see if somebody is coming.
Radi spends a lot of his time online. Almost every day he logs in and spends the whole day doing various activities while being online on Facebook. Apart from Facebook he also uses mailing lists and Instagram. These online activities have helped him to update his knowledge about many current political issues in Indonesia. There are various things we discussed that afternoon, but one thing in particular intrigued me most: when he described how he was blocked from a mailing list by another exile.
This started from an online debate that Radi engaged with another exile after Indonesian's 2014 presidential election. This other exile argued that the newly elected president, Jokowi, could bring socialism to Indonesia. Radi did not agree with that argument. He argued that Jokowi is part of the nationalist bourgeoisie instead. However, that did not mean that Jokowi would be a bad president. Radi believed that by being a member of the nationalist bourgeoisie, Jokowi had the potential to fight imperialism by building national industries. “I explained that. Afterwards, bamm! I was blocked,” said Radi.
At first, Radi thought that he was only blocked from that other person’s Facebook account. But later he believed that he was blocked from the mailing lists as well. He stopped receiving emails from certain mailing lists. Therefore, he was sometimes not aware when there were events held by other exiles in the Netherlands. This was confirmed by others who asked Radi about his absence from a certain event.
I asked Radi more about whether this other exile is an important figure that holds control over that mailing list, hence allowing him to block Radi from it. Radi said that it was not the case; he suspected that this person employed some kind of hacking abilities to block him for the mailing list. His suspicion was reinforced after he asked his son, whom he often relies on to deal with computer matters. His son said that it is possible for someone, in this case the other exile, to block Radi by hacking. It is of course hard to tell whether Radi’s inability to receive new emails was caused by the other exile or merely a
30 technical problem. But for him the evidence was convincing enough to believe that this situation happened because of the debates he engaged with on the Internet.
This story is fascinating for several reasons. Not only was it is rare for me to see someone from Indonesia in their seventies actively engaging with new technologies like the Internet, but also how normal this technology had become part of their lives. In this case, for example, Radi did not question the possibility that the other exile, who is also probably in his seventies, possessed hacking abilities to block him from the mailing list. On the contrary, from his tone the possibility that the other exiles have hacking abilities seemed as normal as the political debate they were engaged in.
Radi’s online activities cannot be taken as a representation of Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. He is not involved in many exile organization activities like the others. He is among the very few that is very active on multiple online platforms in his daily life. Many other informants, for instance, choose not to use Facebook because they considered this platform too troublesome. However, the way Radi normalizes the Internet as part of his own life made me interested to look further at how Indonesian exiles incorporated the Internet in their life. I wondered, what kind of activities do they engage in on the Internet? The answer to these questions will be elaborated in the following three sub-chapters: First, I will talk about how these exiles learned and incorporated computers and the Internet into their lives. Second, I will discuss how the opposition of Soeharto is projected on the Internet. Third, the last sub- chapter will elaborate how past fragmentations among Indonesian exiles are also exercised on the Internet.
3.1 On Making Sense of the Internet When I started this research, I assumed that there would be a significant gap between the Internet and the computer as new technologies, and Indonesian exiles as users. This is because I knew that most of these exiles are older people, so I assumed it would not be easy for them to learn how to use the computer. My fieldwork has proven that this assumption is unfounded.
Since very early interactions, the Internet and the computer have been accepted as a normal part of their lives. The experiences of learning were perceived to be very ordinary, so it was not easy for my informants to recall the processes of incorporating the Internet into their lives. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the computer and the Internet were not considered important. Conversely, the use of the Internet had become an essential daily activity for many of my informants. Therefore, looking into how they make sense of this technology could help us understand how it can be used to express past ideals that we discussed in the previous chapter.
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There were many ways Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands were introduced to and learned how to use the computer and the Internet. For one exile, Kartaprawira, the Internet was an important technology to fill his spare time during his early days in the Netherlands. When he received his asylum status in 1992, Kartaprawira looked around for jobs. However, there were not any job opportunities that suited his expertise in law. He could not do any work that required physical labour due to the different illnesses that he had. The job agency eventually suggested him to retire and spend time on his hobbies.
Activities on the computer and the Internet became one of Kartaprawira's hobbies. Kartaprawira saved some of his allowance from the Dutch government to buy a computer. He had already experienced using an older computer during his time in the Soviet Union. He recalled at that time that the computer was large and noisy. Only in the Netherlands did Kartaprawira get to know personal computers, and decided to learn more about this technology.
“I was probably one of the first exiles in the Netherlands (that used a computer)”, explained Kartaprawira. The operating system of the computer at that time was not as user-friendly as the current versions. Therefore, Kartaprawira needed to memorize different kinds of commands to operate this computer. Kartaprawira remembers that since he learned to use the computer by himself, it was a long and difficult process. Sometimes, he forgot to save the data after he wrote an article. Thus, his knowledge of using computers was largely shaped by trial and error.
Kartaprawira mostly used computers to write about his experiences or opinions on social and political issues. At first, he kept those writings for himself on his own computer. Later he found Apakabar18, a mailing list that was created by John A. Macdougall19 and attracted many early Indonesian Internet users. Within this platform, Kartaprawira could share his writings to wider audiences that were interested in Indonesia. Most of his writings were related to political issues in Indonesia under the New Order regime.
To handle the column he created in Apakabar, Kartaprawira requested the help of another exile, Kuslan Budiman. Although Kuslan did not have knowledge about the Internet, he was interested in participating and share his writings through this column. Kartaprawira recalled that the combination of their works amounted to 125 postings in Apakabar. He believes that this mailing list played an important role in the proliferation of democracy, particularly because Apakabar enabled the publication of different kinds of criticism towards the New Order regime.
18 Apa kabar means ‘how are you?’ in Indonesian language. 19 Former member of staff at the US embassy in Indonesia
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Later after Apakabar was closed due to financial reasons20, Kartaprawira exercised his interest in politics through other online platforms. He became a moderator for several mailing lists including the one owned by Persaudaraan. He also initiated an organization to support the victims of 1965-1966 events that relies heavily on blogposts as their tool of communication.
Kartaprawira’s case illustrated that from very early in the 1990s, some Indonesian exiles were already familiar with computers and the Internet. Moreover, while they learned to use computers and the Internet, they simultaneously incorporated these technologies into their political causes. In this regard, the computer and the Internet were accepted by these exiles as something not very different from previous media, like radio or pamphlets, that were utilized for their political causes in the past.
The role of Apakabar is also important to address because this platform enabled these political causes to be conveyed. With this platform, Kartaprawira, Kuslan, and a few other exiles found a medium where their writings were spread beyond the Indonesian exiles’ community in the Netherlands. However, the knowledge regarding Apakabar was limited among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. This situation was also related to the small number of Indonesian exiles that were familiar with computers and the Internet at that time. Kartaprawira recalled that he sometimes tried to persuade his colleagues to learn how to use the Internet, but there were not many interested in this at that time. On the other hand, even among other exiles who already learned how to use computers, the use of mailing lists was not really common in the 1990s; even less common was the idea to use them to propagate political ideas. Computers, for many of them, were primarily used to write or create documents related to their work.
Radi is one example of this. Similar to Kartaprawira, he had seen the old version of computers in the Soviet Union. However, he never had a chance to use computers before he came to the Netherlands. Around 1991, Radi met another exile who offered him a used computer. This was his first computer; he recalled that even though it was very old, he was happy to receive it. Radi had a lot of experience in writing various kinds of articles. During his time in the Soviet Union, he wrote several essays on Marxism and political issues. However, most of his writings were kept to himself and were not published anywhere. Thus, for Radi, this first computer rekindled his interest in writing and he was able to save these writings.
20 Apakabar had developed into a mailing list with its own website which needed its own finance to support the operationalization. Since it lacked the funds to maintain the website, the founder decided to close the site and move all the remaining databases to the Ohio University Library website.
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Several years after that, Radi found out that his son was dyslexic, and needed some software to help him learn Dutch to be able to perform at school. Radi's old computer did not meet the requirements to install this software, so the school offered to lend them a newer computer. By using this computer, Radi’s son was able to overcome his dyslexia. Radi's son then became very active on the computer and learned many more features than Radi, and eventually taught his father about the Internet.
By the end of the 1990s, Radi was already often spending his time on the Internet to look for news about Indonesia. Several years later he also started to participate in online mailing lists. This interest was initiated from his meeting with one Indonesian in the Netherlands. At that time there was an informal talk between an Indonesian writer and another exile. Radi joined the conversation and expressed several of his opinions. The writer was really interested in Radi’s opinion and said that he should share his thoughts on a mailing list. Since the writer was also a moderator of the Sastra Pembebasan mailing list, so he added Radi onto this list. Radi then started to publish his writings on this and several other mailing lists. When he joined a mailing list, it was usually recommended to him by other exiles. Therefore, most of the time, the moderator of the mailing lists he joined was related to the Indonesian exile community.
This does not mean that Radi is not interested in developing contacts with new people. It is just that most of the mailing lists he joined are restricted. People need to apply before being able to write a post or read others’ posts. Furthermore, since the moderators filter the membership, at the very least the members share an interest in certain topics.
In contrast to mailing lists, Facebook offers Radi more opportunities to interact with new people. On Facebook, he can interact with posts created not just by his direct friends but also from other parties that interact with his friends. On the other hand, his friends’ extended networks can also see, comment, and interact with Radi’s posts. These features enable him to interact with people that would be unexpected from his interactions in mailing list. Once, a middle school student contacted him because she was curious about Radi’s political articles. On other occasions, Radi comments on interesting articles posted by strangers. Due to Facebook’s interactive characteristics, Radi spends more times on this platform compared to previous platforms like mailing lists.
While Kartaprawira started his Internet experience along with his political activism in the 1990s, the case of Radi demonstrated a different trajectory. Radi’s case is closer to the Internet experiences of my other informants. First, he started to familiarize himself with a computer as a tool to write, and not so much to convey political causes. Second, his children, who were educated in Dutch schools, played
34 important roles in his interactions with these technologies. Today, Radi's children still help him when dealing with many technical matters regarding his computer. Radi is also aware of his limitations on these technologies and use only specific features that are important to him. These aspects of learning are shared by many other exiles as well.
