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IN THE TIME OF MADNESS
by Richard Lloyd Parry
Jonathan Cape. 315 pp. $24

WARS WITHIN: THE STORY OF TEMPO, AN INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE IN SOEHARTO’S INDONESIA
by Janet Steele
Equinox Publishing. 328 pp. $16.95

In 1997, as Indonesia’s economy was crumbling, I moved my family from Jakarta to Bali, putting some distance between my children and the gathering storm clouds in the capital. We settled on a house in a village near the island’s spiritual heart, Ubud, built by a well-known documentary-maker who had been killed in a freak accident. Just before we moved in, my wife visited a dukun, or traditional seer. The spirit of the land on which the house was built, the dukun warned, took a human life every few years. It intended to take a female life next.

For my wife, whose own bloodline extends back to Indonesia’s other mystical power center, the royal kraton (palace) of Solo on the island of Java, there was no question. We had two daughters; we would find another house. I did not object. I had been in Indonesia long enough to know one did not challenge the unseen forces. “There is light and there is darkness” the village headman had told me a few days before the warning. “They must always be kept in balance.”

It was near there that the British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry first experienced the blurred line between light and dark, between dream and reality, that is woven through In the Time of Madness, his intensely personal account of covering Indonesia during the final years of President Suharto’s rule. “After I had fallen asleep with the jungle in my ears, I dreamed of knives and faces,” he recalls in the prologue. “Of a mobile telephone that would not stop ringing and of endless conversations with a man named Colonel Mehmet.” Over the next three years, the mysterious colonel would continue to haunt Parry’s dreams, as the young journalist explored the dark side of Indonesia in the late 1990s as “one power was dying; another was fighting to get born.”

In the tradition of the best literary journalism, In the Time of Madness reads like a novel, offering both a unique perspective on Indonesia’s reformasi revolution of 1998 and an uncomfortably honest portrayal of a journalist at work. Parry writes in a voice at times reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, who also probed the archipelago’s heart of darkness. At first, like most young reporters, Parry believed he wore an emotional armor that insulated him from the horror as civilization’s rules began to fray: “I encountered death, but remained untouched.” Headhunters eating human flesh in Borneo; mob justice in the capital; the Timor revolt. But like so many foreign correspondents before him, Parry eventually “discovered that such experience is never externalized, only absorbed, and that it builds up inside one, like a toxin.”

While most journalistic accounts of the end of Suharto’s three decades at the helm focus on the collapse of the economy, the corruption of the president’s clan and cronies, and the political machinations of rival heirs to the political throne, Parry examines events through a much darker prism; a world of ritual, spells, and seers.

This is not just a book about mysticism or Indonesia. It is also a compelling look at the realities of life as a foreign correspondent. Journalists often walk a fine line between the roles of reporter and voyeur, willing participants in the pornography of violence. Parry is not shy about offering uncomfortable glimpses of this reality, as when he manages to buy photos proving that Dayak warriors, engaged in communal violence in Borneo, had reverted to the ancient art of headhunting: “We shook hands on the deal with big awful grins on our faces. In the car, I caught myself giggling, a strange cold kind of giggling, as I fingered the envelope of prints.”

As someone who has covered far too many wars, I sometimes found myself wincing at Parry’s willingness to lay bare the swirl of emotion and rush of adrenaline that keeps so many reporters coming back for more. Approaching the site of a massacre, Parry realizes that “I had never before felt simultaneously such extremes of eagerness and reluctance. My body felt light, as if I might float away from the earth.”

Parry also offers telling insights into the complex mix of motives that drive foreign correspondents, as when he finds himself inside Indonesia’s parliament building after it was taken over by students: “Such events are flattering to those who witness them; you feel that just by being there you are courageous.”

At times, Parry’s forays into hyperbole and his fixation with the bloodier aspects of those years threaten to undermine an otherwise fine book. It would be easy for a reader who knows little about Indonesia to come away from it with the impression that chaos reigned throughout the late ’90s. The bloodshed witnessed by Parry was certainly personally traumatic for the reporter and its victims, but most Indonesians were untouched by the pockets of violence. There was no repeat of Indonesia’s so-called “Year of Living Dangerously,” the 1965 convulsion of bloodshed that claimed at least a half-million lives, no military coup, no collapse of central authority, no Balkanization of the archipelago. One almost senses a faint disappointment on Parry’s part that none of this came to pass.

As a glimpse into the life of a foreign correspondent, or as a nonfiction companion to Conrad’s Lord Jim, In the Time of Madness is a very good read. As a history of a period through the prism of journalism, it should be paired with another recently published book about reporters and Indonesia, Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia, by the media historian Janet Steele.

