hen The Jakarta Post published for the first time today 43 years ago, its prime directive was clear: to tell stories of Indonesia from the perspective of an Indonesian.
Standard practice around that period mostly revolved foreign correspondents parachuted from the major capitals of the West to report from the “exotic” East, who often wrote with an outlook which literary critic Edward Said deemed “orientalist”.
Or in the words of Karl Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”
There was indeed an urgent need to tell the Indonesian story from a homegrown perspective in the late 1970s, because soon after the failed coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in the mid 1960s, the country appeared to be missing from the map.
It seems that while Indonesia was preoccupied with jumpstarting the economy, the New Order regime of then president Soeharto wanted to keep a low profile so as not to draw the world’s attention to its efforts to crack down on dissent and free speech.
As a result, only rarely did Indonesia catch the world’s attention, usually only a sideway glance when a volcano erupted or a plane crashed from bad weather or poor maintenance.
Every Thursday
Indonesia, then a rising middle power with a population over 100 million, deserved better, in terms of media coverage.