Aminah, for example, did not use the Internet until the early 2000s. Her activities with DIAN and Persaudaraan urged her to create her own email account. Her son helped her set up this account. At that time her son was studying physics at university but had strong interest in computers and the Internet. Later, her son even wrote several books related to computer programming. Nevertheless, her son’s interest does not affect Aminah’s knowledge on computers and the Internet very much. Aminah said that her use of Internet is not that different from other exiles. They use it mainly to contact others through email and look for news about Indonesia. Aside from those two features, she described herself as someone who is gagap21 about computer and the Internet. It is also one of her reasons for not using Facebook. With various kinds of features and constant notification, Aminah considers Facebook too troublesome. In line with that reasoning, Aminah is also not interested in joining other mailing lists apart from the mailing list created for organizational purposes.
Aminah’s use of computers and the Internet is very relevant to Indonesian exiles’ general perceptions of these technologies. Like Aminah, many of them have emails and use them on a daily basis. Computers and the Internet, particularly emails, are accepted as a normal tool within their life. Yet despite the incorporation of these technologies into their life, many do not have much technical knowledge about them. Therefore, they only utilize specific features of their computers that are relevant for their daily activities.
So computers and the Internet are treated as technologies that are mundane while simultaneously incomprehensible for many Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. This kind of experience is not specific to the case of Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands, but also relevant to many different groups around the world. In Hyderabad, for instance, technical limitations do not stop many old people from using the Internet. With help from their relatives and friends, they are able to use this technology on a daily basis (Srinivasan, 2015).
If computers and the Internet are perceived as technologies that are hard to comprehend, how did the exiles make sense of it at first? To answer this, we can consider Radi’s experience of using his computer and the Internet for the first time. He said, “I always said it until today, that for me computers (and)
21 Taken from gagap teknologi, an Indonesian term to describe technological illiteracy.
35 typewriters are not that different. Once I got to know the Internet, then it is (similar to) the postal service.” Radi rationalized computers and the Internet by comparing them to older technologies that he knew before. By making this comparison, it is easier for him to grasp the nature of these technologies and later incorporate them into his life. Other exiles might not be as eloquent as Radi in verbalizing their frame of thinking in normalizing these technologies. However, the perception of seeing the Internet as a continuation of older technologies could also be seen from how they use it to project past ideals into contemporary situations.
3.2 Online Opposition towards the New Order Regime “Ibrahim Isa is a political dissident. From 1966, his name was officially blacklisted by Suharto’s regime, as a traitor. Thus, he and his family cannot return to Indonesia. He is labelled as a “traitor” because of his political beliefs and his political opposition to the dictatorial anti-democratic regime of General Suharto. Especially, during the Tri-Continental Conference (Asia-Africa-Latin America) in Havana, Cuba (January 1966), where he acted as a “prosecutor” against General Suharto’s regime.” (Posted in ibrahimisa.blogspot.nl, 1 April 2007) The excerpt was taken from the first paragraph of a CV that was posted by Ibrahim Isa on his blog. Originally written in Dutch, it is the first article that is meant as an introduction to his profile for the blog’s readers. During his lifetime, Ibrahim Isa was among the few renowned figures in this community. He was often asked by journalists, academics, and NGOs to speak as a representative of Indonesian exiles. His blog helped him become one of the most accessible Indonesian exiles on the Internet.
The blog started in 2007, and Ibrahim Isa regularly updated the content until 2014. Isa created many contents with different themes. Sometimes he discussed his life in China, his current life in the Netherlands, or selected news he curated from other media. But the main focus was criticism towards the New Order and its action against human rights. The excerpt is interesting because, even though it was posted 9 years after the fall of New Order regime, it was still important for Ibrahim Isa to address himself as a political dissident positioned against this regime.
The strong opposition towards the New Order regime is not exclusively presented by Ibrahim Isa. In fact, these narratives are dominant among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. Although not as visible as Isa’s blog, similar narratives are shared by these exiles on various platforms, such as Facebook or mailing lists. Radi, for example, recently shared an online petition opposing the Indonesian government’s proposal to give official hero status to Soeharto. On a mailing list, Esti published an essay on how the New Order regime betrayed the national constitution in their period of rule:
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“The Betrayal of Pancasila and the Constitution of Indonesia …New Order whose pillars are Golkar, ABRI (TNI+POLICE), and the rich people was born and grew from the massacre of thousands of innocent lives. By using “the betrayal of Pancasila” as a pretext, thousands of innocent people lost their lives and many more were exiled and prisoned by the New Order. Now, in this era called “reformation government” there is a commemoration of “The Betrayal of Pancasila”. We need to ask honestly to ourselves. Who is the one that truly betrayed Pancasila all this time? Without our honest efforts to uncover the dark pages during the New Oder, including the dark pages in East Timor, the true betrayer of Pancasila will remain unknonwn to the next generations.”. (Posted in Apakabar, 18 October 2000) In this essay, Esti referred to the past when he wrote about the “betrayal of Pancasila” as a pretext to the massacre. It was a slogan that the New Order used to label the communists after the 1965 incident. During the time of the New Order, this slogan was commemorated each year to remind Indonesian citizens of this regime’s role in the eradication of communists. Therefore, it seems ironic for Esti that even after the fall of the New Order this event was still commemorated.
He also pointed out that for all the atrocities they have done, the New Order regime should be the one who is labelled as the betrayers of Pancasila. Therefore, it is important to uncover the truth of the New Order’s past actions, including in East Timor22. The discussion of East Timor in this case became relevant because a few months before Esti posted his essay what was previously an Indonesian province separated itself from Indonesia through a referendum. During that time there was an investigation into many military actions ordered by the New Order to keep this province as part of Indonesia. Therefore, in this post Esti tried to make the connection between the past and the present.
Similar forms of criticism could also be found from other exiles in various mailing lists. These criticisms towards the Indonesian government, particularly the New Order, are one of the most significant markers of Indonesian exiles’ presence on the Internet. However, these practices cannot be separated from similar practices they have done in the past. An example of these oppositions could be seen in the case of Indonesian exiles in China and Albania where they managed to create publications and broadcasts as a form of resistance.
In China, Indonesian exiles published several forms of publications. One of the bulletins was called Berita Pertimbangan. It had a similar function to current mailing lists, as it compiled news snippets, particularly ones about Indonesia, and then reprinted the content. There were also other publications like Suara Rakyat Indonesia where they published a greater variety of writings, including poetry. These publications were not only used to criticize Soeharto, but some of was also self-criticism of the exile
22 Currently known as Timor-Leste, a sovereign state that was established in 2002.
37 community, particularly PKI members. Radi, for example, once wrote an article that criticized PKI’s officials in the Soviet Union and China, stating that they were heavily influenced by the interests of these two countries. This article was published in Percikan Api, a bulletin that was initiated by exiles who opposed PKI’s representation in China.
Similar forms of resistances were also created in Tirana, Albania. After the 1965 incident, PKI’s representatives in China demanded Albanian students, except those with medical and engineering programmes, to stop their education. The reason behind this demand was because other students with their knowledge and experience were needed to organize and establish opposition towards the New Order from Tirana. It was then announced through publications and radio broadcasts. There were at least two important publications made in Tirana: Angkatan Pemuda Indonesia, a quarterly that published articles in Indonesian language; and Indonesian Tribune, an English monthly that was targeted to more international readers. Aside from these publications, exiles in Albania also developed an Indonesian radio broadcast. At that time, the Albanian government allowed different countries to have their own radio broadcast. Chalik, with other Indonesian students, then submitted a request to the Albanian government to initiate their own radio broadcast. The broadcast was directed to Indonesia, with the hope of gaining attention from Indonesian listeners. The program was aired every day with its presenter using the Indonesian language. The programme started with news and occasional songs between the news segments. At the end, the presenters discussed the news and gave commentaries. The last part of the programme was really important because in this segment the presenters would criticize the New Order. “We were assigned to write (materials) to hit Soeharto. We would find the materials from BBC London, magazines, newspapers, which we later compiled to oppose Soeharto,” explained Chalik.
Efforts to oppose Soeharto while being an exile could also be found in other countries like East Germany or the Soviet Union. These activities demonstrated that exiles have long been producing materials through different mediums as part of their struggle to oppose Soeharto. The opposition started as soon as they were forced to become exiles, several decades before the Internet even existed. Therefore, it is only natural that when Indonesian exiles learned how to use the Internet, they incorporated this technology into their long-standing resistance towards Soeharto.
As briefly discussed before, the Apakabar mailing list became the first platform where Indonesian exiles could articulate their opposition against the New Order. The mailing list was initiated by John A. MacDougall as a commercial information service (Basuki 1998 cited in Lim 2005: 100). He compiled
38 information and news related to Indonesia and then sold it commercially while distributing it to several mailing lists at the same time. Since he received many positive responses, he then initiated a newsgroup named Indonesia-L, which was later known as Apakabar (Lim 2005: 100). At first, this mailing list was only popular among the Indonesian students who lived abroad to update themselves about the situation in the country. But later, this mailing list gained popularity among Indonesians who lived in Indonesia as well23. The growth in numbers of subscribers made its founder move the database from being merely part of a newsgroup on activist network to having its own website with larger user and content capacity24
Apakabar was popular because it enabled its member to articulate their voices freely without being censored. The mailing list thus became the first Internet-based platform that was crucial for political communication to criticize the New Order from inside and outside Indonesia (Hill and Sen 2007: 128). By the time it closed in 2002, approximately 175,000 postings had been created in Apakabar25.
The activities exercised within the Apakabar and other mailing lists shared many similarities with previous forms of opposition expressed by Indonesian exiles. Just like mailing lists, past opposition also relied on the circulation of information about Indonesia. The process of curating the news and articulating personal thoughts were also crucial to articulate their resistance. Therefore, even though the Internet existed as a new technology, Indonesian exiles were exercising similar practices to what they had done several decades earlier.
