Indonesia, not a Democracy?

"The Attorney General Office’s banning of some history books.

On 5th March, the Attorney General’s Office banned the further printing and distribution of thirteen history books from the 2004 junior and senior high school curriculums because they play down the role of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in the 1948 uprising in Madiun, East Java, and the 1965 coup attempt in Jakarta.

According to the AGO the books not only failed to state the facts about the PKI’s role in the events but went further and challenged some “accepted truths”, which could create public disorder. The AGO has the authority to monitor the circulation of written materials and has in the past banned a number of books deemed capable of disrupting political stability since the Soeharto era."

http://www.indonesiamatters.com/1172/book-banning/

Disclaimer: This is a piece I wrote for History, one that I sort of rewrote, and one that all history students are familiar off! Sorry people and Ms. Jess, (IT IS A CURRENT EVENTS PIECE) if it’s a just a temporary entry, all the homework and tests pilling up forbid me from making a coherent nice piece..

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

August 1950, Harry Truman sent this message to Congress; that despite all the problems that the Communist Soviet Union has caused America, Congress does not have the right to silence communist ideas and teachings. Ignoring dissents made and insults hurled at him, he stayed true to the fundamentals of democracy; liberty and equality.

To him, democracy meant that the government could not control what its citizen’s listens, reads or says, to him, democracy meant that the government had no right to declare and demand submission from its people and be treated as if they were subjects instead of citizens. Truman is correct; the idea of banning thoughts is the very betrayal of all that is democracy.

Americans are so fortunate; they also have presidents with backbones. *cough* SBY *cough*

Today's government has by and large ignored the fundamental freedom promised by democracy, FREE SPEECH. Even today the fear of saying what we truly want still looms in our head. In my head.

Friends advise me not to be too vocal, sadly they are right.

It has been 9 years since the fall of Soeharto, a fall that would have supposedly lead us to a true democracy. A democracy that entails free speech, a freedom that for so many years have been suppressed and caged tightly by Soeharto.

Now the ban and the propaganda against Communists is still alive and healthy. In public schools, and even National Plus schools, the young and even the old still mostly fear Communism although not knowing what it means; all they know is that Communists had killed the heroic generals back in 1965.

Book burning and book banning is still alive, still active. The Attorney General’s Office censor history books, and in doing so aren't they hailing themselves supreme in intelligence? Are they not proclaiming that those bureaucrats in the Attorney General's Office are superior to ordinary civilians, superior to us?

The truth is that the government is still supreme, and a true Indonesian Democracy has not been accomplished. You would argue that it’s better now, it’s free now. But they have and still are successful in indoctrinating Indonesians their warped account for their past.

North Korea claims that they are democratic, a claim that is absurd. Sadly, there is a similar danger with Indonesia.

We can claim we are democratic, but if our actions and our government actions totally rebuke the foundations of democracy we too, could fall back to Soeharto’s era, banning and freedom of speech is a slippery slope.

One that hopefully Indonesia will not slip once more.

Note: I'm not proposing that we are not a Democratic country, only that in this aspect we're defying all that is democratic, and the dangers to it.