By his own admission, Parry — like most Western reporters — only discovered Indonesia on the eve of the revolution; Tempo helped to bring that revolution about. Wars Within should be required reading for the armies of Western media trainers currently descending on newsrooms from Morocco to Indonesia in the hope of bolstering media freedom — as well as those who fund them. Steele, an associate professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, provides a deft and highly readable account of how Tempo pushed the envelope under an authoritarian regime and emerged as the country’s most influential news organization.

Then a Fulbright scholar in Indonesia, Steele first began studying the magazine in 1997, “while Tempo was still a ghost,” three years after it was banned for a second time by the Suharto regime. The eternal cliché about Indonesia is that, as in the country’s famous shadow puppet plays, there is always more going on behind the scenes than is apparent to the audience. Tempo is the journalistic embodiment of this truth. Its print edition banned, the magazine began publishing an Internet version, but only as a cover for the real journalistic product, a set of e-mailed and photocopied newsletters produced by a clandestine unit of reporters organized in a system of cells, using aliases and operating from a location even its founder, Goenawan Mohamad, claims he did not know. The Asia Foundation provided a secure server with the most up-to-date encryption to foil government efforts to trace its output. Other aspects of the operation were funded by USAID in a don’t ask, don’t tell relationship.

Within weeks of Suharto’s downfall, Tempo’s publishing license had been restored. A few months later, the revived magazine was once more on the streets (by 2001 it was also producing Koran Tempo, now one of Indonesia’s most popular newspapers). Back in the States, Steele was amazed at the alacrity with which former Tempo reporters quit their jobs to return to the fold.

“I had initially intended to write about Tempo as ‘the magazine that doesn’t exist,’ ” she recalls, “but obviously that was no longer possible.” So Steele returned to Indonesia in 1999 “to examine Tempo as a window into the history of the New Order.”

The story she produced is invaluable for anyone trying to understand the workings of the media in a controlled society. It is a world in which black-and-white gives way to shades of gray. “National news in Tempo became part of an elaborate process of negotiating and signaling among elites,” reports Steele.

Nor did Western notions of objectivity always apply. “Being ‘balanced’ in a [political] system that was inherently unbalanced was not enough,” Steele writes. That did not mean Tempo always challenged the government head-on. In fact, some critics of the magazine accused it of collaboration. That, Goenawan and his colleagues contend, was all part of the delicate balancing act in which the “hidden message” of resistance was written between the lines.

The ultimate goal of Tempo, as the journalist Arief Budiman told Steele, was “to supply [its readers] with the moral courage to at least not to betray their conscience.” But to do that, it needed to stay alive.

Vast amounts of government and foundation money is being spent these days on gatherings at five-star hotels in places like Barcelona and Dubai at which journalists from the West and the Muslim world engage in group therapy over their joint role in facilitating the violence of recent years. “How do we avoid making the same mistake again?” is the common theme.

Each time I am asked to speak at such events, I close by stating the obvious: a little balance goes a long way. And then I read from a definition of good journalism authored not in the newsroom of The New York Times or Le Monde, but at a news organization deep in the “third world,” whose publications have a combined circulation of a few hundred thousand. A news organization that most of the audience has never heard of — Tempo:

Our journalism will not be one-sided, or based on the politics of a single group. We believe that neither virtue nor the lack of virtue is the monopoly of any one side. We believe that the duty of the press is not to spread prejudice, but rather to wipe it out, not to sow the seeds of hatred, but rather to communicate mutual understanding . . .

Suharto is gone, retired to the modest house on a tree-lined Jakarta street where, according to confidants, he spends his days in meditation and prayer. The draconian press laws that once governed the Indonesian media have been scrapped. But that does not mean that Tempo’s struggle — or that of Indonesian journalism — is over.

At this writing, Goenawan Mohamad’s hand-picked successor as editor-in-chief, Bambang Harymurti, is appealing a one-year prison sentence on a criminal libel conviction for a story that a judge ruled was not “balanced.” Goenawan himself has had his home confiscated as part of a civil libel suit by the same businessman. They are among dozens of Indonesian journalists who have been dragged into courts as legal harassment has replaced government repression.

It is a scenario being played out in countries moving toward media independence across the developing world. And as in Indonesia, reporters in many of those countries also face a host of other challenges, from lack of training and poor salaries to threats and enticements from militant Islamists and powerful economic forces.

“Remember, the overall majority [of Indonesian journalists] were recruited trained, indoctrinated under a very effective New Order (military) regime. Many are disoriented,” Aristides Katoppo, another veteran editor whose newspaper was banned in the Suharto years, said in a recent e-mail. “You know how difficult it is to unlearn old habits. Militarism or commercialism are equally seducing; for the first you bow to the bayonet, for the other you bow for the money.”

Suharto is gone, but the darkness he helped to create lives on.

To read the articles in the January/February 2006 issue, click here.

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