If there are fundamental differences between the Internet and previous platforms, it is in terms of the audience reach and the interactive features. Apakabar enabled news and commentaries to reach audience numbers that were unprecedented with previous forms of oppositional expressions, like bulletins or even radio broadcasts. This mailing list also allowed its members, including Indonesian exiles, to have interactions with each other. Nevertheless, fundamentally the activities exercised in this mailing list, like curating the news, or writing an essay, was something that Indonesian exiles were already familiar with. Moreover, through these activities they projected their past ideals like association with progressive values and opposition towards the New Order. This explains why despite some limitations in using the Internet, they could still actively engage with various online activities.
23 See https://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/briefhistory.html 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.
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Kuslan, for example, just like many elders in Hyderabad (Srinivasan, 2015), did not know how to use computers and the Internet in the 1990s. Nevertheless, he was already familiar with creating various forms of writings. In Indonesia, apart from being a painter, he often wrote art articles in different magazines and newspapers. After the 1965 incident, Kuslan also wrote poems, some of which were published in Suara Rakyat Indonesia. Therefore, when Kartaprawira asked him to contribute to Apakabar, Kuslan agreed to the request. Both of them wrote in a column they named Percikan Budaya26. With technical help from Kartaprawira, Kuslan published a series of poems and art writings in this column. Many of these poems relied on symbols and metaphors, yet it was still obvious that they were critical towards Soeharto and the New Order. One example is a translation27 of a poem published in 1997:
UNDER THE OLD BANYAN TREE Under the old banyan tree A bunch of men Look up to the sky Message is heard hazily The sound of song disrupted by explosion In this country How expensive is the price of justice?
Flies flew away… (posted in Apakabar, 20 June 1997)
For anyone familiar with Indonesian politics, it is hard not to relate the term banyan tree with the same tree used as the symbol of Soeharto’s party, Golkar. This poem is also interesting because it relates to an election, held a month before its publication, which was dominated by Golkar.
Aside from poems, Kuslan also wrote several essays under multiple pseudonyms. In comparison with his poem, his essays were much more direct in criticizing Soeharto. In 1997, for example, under the pseudonym Aini Patria, he criticized the New Order for continuously propagating that PKI tried to replicate the Chinese Revolution under Mao Zhedong. Aini Patria was not the only pseudonym Kuslan used in publishing many pieces of writing in Apakabar; in one posting he even used these different pseudonyms at the same time. To an outsider, this email would appear like there were many writers who published in the Percikan Budaya column of Apakabar:
26 In Apakabar, its members could classify writing under certain themes based on their preferences. Percikan Budaya/Spark of Culture is a theme named by Kuslan and Kartaprawira to compile their writings. 27 Similar to other excerpts, this was written in the Indonesian language and translated by me.
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“To all netters28/readers, administrators of PERCIKAN BUDAYA wish you a Happy New Year 1998, with hopes that all of you are healthy, fit and full of success. Pardon us for our weaknesses in any writings aforementioned. Our regards: Ki Gareng Pamungkas; Kuslan Budiman; Aini Patria; Tohprawiro; Dul Gemet Kasanmuntira”. (Posted in Apakabar, 07 January 1998)
The practice of concealing personal offline identities is common on the Internet, particularly in online communities that value secrecy. 4Chan, for example, is renowned because its users are guaranteed to remain anonymous. Within this imageboard website, some users publish explicit content of porn or violence, racist slurs, or other material that would not post on more open websites like Facebook29.
However, in the case of Indonesian exiles, the use of pseudonyms did not originate from the practices of Internet use. It was already common practices for them, since many of these exiles were involved in political movements during their times in Indonesia. Communist figures like Tan Malaka30 or Henk Sneevliet31 were known for having multiple identities when they were active. Figures like Sukarno also used pseudonyms when they wrote for newspapers during the time of independence struggle. Therefore, the practice of using pseudonyms was accepted as part of the norm, particularly during a period that was considered unsafe.
For Indonesian exiles, the use of pseudonyms became even more necessary after their passports were revoked by the Indonesian government in 1966. Pseudonyms helped them to filter anyone that might endanger them by accessing their true personal identity. As Radi recalled, during his time in China almost every exile had their own pseudonym to conceal their personal identity. It was even suggested by their government to use pseudonyms particularly if they wanted to move out from China. These practices were then adapted by exiles when they got involved with Apakabar. Thus, names such as Esti and Kartaprawira were created as the online face of these exiles.
In 1998, Soeharto resigned from his position as president. This marked the end of the New Order regime in Indonesia. This political event did not stop Indonesian exiles from criticizing Soeharto and the New Order. They still published different kinds of writings several years after that event. When Apakabar was closed in 2002, they articulated their cause in more diverse platforms. Other mailing lists like Nasional- list, GELORA 45, Wahana-news, or Sastra Pembebasan are still popular platforms among Indonesian
28 The term ‘netters’ is taken from the original post. 29 See (Knuttila, 2011) for more discussion on this subject. 30 Indonesian national hero and political figure, one of the most important PKI figures in their early years. 31 Dutch communist, one of the first people that introduce communism to Indonesia.
41 exiles. In this research, I joined three of these mailing lists, which are: Nasional-list, GELORA 45, and Sastra Pembebasan. These mailing lists are groups that made on the Yahoogroups platform provided by Yahoo.com. Nasional-list was founded on 31st July 200432 by an Indonesian living in Germany33. The group is restricted, hence people need to have approval from a moderator before they can read or post anything. In the group's description it says, “DEFEND THE CONTINUITY OF NKRI AND PANCASILA AS NATIONAL FOUNDATION.” It has 1797 members, mostly Indonesian subscribers from both Indonesia and abroad. The mailing list is very active; the posts are predominantly in the Indonesian language, with the amount of posts ranging from 22 to 66 every day. GELORA 45 was founded on 8 September 2004 by the son of Siauw Giok Tjhan, who lives in Hong Kong34. Siauw Giok Tjhan was a minister during Sukarno’s era and once the head of Baperki, a Chinese descent organization that was banned after the 1965 incident. The mailing list does not provide any descriptions, only a greeting statement that says, “WELCOME to GELORA45”. Despite the relatively small number of members, only 546 people, the number of postings is not very different to the Nasional-list. The last mailing list is Sastra Pembebasan. It was initiated by an Indonesian poet who lives in the Netherlands on 21st December 2003. In comparison with the previous two mailing lists, it has a much longer description. It starts its description with an explanation of its name, Sastra Pembebasan (Liberation Literature), which serves to demonstrate how its members could interact as egalitarians in the virtual world. It urges its members to publish any form of writing, from poems and news to press releases about literary activities. It has the largest number of members with 2528 subscribers, yet the amount of posts per day is relatively small, between 7 to 17 posts in the past year. In terms of content, these three mailing lists have many similarities. Most of the recent materials posted in these mailing lists are news snippets from online news outlets. The discussions are dominated by Indonesians using the Indonesian language to talk about recent issues in the country. In a way these activities are similar to activities and interactions on Apakabar, a parallel that is also pointed out by Waruno Mahdi (2002: 17). However, in comparison to Apakabar there are more exiles participating on these mailing lists. Figures like Esti are still active on these newer platforms; Kartaprawira even became the moderator for Nasional-list as well. On the other hand, there are people like Radi that did not participate in Apakabar
32 Mahdi (2002) suggested that the Nasional-list was initiated three years earlier, in 2001, but they moved from several platforms. However, the date used in this thesis is the information provided by group itself. 33 Interview with Kartaprawira on 20 June 2016 34 Interview with Dharmawan on 29 March 2016
42 but are quite active on these newer mailing lists. This is also the case for Chalik, who even became the moderator of one mailing list and is one of the most active members on many mailing lists. The involvement of more exiles in these later mailing lists is related to greater access to computers and the Internet in their community. Many of them did not access the Internet until around late 1990s, and email was the first platform they used online. Even after they learned to use email, considerations about joining mailing lists were still mainly influenced by their offline interactions. Usually colleagues who they already knew offline would recommend mailing lists for them to join. This explains why many mailing lists that are popular among exiles are the ones that connect them to their offline community as well, so online interactions for Indonesian exiles is never really separated from offline interactions. As suggested by Miller (2013: 10), this mixed use of offline and online communication without clear boundaries has become common Internet practice.
The articulation of opposition to the New Order regime is not only practiced on mailing lists. As mentioned above, Ibrahim Isa used personal blogs to convey his opinions on social and political issues. In 2003, Kartaprawira initiated LPK65 to pursue justice for the 1965 victims, including exiles. This organization also initiated a blog that functions as their personal media. People like Radi and Asahan now prefer Facebook to share their articles or simply to interact with other people through commentaries or other features. This online opposition shows that Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands are not merely preserving past memories and ideals, but are also projecting those memories into social actions. While acts of opposition are relatively accepted as a shared cause of Indonesian exiles, there are also the Internet practices that tends to be divisive, as there is a projection of past fragmentations into online debate.
3.3 Online Debate and Past Fragmentations Similar to online opposition, online debates engaged by Indonesian exiles also started in Apakabar. One instance of these debates happened in September 1997. Early that month, Kuslan posted several poems created based on his experience of struggle against Dutch colonists. Another exile, Taufik35 criticized those poems as a glorification of warfare and killings. Moreover, he considered that many ‘leftist artists’ were guilty because they participated in building the myth of Indonesian army’s knighthood. He went even further and questioned their knowledge of Marxism:
“…Were they Marxist? Most of them did not even read Marx! For me, they were bourgeois, oppressors, violent. Another myth that needs to be deconstructed: PKI was not a Marxist party, but a party of the
35 Pseudonym
43
lower bourgeois, whose main program was to oppress, oppress, and oppress!...” (posted in Apakabar, 03 September 1997) This argument triggered responses from another Apakabar member, who argued that this criticism obscured the role of Indonesian freedom fighters. He also pointed out how Kuslan’s poems were admirable because they reminded others about the essential evil of colonialism.
By the end of that month, Kuslan sent his response to the first criticism. He said in his email that initially he did not plan to respond to the criticism. However, he received numerous phone calls from his colleagues asking him to respond. In the email Kuslan argued that the criticism was not written by a literary critic, but merely its writer’s opinions on other issues like PKI. Kuslan also posited that warfare is a relevant theme to be explored in art. He stressed the importance of reading literature by using literary codes, particularly because literature can be interpreted in different way by its readers.
In this instance, the other exile tried to take the discussion on Kuslan’s poem to broader issues like ‘leftist artists’, Marxism, and PKI. However, Kuslan avoided these points by saying that these issues were not part of literary criticism but separate subjects. He chose to defend his work based on a literary point of view instead. He even refused to address the email as a reply to the previous critic but more as an explanation for other people who observed the dispute. It was not clear why Kuslan decided not to prolong the debate, but the situation itself was not unfamiliar for him and many Indonesian exiles. Although not necessarily always expressed in writing, questions or accusations about other political positions were part of a shared experience for many exiles.
The exiles were already familiar with political debates engaged in partisan media in Indonesia prior to 196536. At that time, every party with different ideologies had its own media and they often criticized one another through editorials. Radi, for example, classified media at that time into two categories: progressive and reactionary. He elaborated these categories as follow:
“At that time, the criteria for revolutionary and reactionary were really simple. Anti-imperialists (who) supported rebellions against the Indonesian Republic were reactionary. Anti-imperialists (who) were against all rebellions against the Indonesian Republic were revolutionary. Outspoken or not, if (they were) opposite from that (revolutionary stance) then it was reactionary.” So the partisan politics in media was not an independent phenomenon, but more a reflections of general divisions in Indonesian politics before 1965. For Radi, this political division seems to be self- evident and was manifested on many political issues like support towards rebellion or land reform. This
36 See (Sen and Hill 2007: 52) for more discussion on partisan press in Indonesia
44 situation became an important background that was experienced by many exiles before they left Indonesia.
The 1965-1966 events also triggered fragmentations among exile communities. The most influential fragmentation was the Sino-Soviet split between PKI representatives in China and Moscow (Hill, 2010). The polarization between these two blocs was reflected in the way Jusuf Adjitorop, leader of PKI’s delegation in Beijing, labeled PKI’s representative in Moscow as a ‘flunkey’ of ‘the Soviet modern revisionist’(Hill 2010: 33). Apart from not being able to return to Indonesia, Indonesian exiles were positioned between these two factions. Many of those who did not feel represented by either of these two blocs created their own clique and even their own publications, as discussed above.
This fragmentation among Indonesian exiles put many of them in an even more ambiguous situation. Radi, for example, was suspected of being a ‘revisionist’ by his colleagues since he aspired to visit the Soviet Union. On the other hand, other groups of exiles dubbed Radi as a supporter of Mao when he arrived in Moscow. Asahan, another exile from Soviet Union, also faced a similar situation and did not feel he belonged to either the Chinese or Soviet PKI factions. This eventually led him to move to Vietnam instead.
Asahan’s case is an important one for discussing the connection between this debate and past fragmentations. He is a rather controversial figure among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. He is renowned for his habit of engaging online debates on many occasions even to the extent of making harsh comments. Some of my informants warned me to pay attention to my words and behaviour if I met him. This precaution seemed even more justified after seeing how Asahan could confront and even insult others on Facebook or mailing lists using capital letters. On one post in a mailing list, for instance, he commented on the popular theory regarding the 1965 incident:
“…and of course the group of PKI’s oporkaki is behind that constructed myth and convinced themselves that it is (the) right (thing) to relieve their dirty moral burden as the traitor of PKI and communism. Therefore the oporkaki group legally support Suharto’s slander that accused the PKI of being the mastermind behind G30S and fought illegally to spread anti-communist, anti-PKI ideology, and want to collaborate with the successor of New Order or whichever regime that currently rules. THEREFORE, THE RECONCILIATION THAT IS COVETED BY PKI’S OPORKAKI GROUP IS DECEPTION AND PARALYZING THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE. ASAHAN AIDIT.” (posted in Sastra Pembebasan, 29 April 2016) In this posting, Asahan stated his disagreement with an academic theory that suggested PKI was the initiator of the 1965 incident. He then criticized other colleagues who accepted this theory as collaborators of Soeharto. Asahan also labelled them as oporkaki, an Indonesian abbreviation that
45 means an opportunist with either right- or left-wing ideology. He went even further by labelling the reconciliation, one of the main aspirations among Indonesian exiles, as deception.
Based on postings such as these and warnings from previous informants, I went to meet Asahan anticipating that he might be harder to interview than the other informants. However, this fear vanished when I met him. Instead of an aggressive angry old man, Asahan did not appear very different from my other informants. He said that he personally does not really feel comfortable confronting people in a forum or a direct meeting. However, he admitted that on the Internet he could be very direct and aggressive towards his opposition. When I pointed out this dichotomy he said:
“I am obliged to. My nature is not (aggressive) like that, but I was shaped by the practice itself. I was shaped by those reactions and others. I am absolutely not someone who loves to debate; I am not capable of doing it.” Apparently, this dualism was already pointed out by Asahan's colleague, who told Asahan that he lives in two worlds: the first world is the fiction that Asahan created through novels or poems, and the other world is the personal Asahan himself. Asahan considers his behaviour on Facebook as reflecting this. When he participates in online debates, it is not necessarily because he enjoys debating or insulting people. Asahan believes that he is shaped by other people’s activities. For example, he admitted that his response online could be uncontrollable when he finds materials that he considers anti-communist propaganda. In this regard, the platform seems to allow Asahan to do the kind of activities he rarely exercises offline. However, similar to the online opposition practiced by other Indonesian exiles, many of the references that he used came from past ideals.
Asahan’s criticism toward others, particularly exiles, affected his social life in the Netherlands, to the extent that he feels excluded by other exiles in the Netherlands. Although on a different level, Radi’s case at the beginning of this chapter also illustrated how online actions could affect offline social interactions.
For this reason, many exiles choose not to engage in online political debates. Chalik, for instance, despite routinely posting and forwarding articles on several mailing lists, tries to have as few debates as possible. He has experienced how these debates disturb social relationships in real life. “Once I joined (this debate) we attacked each other, and I don’t talk with that person any more,” he said. Apart from affecting personal relations, for Chalik these debates are also sometimes pointless. He illustrated one situation where people debated about China’s politics. There was no consensus because everyone argued from their ideological point of view. Despite the intense debate, Chalik believes that it was pointless since these online conversations did not have any actual influence on politics in China. Farida
46 shared the same opinion as Chalik. Despite knowing that there are many debates on different mailing lists, she is not interested in getting involved. In her opinion, it is better to discuss things privately if there are any disagreements with another online user. Therefore, she could still convey her ideas but does not have to engage in conflict in public.
Kendzior (2011: 561) pointed out that dissonance instead of consensus is the common characteristic of politics exercised on the Internet. Parallel to Indonesian exiles, she posited how despite sharing similar resentment towards government, opposition activists are capable of being very critical towards each other. Similar forms of online conflicts could also be found in the cases of Iran (Graham & Khosravi, 2002), China (Yongming, 2005), and Eritrea (Bernal, 2005). However, the lack of consensus does not mean that Indonesian exiles do not exist as a community. As shown by other research (Bernal, 2005; Kendzior, 2011), the fact that these debates are part of common practices implies that conflict also has the potential of bringing some sense of community.
In this regard, how are the online practices of Indonesian exiles different from other online practices? As discussed in this chapter, the importance of Indonesian exiles' online practices lies in the projection of past ideals. The opposition to the New Order or the rhetoric used in online debates are part of the particularities that come from what Indonesian exiles experienced in the past. On the Internet, they articulate those ideals through contemporary issues. In this regard, these past ideals are crucial in shaping their online practices. On the other hand, these online practices also influence their current activities as a community. The engagement between offline and online practices will be the main discussion in the next chapter.
47
4. Offline-Online Engagement and Reclaiming Indonesian-ness Miller and Slater (2001) posit that the current discussion of online research should not separate online practices from offline activities. They argue that many studies have shown that online practices are heavily influenced by existing offline practices or values. Therefore, we could see how people from different parts of the world use the Internet in different ways. In the case of Indonesian exiles, the previous chapter has illustrated how the old ideals and exilic experiences are projected into their Internet practices. Opposition to the New Order and online debates have become the two most important features of this projection.
In this chapter I will try to show how the projection of those ideals is part of the intertwined offline- online engagements. The engagements are shaped by and simultaneously shape the collective imagination of current Indonesia. This enables Indonesian exiles to hold on the sense of being Indonesian despite being separated from the country physically and legally. To elaborate this argument, I will discuss two important cases. The first is the IPT 1965 (International People’s Tribunal 1965) and its related events where Indonesian exiles fluidly employed offline-online platform to support their cause. The second case is the Diskusi Forum event where information received from offline-online practices were rearticulated through storytelling.
4.1 IPT 1965 and the Long Pursuit of Justice In a cloudy morning on 20 July 2016, I attended the verdict announcement of the International People’s Tribunal 1965 held at the UvA library in Amsterdam. For many exiles, this announcement had been the most anticipated event for months. There was a great hope that this announcement would provide them with some justice they had been longing for decades. I was not familiar with this building, so it was difficult for me to find the room for the event. Luckily, I met a man who I presumed to be Indonesian at the entrance gates. He noticed my confusion and pointed me to go to lower floors where the event was being held.
I was not very early, but not late either. Some Indonesian traditional snacks were served around the table, while Lea Pamungkas, IPT committee member, greeted other guests. The event was held in a long hall with a wooden floor. Most of the seats were already filled in a room where the big white screen seemed in contrast with the decorative posters that depicted life in colonial time. There was a sense of enthusiasm among the audience. They smiled and talked to each other while waiting for the start. I picked a seat on the left side of the hall, at the back. Across from me were several familiar faces I smiled and nodded to Andreas, who was sitting in that group. Chalik came to me and said, “Come with me, I
48 will introduce you to Esti.” In my previous interview with Chalik, he had suggested I talk with Esti about exiles’ activities on the Internet. I did not know much Esti, but from his name I assumed he is part of the Balinese ethnic group. I also thought that his name had been referred to as an informant in one of the references I had read earlier. I talked to Esti for a while and made an appointment to do an interview on another day.
Then I went back into room and sat on my chair. An Indonesian woman sat next to me and introduced herself as a law student who studied human rights for her doctorate in Netherlands. We talked a little about this verdict and the discussion around 1965 issue, which at that time was also happened in Indonesia. “Aren’t these (matters) still sensitive in Indonesia?” she asked. For me it sounded like a rhetorical question, which is quite common in discussions on the 1965 incident. It was a reminder that for many Indonesians, it is still hard to acknowledge that the New Order regime systematically persecuted communists.
Our conversation was interrupted when the light dimmed, signalling that the event was about to start. A pre-recorded video of Zak Yacoob, the head judge, reading the verdict in Braille, was screened. Alongside his statements, the video also showed old footage of the persecution of communists in Indonesia. Everyone paid attention to that video, and several people made some notes. The verdict itself took a strong stance against the crime and demanded the Indonesian government to be responsible for the victims. There was one exile who looked overwhelmed by the verdict; her colleague patted her on the back to comfort her. After the screening, the committee turned the light on again, and people clapped as an appreciation of the verdict.
After the screening, the committee asked several people to give a speech about the verdict. Among people who gave a speech was the exiles' representative, Sarmadji. He gave a speech in Indonesian that was translated into Dutch by an interpreter. “For me it (the verdict) is necessary to be disseminated among Indonesian people. It is very important because until today there have been a lot of manipulations regarding (30th September) 1965 incident”, he said. Other speakers emphasized how this verdict could be dealt with by an international organization like the UN, and the necessity to push the Indonesian government from within the country. Those speeches concluded the event that morning. Yet many people were still eager to talk with each other, to share their thoughts and opinions about the verdict.
Since the tribunal that was held seven months earlier, IPT 1965 and its aftermath events became the most important topic among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. The initiative was started in 2013,
49 after the screening of documentary film, The Act of Killing, in the Netherlands. When this documentary was launched publicly, many scholars and human rights' activist considered it important because it had great impact raising international and domestic awareness about communist persecution in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966. Realizing this momentum, several activists and scholars in the Netherlands worked to create a movement to pursue the Indonesian’s government responsibility, including sociologist Saskia Wierenga37 and Nursyahbani Katjasungkana38. After a series of discussions among the initiators, they came up with idea of organizing a people’s tribunal.
The idea for a people’s tribunal on the 1965 case was developed from the precedents of other tribunals including the Russell Tribunal39 and Biak Tribunal40. The initiators were aware that this kind of tribunal could not execute any legal sanctions, but could only provide moral sanctions. However, this was still considered important progress since its result could be used as a legal basis to pursue justice from the Indonesian government regarding persecution in 1965/196641. Previously, there were several other initiatives that aimed to bring justice for these people, particularly after the fall of the New Order.
During the presidential period of Gus Dur, for example, there was a talk to bring exiles that he described as “orang-orang klayaban42”. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Gus Dur already interacted with Indonesian exiles long before he became president. Therefore, he understood the situation of these people and sent his Minister of Justice, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, to assess the possibilities of returning them to Indonesia. Yusril came to Netherlands and met several exiles to listen their opinion about the plan. Some held great expectations that their long aspiration would finally be realised after this meeting. However, there was no continuation of this effort after Gus Dur was impeached in 2001.
During the presidential term of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, there was also an effort to return citizenship to these exiles. The representation of Indonesian embassy in Netherlands met several Indonesian exiles and proposed to give them a new Indonesian passport. To process the passport, Indonesian exiles were formally viewed as Indonesian citizens who had failed to extend their passport. While a few accepted this offer, most of them refused and chose to keep their Dutch citizenship instead. The proposal was turned down because it did not address the fundamental demand of Indonesian
37 Dutch scholar, focuses on gender and women issues 38 Indonesian human rights' lawyer 39 A private body initially organized to investigate American war crimes in Vietnam. Later a similar tribunal using the same name was created to investigate other state crimes. 40 A tribunal initiated to conduct an investigation of the Indonesian government’s crimes in Biak, West Papua. 41 As manifested on their website, http://www.tribunal1965.org/id/about/faq-ipt-65/ accessed 12 December 2016 42 Literally translated as wanderers, referring to the fact that exiles were forced to move around countries after being prevented from returning.
50 exiles, namely an acknowledgement by the Indonesian government that it had committed injustice in the past. The Indonesian government, represented by the embassy, could not meet this demand, so the talks were discontinued.
For Indonesian exiles, an acknowledgement from the Indonesian government that they are victims of the state’s action is more important than formal documents restoring their Indonesian citizenship. Jackson (2013: 73) explains the importance of acknowledgement for a group of people who experienced trauma or loss in the past. He argues that a demand for acknowledgement from some ultimate authority is not merely an effort to seek material retribution. Much more than that, it is a symbolic gesture to regain a loss by demanding the authority to forfeit some of its power. In this regard, a public apology is an act of acknowledgement of “the truth of the experience of the powerless”(Jackson 2013: 72). Therefore, it is understandable that most Indonesian exiles refused the offer of a new passport, as that offer did not provide acknowledgement of the experience that forced them to become exiles. A passport is ‘merely a paper’ or ‘document’, as my informants said, and so could not be seen as a serious effort from the Indonesian government to meet the exiles' demand.
In 2012, Komnas HAM (National Commission of Human Rights) did research on killings and persecution of alleged communists perpetrated by the government in 1965. In that process, one of the representatives went to Netherlands and met several exiles to discuss the issue in general and the situation of exiles in particular. Komnas HAM then held a press conference in which they announced their conclusion that the execution of alleged communists in 1965/1966 was a severe human rights' violation. Nevertheless, the final report did not include exiles as part of the victims. Some of my informants expressed their disappointment about this, because they had high expectations about this initiative beforehand43. Komnas HAM also reported its findings to the Indonesian government but there was no follow-up.
IPT 1965 was initiated with a hope to create a ‘different kind of effort’ from other initiatives related to 1965 done in the past. From a very early stage, several representatives of Indonesian exiles were involved. Their involvement was considered crucial for the committee because one of their goals was to give a voice to victims44 and represent their experiences as best as possible. The delicate matter of
43 It is important to note that on one discussion, an exile suggested that the absence of acknowledgment toward exiles as victims was their own responsibility, because many of them did not allow their data to be included within the report. 44 As manifested on their website, http://www.tribunal1965.org/id/about/concept-note-on-international-peoples- tribunal-on-crimes-against-humanity-in-indonesia-1965/ accessed 12 December 2016
51 conveying experiences to other people who did not share similar experiences is not an easy task. As Jackson (2013: 84) pointed out, there is an unbridgeable gap between the one who experienced a certain situation and others who did not. He added that this ‘experience exacerbates the feeling of being isolated’ and rendered the victim as speechless (Jackson 2013:84). In this regard, the role of Indonesian exiles is essential. As victims of the New Order regime themselves, they have the capacity to understand feelings and suffering experienced by other victims who experienced abuse and torture first-hand. Through this understanding, Indonesian exiles bridged these experiences to non-victim committee members to help make the tribunal sensitive to their feelings. Aminah and Andreas, for example, were consulted by other committee members and were asked to attend meetings for tribunal preparation.
The tribunal itself was held for four days, on 10-13 November 2015. Apart from its status as ‘legal city’, The Hague was chosen to be a place for tribunal because many Indonesian exiles who are 1965 victims live in the Netherlands45. The whole process involved hundreds of volunteers filling different roles from various backgrounds, including academics, activists, victims and students. They were also come from different nationalities: Zak Yacoob, the head judge, is a citizen of South Africa; Todung Mulya Lubis, one of the prosecutors, is Indonesian; while Saskia Wierenga, one of the expert witnesses, is a Dutch citizen. During the event, Indonesian exiles were involved in different activities. Some helped to provide accommodation for people who live abroad, while Aminah and one other friend testified during the trial.
One of the things that differentiate IPT 1965 from previous initiative regarding the 1965 incident is the dominant use of the Internet. The Internet was utilized from very early on in the tribunal preparations. The committee mainly used the Internet to communicate with their network all around the world through mailing lists, video calls, and social messenger platforms like WhatsApp. IPT 1965 also launched a website to disseminate all information related to this initiative. Finally, the whole trial was streamed online on YouTube, so people who could not be present could still monitor the trial in real time, including some of my informants. To some extent, the use of various Internet platforms helped IPT 1965 receive more public recognition, particularly in Indonesia.
The court process received plenty of news coverage from Indonesian media, some of which even sent their reporters to The Hague. This exposure then led representatives of the Indonesian government under President Joko Widodo to make a response. Around this time, the stance taken by the Indonesian government was generally defensive. The Indonesian vice president, Jusuf Kalla, said that since the IPT
45 Interview with Lea Pamungkas, coordinator of Media and Communication of IPT 1965, 16 June 2016
52 was a ‘pseudo-tribunal’, there was no need for the Indonesian government to respond46, while Luhut Pandjaitan, Coordinator Minister of Politics, Justice, and Defence, accused the committee of IPT 1965 of being a group of people whose ‘thinking is no longer Indonesian47’. Nevertheless, several months after the tribunal, the Indonesian government held a symposium to discuss the problem of alleged communist persecution in 1965/1966. This kind of event was unprecedented in Indonesia. Even until recently, many discussions related to communism or Marxism had to be cancelled, under pressure from police officials or vigilante organizations.
At the symposium in April 2016, many speakers from different groups articulated their thoughts about the event, from academics, victims, and representatives of the military considered responsible for the killings. Despite the reluctance of the military to acknowledge the systematic killings48, the general tone of the symposium was closer to the aspirations of the victims than dominant narratives of communism in Indonesia. The symposium gave recommendations that acknowledged the role of the state in the alleged communist killings in the past49.
A few days after the symposium, the Indonesian president Joko Widodo visited the Netherlands on bilateral business. The IPT 1965 committee and several exiles organized a public demonstration demanded truth-finding as part of the reconciliation process. They also aspired to give those written demands directly to Joko Widodo. This was perceived as an important act to respond to the statement from Luhut at the symposium that the government did not have any intention to apologize50. Despite the tight security, Francisca, one representative of the exiles, managed to slip through and give the demand letters directly to the Indonesian president, who replied “I know51.”
The enthusiasm of Indonesian exiles about these series of events could also be seen in their online activities. Their enthusiasm was expressed through news snippet they posted on mailing lists. After the symposium, Esti for example posted news from Antara online portal entitled “It is time for Indonesia to make peace with its past”:
46 http://www.cnnindonesia.com/nasional/20151111181158-20-91088/jusuf-kalla-soal-sidang-rakyat-1965-itu- pengadilan-semu/ accessed 7 December 2016. 47 http://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2015/11/151111_indonesia_luhut accessed 7 December 2016. 48 http://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2016/04/160418_indonesia_simposium1965 accessed 8 December 2016 49 http://www.bbc.com/indonesia/berita_indonesia/2016/05/160518_indonesia_hasil_rekomendasi_simposium65 accessed 8 December 2016 50 http://www.rappler.com/indonesia/130511-perjuangan-francisca-serahkan-surat-rekonsiliasi-jokowi accessed 12 December 2016 51 Ibid
53
(Display of posting on mailing list, posted on Nasional-list, 20 April 2016)
Chalik responded to this post with the following comment:
“Hopefully recommendations from the symposium could heal the old wounds; hence it will not become a burden for our descendants in the future. With a legal way of resolution, let’s build Indonesia with a new face, which includes the rights' rehabilitation for those who still wander abroad because their passports were forcefully revoked by the New Order regime. Without any effort to unify every strength of Indonesia as a nation, Indonesia will always be negatively perceived in the eyes of the world, as a state who could not resolve severe human rights' violations within its own country. Rgrds: Chalik Hamid” (posted on Nasional-list, 20 April 2016) Drawing comparison with Anderson’s notion on imagined communities, Appadurai (1996) argues that although movement of people such as refugees is hardly a new phenomenon, the emergence of electronic media has an unprecedented influence. Electronic media allows displaced people to imagine their homeland through a “rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations”(Appadurai 1996: 4) In the case of Indonesian exiles, as exemplified by interactions between Esti and Chalik, news is treated as a partial representation of the current Indonesia. It is partial because they do not merely act like passive readers. They engage the information about the symposium with their hopes and aspirations developed from their experiences as exiles. Therefore, comparable to Chinese political writer (Yongming 2005: 786), Indonesian exiles' agency lies in the use of their own framework for curating and interpreting information they receive from the Internet.
Appadurai (1996) also discussed the role of imagination as one of the most important forces in this current globalized world. When he discussed imagination, he specifically separated this concept from fantasy. While he considered the latter as mostly private, imagination has what he called a “projective sense” (Appadurai 1996: 7). This quality enables imagination to be translated into actions. In this regard,
54 while Indonesian exiles interpret information based on their ideals, information from the Internet also shapes their ideas about themselves and Indonesia as a homeland. On the post above, for instance, Chalik's comment demonstrated the negotiation between his ideas about Indonesia in the past where the government had committed human rights' violations, with present-day Indonesia in which he could put his hopes. So in these practices, there is constant negotiation between past and present. This kind of engagement with homeland would be unthinkable without the use of the Internet. Therefore, while their collective imagination as exiles has long been an important drive of their political engagements, online practices bring a new dynamic.
These engagements show that Indonesian exiles are not only concerned about things that happened in the past, but also about the present situation. This interest is relatively distinct, particularly considering their status as an elder. For comparison, Khvorostianov, Elias, and Nimrod (2012: 595) shows that older Russian Jewish migrants in Israel prefer to use the Internet to look about the past in Russia. Unlike the younger migrants, they do not have any interest in the current situation in Russia.
The involvement of Indonesian exiles in this series of events also shows that their online engagements were exercised parallel to their offline activism. One example of this simultaneous engagement on these two platforms could be seen in the case of the verdict's announcement. As described at the beginning of the chapter, Indonesian exiles were present at this event. Some came to observe, others documented the event, while some were asked to give a speech. Shortly after the event, there were many posts related to the verdict announcement on the Internet. In one secret Facebook group52 of IPT 1965 for example, one exile posted news about the Indonesian government's response to the IPT 1965 verdict. To this news he added his comment, “The government has started to feel besieged53.” With this post, this exile implied that the verdict had a significant impact on the government. There were also posts created on mailing lists. Esti, for example, commented on the government’s refusal to work on this verdict. He said:
“…the greatest deception was the one that Soeharto did with his military. This deception still rules over most brains in Indonesia. Soeharto’s deceptions alongside ABRI have sacrificed millions of innocent Indonesian citizens, alongside its natural resources. Now, the one who is referred as Reformation government is still trying to deceive the Indonesian people. Will Indonesia continue to live with deceptions? Read the conclusion of the IPT that was held in The Hague in 2015, that was announced on 20 July 2016 in Amsterdam. AA” (Posted in GELORA 45, 21 April 2016)
52 As mentioned before, it is a feature of Facebook that means the group could not be found or accessed by other users unless they added into the group by its founder/moderator. 53 Posted on 22 July 2016
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In the previous chapter, I presented an old posting by Esti on Apakabar that related his past experiences with contemporary issues about East Timor. In this post, he performed similar practice with IPT 1965. Esti addressed the past by writing about Soeharto’s deception. He then elaborated the past even further as some sort of original sin when he said that act of deceptions had taken a toll on Indonesia that was still affecting it today. In the last part of his argument, he made the connection between the Indonesia of the past and present when he asserted that the current regime reproduced similar deceptions. He also stated that the conclusion of IPT 1965 should be taken as a reference to expose the deception.
When Esti talked about IPT 1965, this was not an event he referred in a distant past. The initiative is also not something he learned about only through online platforms like Facebook. Rather it is something he was personally involved in, alongside many other exiles in the Netherlands. Therefore, Esti was making online posts while at the same time performing offline activism. As I have discussed in the previous chapter, Esti performed these kinds of activities since the mid-1990s. He joined multiple organizations in the Netherlands to oppose Soeharto, and at the same time he was also active in Apakabar. These two forms of activism were performed simultaneously, thus influencing each other. The activities of his organizations became a reference for his posting. On the other hand, the information he received from Apakabar informed the kind of actions made by his organizations.
Chalik's case is similar to this. He attended many of the events related to IPT 1965. He also documented those events with his camera, wrote reports, and posted these documentations on a mailing list. The documentation then became a reference to other members of mailing lists which included Indonesian exiles, thereby informing their offline and online actions.
(Documentation of IPT 1965 verdict announcement by Chalik, posted in Sastra Pembebasan, 21 July 2016)
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These two forms of activism should not be seen as something separate, as they influence each other. The accounts showed that both Esti and Chalik purposely performed their activism both online and offline in a flexible way as long as it supported their cause. Thus the line between online and offline activism is blurred. This kind of engagement affirmed the notion discussed by Miller and Slater (2001) that a complete separation between online and offline is no longer relevant.
4.2 Experiencing Indonesia on Diskusi Forum After the fall of Soeharto in 1998, many Indonesian activists as well as students visited the Netherlands. Some of them later even decided to stay on in the Netherlands. This influx of people provided information to Indonesian exiles about the current situation in Indonesia. Knowing the situation, Ana, Asih54 and several other friends believed that it was important to gather information from them to know ‘the truth about the current situation’ of Indonesia55. Thus, around 1998-1999 they initiated a discussion group as a place for exchange of information.
From the beginning, this discussion group utilized email to arrange offline meetings. Later, they created their Diskusi Forum mailing list to do this process, which is still used until today. The Diskusi Forum meetings do not have any given schedules, but are arranged ad hoc based on a certain interest of issues or informants that happen to come to the Netherlands. Once, for instance, they arranged a meeting because Asvi Warman Adam, Indonesian historian, was visiting the Netherlands. Other occasions, like the one I attended, were arranged because many exiles were interested in discussing the impact of the 1965 symposium. As stated in the previous section, it was a topic that became an important discussion on the Internet. At some point in the past, there were offline meetings once every two months. At each meeting, the numbers of participants would vary between twenty and fifty people. In recent years, the number of participants has declined because some members have passed away.
My participation in a Diskusi Forum event was triggered by one interview with an informant. Knowing that I was interested to find out about the use of the Internet among Indonesian exiles, she suggested contacting Asih, a co-founder of this forum. Several days later, I met her and she invited me to come on their next meeting. We then interacted through emails, in which she also explained the general agenda of the meeting:
“Please bring your friend. This is not a closed meeting. (It is) a free event. We will talk about the 65 symposium, for which until today there has not been any follow-up. (We will also talk) about the
54 Pseudonym 55 Interview with Ana, 17 August 2016
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governor elections of DKI, and the government’s policy in handling its ocean to become a maritime country. There are also friends of the Forum that will present impressions from their visit to Indonesia. Thus, the schedule is quite tight…” (Asih’s email, 2 August 2016) The meeting was located in Zeist, in a small common room surrounded by apartments. Diskusi Forum does not always use this place as a location. For past events with fewer participants the meetings were held at Ana’s or Asih’s place. When I arrived, there were already several participants that talked to each other. By the time the event started, several minutes after eleven, around thirty participants were present in that room. Most of the participants were exiles, and there were approximately the same number of men and women in the venue. Asih opened the event by explaining the agenda to the other participants. She suggested allocating the time to two items. The first item was the presentation by several exiles who had recently visited Indonesia. They were expected to talk about their impressions of the current situation in Indonesia. The second item was a discussion on political issues that were mentioned previously in Asih’s email. Before the meeting started, I introduced myself and asked their permission to record the discussion. Some participants objected to being recorded, while others did not mind. Therefore, it was decided by the forum that the participants who objected would express their objection before they talked. In this thesis I use pseudonyms to refer to anyone apart from the informants I interviewed personally.
Ana was the first presenter. During her visit to Indonesia, she had the opportunity to talk and interact with what she referred to as the ‘young generation.’ She said that from these interactions she learned a lot of information about current political and social issues in Indonesia. To other participants in the Diskusi Forum, she conveyed that despite having good political intentions, Indonesian president Joko Widodo was still facing many great problems. Ana said that one of the most important problems is how many new laws give too much freedom for foreign investment. On a more positive note, she then talked about the progress of Jakarta under the current governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama. In her opinion, the progress made by him could be seen from various aspects, from better transportation and clean rivers to less corruption from public officials. Ana also added that she grew up in Jakarta and had visited this city several times since she moved to the Netherlands, but had never seen this kind of progress in the past. Therefore, she hoped that the current governor could be re-elected in the next election.
The rules stated by Asih at the beginning mentioned how the questions should be asked after presentation. Nevertheless, in reality the participants made comments or asked questions during Ana’s presentation. Kartaprawira, for instance, corrected Ana on her statement that Basuki eradicated corruption. He said that Basuki did not eradicate corruption, since it is another government body's
58 responsibility. However, Basuki implemented bureaucratic reform that minimized the chance of corruption. Farida, who had also recently visited Jakarta, verified several points made by Ana. Aside from her impressions about Indonesia’s development, Farida also told the forum about how different the acceptance she received from family and relatives this time. Despite her background as an exile, her family gave her a warm welcome. This was contrasted to her visit to Indonesia eighteen years ago, when many people ignored her. Farida believed that it was part of the positive developments in Indonesia.
The discussion on the first session was not all about social and political issues; some presenters emphasized their trip more as part of their leisure activities. Chalik, for instance, presented his road trip with his family to several cities in Sumatera. His stories presented a contrast between the problems he faced, such as bad infrastructure or bad ethics of civil servants, with the beautiful scenery of places he visited. Another participant, Hidayat56 also talked more about the trip as a holiday experience. He expressed curiosity about how the guard of one tourism site could recognize his foreign citizenship from body language. Hidayat also visited Sukarno’s burial, where he proudly identified himself as “Sukarno’s fan” to the officer of the burial. He quite surprised himself that he felt safe enough to present his identity to that stranger. In this regard, he agreed with Farida that in general he also felt much safer than on previous trips.
After the lunch break, the second session started, again with Asih as the moderator. She gave the first opportunity to talk to Kartaprawira as the head of LPK65. He was requested to comment on the suggestion to initiate dialogue between the Indonesian government and exile community, just like the one they did during Gus Dur’s presidency. At the beginning of his talk, Kartaprawira said that he did not go to the IPT 1965 verdict announcement due to illness. Nevertheless, he followed the announcement through online streaming. Kartaprawira also stressed how he spread the link of that livestream to his blog, and several mailing lists that could reach thousands of members. He continued his presentation by praising Joko Widodo for his good track record, as public officials can be monitored for various aspects of development such as education, health, and infrastructure. Even more important for this community, he posited that Widodo has promised to solve cases of past human rights' violations. This promise, Kartaprawira said, can be regarded as a debt that can only be collected at the end of his term. Therefore, he suggested monitoring this presidency first before demanding the 'payment' of that debt.
For Kartaprawira, the symposium is the start of that promise's fulfilment. Nevertheless, there are still many people in Indonesia who oppose this effort, particularly from the military. They even created their
56 Pseudonym
59 own symposium to counter the first symposium. Since the results from both symposiums had already been given to the president, he suggested waiting for the follow up of this situation. At the end of his talk, Kartaprawira praised the IPT 1965. Although this initiative could not give legal sanctions, it helps proves to the international public that there were severe human rights' violations in Indonesia. Moreover, he reminded others that IPT 1965 addressed exiling people as part of human rights' violations. This categorization did not included on the report made by Komnas HAM. At the end, he did not really address the question started by Asih, but the topic he discussed was relevant to the one suggested at the beginning of the meeting.
Similar to the first session, other participants were also given opportunity to respond to Kartaprawira’s presentation. Speaking pessimistically, Hidayat considered efforts to solve human rights' violations in Indonesia as suffering a setback. This could be seen from the rise of anti-communist movements in Indonesia, and the placement of human rights' violators in strategic government positions. In a similar tone, Andreas praised the importance of IPT 1965 but reminded others not to expect too much. His opinion was based on the observation that the president took an ambiguous position toward solving human rights' violations. On the other hand, IPT 1965 does not have the function to punish the perpetrators. However, given the circumstances, and judging from people's responses, Andreas considered that IPT 1965 was quite successful.
As one of the participants, I was also requested to give my opinions on this matter. I grew up during the last decade of New Order regime, where its control was not as strong as it used to be. Hence, though my generation still experienced some of propaganda against communism, we also had more access to other information regarding the same subject. This fact was also addressed by many other participants at this event, so they asked me to talk as a representative of younger generations about these matters. I stated that I agreed with many points discussed before. I mentioned that despite the strong re-emergence of the anti-communist movement in Indonesia, the fact that more people currently engage with Marxism through publications or activism shows that the situation in Indonesia is not completely negative. Rather it is a democratic arena where there is a contestation of ideas.
Similar to several other exiles, Esti shared his concern regarding government’s intention to solve human rights' violations. Additionally, he pointed out how the exile community might have some responsibility for not being included in the Komnas HAM report. Other participant, Sarmadji, added another interesting point on these topics. He argued that the exile community has the resilience to keep on struggling for justice. In his case, this struggle is reflected in his daily activities collecting various
60 publications related to communism and the 1965 incident in Indonesia. Sarmadji also believes that exile’s spirit of struggle will be inherited by younger generations. Around half past four, the event was ended because there was a time limit on the room hire. At the end of the discussion, Asih stated that this forum had been initiated so they could hear each other's opinions. Although there were many different opinions, it was important to discuss them freely so they could use these as a reference for their own consideration.
In reality, the interactions were even messier57 and more spontaneous than this description. During each presentation, for example, there were many interruptions made to respond to some points made by presenters. Aside from the main topics, there were also smaller topics that were discussed in between the presentations. For example, some participants talked about the length of stay permit in Indonesia as a foreigner. Others dwelt on very particular subjects like the quality of Indonesian trains. In this regard, the messiness and spontaneity resemble similar discussions that are performed online, especially on mailing lists, as discussed previously.
On mailing lists, the interactions are usually started by postings from some members. Postings are created by forwarding news considered relevant onto the list. On rarer occasions, members produced their own written piece about certain issues. Other members then respond to these posts, most of the time with short commentaries. The continuation of the interactions depends on how controversial the topic is or the response from the members of the mailing list.
Similar interactions took place at this event. The discussions were started with presentations from several participants. The other participants responded to the main presenters, sometimes in the middle of their presentation. Hence, the stories presented by these presenters were constantly affirmed or refuted during the presentations. This pattern of interactions made the discussions really hard to have any kind of consensus. Asih is completely aware of this nature of Diskusi Forum. Therefore, she never tries to draw any kind of conclusion for each discussion. In this regard, she portrays this forum as a place where people exchange ideas freely to each other. As discussed above, activities on mailing lists also have a similar freedom and flexibility and eventually produce more dissonance than consensus. These similarities are not a coincidence, since it is clear that both activities, on two different platforms, always inform one another.
57 Messy is the term I borrowed from (Postill and Pink 2012) that they used to describe unstructured and complex dynamics of interaction in social media. I choose to use the same term to show the parallel between these two interactions.
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Despite the similarities, there is fundamental difference between interactions on mailing lists and Diskusi Forum, namely the distant between participants. Generally, there is an assumption that on mailing lists there is a clear distance between members. People can write anything and do not have to deal with the direct consequences that might happen because of that writing. This sense of security is even stronger if the member uses a pseudonym that does not refer to their offline identity. This privilege enables people to act freely on mailing lists. On the other hand, there is no distance between participants in the Diskusi Forum. Each participant can respond directly to other participants' ideas. People could also monitor each other's reactions toward certain ideas brought up by participants. Therefore, despite many different opinions, none of them were delivered in a harsh manner.
Nonetheless, the comparison of mailing lists generally is probably not suitable for Indonesian exiles. In the previous chapter, we already established how their online interactions could directly affect personal relations offline. This is because the members of these mailing lists are not total strangers, even if they use pseudonyms, as most of the time they are already familiar with other members. Therefore, there are direct consequences for those who are considered to be harsh on a mailing list. Nevertheless, unlike in Diskusi Forum, this norm does not prevent harsh debates and open conflict being performed on a mailing list. Even with its limitations, the platform still provides some sort of distance that is not available offline.
If interactions at events like this resemble interactions on the Internet, why would Indonesian exiles still be eager to meet at events such as Diskusi Forum? To explain this, I would like to bring the discussion brought by Michael Jackson (2013) on the role of storytelling. Through Arendt’s concept of ‘subjective in between’, Jackson argues that people never tell stories merely to voice their mind, but also to shape their experiences to relate with others (Jackson 2013: 15). Moreover, since storytelling is a collective process, while shaping their own experiences, storytellers are at the same time shaping “collective identity and solidarity” (Jackson 2013: 16).
Asih stated clearly that Diskusi Forum was initiated because of the need for Indonesian exiles to exchange ideas with each other. It was considered important because many of them had already accessed different kind of information from the Internet, and according to her it is sometimes disconcerting to keep opinions to oneself. In this account, we can see that for exiles having their own perspectives on certain issues in Indonesia is not enough. There is a strong need to create a meeting where they can relate their own thinking to collective thinking on certain issues. To do that, as shown in the above description, the participants on Diskusi Forum were encouraged to exchange their stories.
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As Jackson (2013) pointed out, to be able to relate one’s experience with others, the form of the stories are important. The stories need to be presented in a way that other participants can relate to. Ana, for instance, presented her experience with young generations which she considered were critical to old frames of thinking established by New Order. Given their age, it is natural for this community to consider many people as the young generations. More than that, the sentiment of seeing the young generations as a people who bring hope is something that most of the participants could relate to. A similar sentiment could also be heard from Andreas’s speech during the film screening, or Asih’s request for me to share my opinion on the event. By presenting her story using a shared sentiment, Ana invited other participants to engage with their own experiences. These interactions happened through the course of the event, which in turn moulded these individual experiences into the group collective.
The transformation of personal experiences into collective meaning could also be seen from the choice of topics discussed in this event. As described before, both items talked about the current situation in Indonesia with different specific topics. The first item relied on first-hand experience of speakers about Indonesia. Therefore, the presented stories were dependent from personal interactions of these participants with their surroundings during their time in Indonesia. When Chalik talked about the work ethics of civil servants, it was based on his experience seeing civil servants that spent time outside during office hours. Farida's narrative, where she felt much better accepted in Indonesia today, was also based on her personal interactions with her family. Despite coming from personal accounts, these stories are not free from information garnered from the Internet. Many parts of their stories, particularly their evaluations of the government, were presented with information they learned from mailing lists. These multiple personal stories were then accepted or refuted by other participants, yet in a larger context these interactions became an important part of collective imagination about Indonesia. On the other hand, for those who presented their stories, Jackson (2013) see it as a ‘restorative praxis’ where private meaning is transformed into public meaning, and an individual is looking to be a part of larger collective entity.
The second item involved a different kind of stories. While first-hand experiences were still present, the stories relied more on the interpretation of information about Indonesia found online. These stories then presented as an interplay of multiple sources of information. The talk by Kartaprawira, for example, was partly his personal experience, partly online information, and partly shared knowledge among the exile community. It was hard to separate which part came from which source of references, particularly because despite the distant, he told the story as if he is not separated from Indonesia.
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Moreover, Kartaprawira presented himself as an active figure within the large struggle of finding justice aspired by Indonesian exiles. This was demonstrated for instance at the beginning of his story when he said he circulated the link of live streaming on several mailing lists. In other part he presented himself as a subject with significance when he stated his institution's official support to IPT 1965. By doing this, Kartaprawira performed the second role of storytelling which is “a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” (Jackson 2013: 34). On this matter, the clear separation between personal opinion and facts is no longer relevant, since most of the things discussed are a part of - and also become - the shared knowledge of other participants.
For this community, a big part of their life was determined by external circumstances which they could not control. They were not able to return to their homeland out of the fear of being captured and persecuted by their own government. This made them lose not just the connections with their homeland, but also the sense of freedom as a subject to determine their own course of life. In this regard, storytelling at events helped the Indonesian exiles to reclaim their sense of agency. By telling stories about the current situation in Indonesia and how they played a role in the situations, they had the sense that they were not really separated from Indonesia. To participate in online activities is thus really important for Indonesian exiles, since many of them still consider themselves as Indonesian. As Asih put it, “Because, (I) can’t escape from the feeling as Indonesian, though we are not acknowledged by the (Indonesian) government.” The use of the Internet in this regard allowed them to overcome the gap between those feelings and their actual situation. Nevertheless, as discussed throughout this chapter, offline interaction such as participation in IPT 1965, or meetings like Diskusi Forum, is still considered really important, because physical meetings reinforce the feeling of individual exiles being part of a community of Indonesian exiles.
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5. Conclusion The discussion on the formation of exile communities often emphasizes the exilic experiences as the dominant factor in shaping the shared values of these communities. But the case of Indonesian exiles shows how the formation of shared values and ideals happened before they became exiled. That is why it is important to look at Indonesia before the 1965 incident, where exchanges of political ideologies were performed on a daily basis by various kinds of formal institutions. In this context, communism, mainly spread by PKI, became one of the most important ideologies for many Indonesian people. The importance of communism and socialism was even acknowledged formally by the state through Sukarno’s slogan Nasakom. Nevertheless, for many Indonesian exiles, the interactions with these ideologies did not just come from the state, but also from personal experiences. These progressive ideals translated into actions that were relevant to their life. Therefore, many of these exiles went abroad to communist countries with a great pride that they were proud representatives of Indonesia, which was also considered progressive at that time.
That pride then transformed into anxiety and confusion after they found out there were killings and communist eradication in Indonesia. They were exiled from Indonesia, which they had represented proudly to other fellow international students. It became impossible for to apply knowledge they were learning to their homeland. The certainty they once had was replaced by the precarity of an unknown future. Many of these exiles thus wandered for several years in multiple countries. Some looked for the possibility to return to Indonesia, while others simply looked for a place to settle. In terms of community, the situation also created a paradox. On the one hand, the precarity reinforced fragmentation, particularly between the group who supported the Soviet Union and the group who supported China. On the other hand, this sudden displacement reinforced their association with progressive ideals, which were translated into organized opposition through publications they made in exile.
Despite the agency performed through publications, the fate of these exiles was still largely determined by outside forces like the state. Political and economic changes in host countries such as the Soviet Union, China and Albania forced them to find a new place to live. The Netherlands was chosen by many because of its historical connections with Indonesia, which made the asylum process easier. However, the process to adapt to life in the Netherlands was still not easy. Many exiles could not find jobs that suited their education background, so needed to choose different occupations. Even after they built their new lives and became full citizens of the Netherlands, the sense of being unfairly treated by their
65 own country never disappeared. They still very much felt Indonesian, hence regardless of their formal status they are permanently an exile, forced to be disconnected from their homeland. Therefore, despite life difficulties, some exiles still participated in organized movements to oppose the New Order regime.
The question of agency practiced by Indonesian exiles brought me to look further into their use of computers and the Internet. Some exiles had actually already encountered computers in their previous countries like the USSR, though they had never actually used them. Only after they came to the Netherlands were they able to use personal computers. Most of them learned to use this technology because of direct needs related to their job or family. Some occupations required them to learn how to use computers to make formal documents. Other exiles learned about computers from their children who learned about this technology in school. Later, they learned to use the Internet, particularly email, to contact each other and people in Indonesia as well. Email use is still one of their main activities on the Internet. Apart from making contact, Indonesian exiles use email to create and look for information on mailing lists. Beside these platforms, a few exiles use other platforms such as Facebook or blogs. Their use of the Internet shows how this practice has become a normal experience for them. However, at the same time, since their use is limited to their knowledge they do not consider themselves to actually understand this technology.
These limitations have not affected their efforts in using this technology to convey their cause. In the early 1990s, the Indonesian opposition started to use the Internet as a new platform. Several exiles who had early access to the Internet articulated their opposition on the Apakabar mailing list. The contents published on this mailing list were different kinds of writing such as essays, news snippets, and poetry. These variations of writing were similar to previous publications they made before they came to the Netherlands. Through these writings, Indonesian exiles engaged the recollection of past ideals or events with the contemporary context. Therefore, they were able to be relevant to Indonesia, even though they left decades ago. On Apakabar, some Indonesian exiles used pseudonyms. It is common for Internet users to use pseudonyms, but Indonesian exiles already used pseudonyms before they used the Internet. The practice became really important after the 1965 incident, when it became necessary to protect one's identity.
The other past practice that is rearticulated on the Internet is debates. This practice is related to the past fragmentations they experienced, particularly after the 1965 incident. Around that time, many conflicts started because of accusations in regards to one’s affiliation or interpretation of progressive
66 ideals. In some cases, these conflicts became the reason for an exile to move to another country. Similar conflicts take place on mailing lists. Indonesian exiles use the same kind of rhetoric that they used in the past. The conflicts and debates exercised on mailing lists also could impact personal relations offline. There were cases where after online debates, exiles stopped interacted with their online opponents in offline forums. Many exiles are aware of this possibility, so try to avoid any kind of debates on mailing lists. These practices illustrated that though the Internet was a new technology for the exiles, it did not prevent them projecting past ideals and practices into it.
The articulation of past and present in Internet practice led me to another inquiry regarding the exiles' simultaneous use of offline-online platforms to convey their cause. During the fieldwork, a series of events related to IPT 1965 were the most important topic among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. Therefore, the observations of their engagement with these events provide a current picture of how their activism related to Internet use. From the beginning, Indonesian exiles were actively involved and performed various functions to support these initiatives. Some provided advice during preparation, some exile representatives became witnesses for the trial, and others documented the events. At the same time, during this series of events, the exiles exercised their support to IPT 1965 online. There were multiple postings of news regarding this series of events on mailing lists. Other exiles responded to this news through commentaries or longer essays. The live-streaming link of the events was also circulated on several mailing lists. These participations in IPT 1965 were performed in a flexible manner where offline activities informed online practices, and vice versa. Using the framework put forward by Appadurai (1996), these actions would not be possible without the shared imagination among Indonesian exiles that still belong to Indonesia yet are abandoned by it. The Internet enabled them to participate in current issues related to Indonesia, which further reinforced that imagination.
Yet, offline meetings such as the Diskusi Forum are still necessary for Indonesian exiles. They need to share their feelings, thoughts, and opinions regarding information they learned about Indonesia online. These activities are exercised in an offline space where the participants are familiar with one another through storytelling. As Jackson (2013) pointed out, storytelling transformed individual meaning into collective meaning; hence the act functions as restorative praxis for the storyteller. Even more than that, Indonesian exiles use these occasions to recreate a sense of agency. Through the stories, they become more than a mere group of people that were victims of greater forces from outside; they have the capacities to negotiate or even struggle with the situation.
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This research was started by simple curiosity about why the Internet matters among Indonesian exiles in Netherlands. The development then brought the discussion into the practices of agency projected by Indonesian exiles online. This thesis has shown that for Indonesian exiles, the past has never really stopped, and is kept as nostalgia. Through their offline and online activism, the meanings of events in the past are constantly negotiated, thus making them always relevant with their struggle to relate with Indonesia as a homeland. The next question is whether their struggle to find justice could survive beyond this community. It is a hard question to answer, since I barely interacted with any of them during fieldwork. The presence of second generations came to me mostly through stories from my informants where their children have their own lives and family. Hence, it was not clear to me whether they would continue the political struggle of their parents. In my opinion, the political struggle of Indonesian exiles is more likely to be inherited by Indonesians who have an interest in history or human rights issues. However, more research is needed to answer this problem more conclusively. It is also just one of many issues that is not discussed enough or overlooked in this research. Yet, regardless of the limitations, I hope the findings from this thesis provide new insights into discussion not just about Indonesian exiles, but also the use of the Internet among other group of exiles.
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