Dialogue with Yosep Adi Prasetyo
Jane Wardhana and Sofia Tjiptadjaja

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Yosep Adi Prasetyo a.k.a Stanley is a journalist and active in AJI (Alliance of Independent Journalists). He is also an activist with DEMOS, a Jakarta-based NGO to promote democracy and civil society in Indonesia.

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Note: The opinions reflected in this interview are solely the interviewee’s and do not necessarily represent FICA Cross Point’s

JW: Can you tell us a little bit on what types of activities you are currently doing?

Stanley: I am currently the Director at the Institute of Information Study, it’s my day-to-day responsibility. The Institute is a Media NGO that is active in Jakarta, but we also have network in Medan, Makassar, Surabaya, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. Additionally, I am founding chairmain of Demos¸ one NGO focuses on researching and advocating human right issues. I am also a board secretary for Institute of Study for National Issues (Lembaga Kajian Masalah Kebangsaan, Elkasa) and the Board Secretary at the Propatria Foundation that focuses mainly in Security Sector Reform. I am also active in AJI (Alliance of Independent Journalists). This organization monitors its members which are journalists to follow the journalism ethics. If they violate the journalism protocols or ethics then the organization would make recommendation for the journalist to be discharged from his/her position. Sometimes, I volunteer to be a facilitator for different events for my friends at ICIP (International Center for Islam and Pluralism) or help as a researcher at Komnas HAM (National Committee for Human Rights Issues).

ST: How do you think the current situation of Indonesia media? Since the reformation in 1998, can freedom of expressions really be felt?

Stanley: Freedom of expression has obviously changed since the control of State has diminished much. But the pressure now has moved from the State to other models of communalism; for example pressures from thugs and also capital control remain unchanged. In the past when the threats came from the State, they could say “If you broadcast this news, we will close down your organization”. But now we can see some mob attacks organized by FPI (Islam Defender Front) to “Playboy” office and the “Kompas” newspaper which published many feature articles about some local laws that are heavily influenced by Islamic fundamentalism, for example the prostitution law at Tangerang area. Another threat is the conglomeration of media. The media moguls can collude with the politicians, who can influence certain news to have a different angle or direction, or can even select which news to broadcast and which are not. This is a real threat that is facing the Indonesian media. We probably already have the freedom, but the question is freedom for whom? I don’t think we have freedom for the public since the media organizations still represent their capital holders’ interests and are still limited by their own fears. During the Gus Dur era, the media threat came from the people of Nahdatul Utama (NU) and Barisan Serba Guna (Banser), Gus Dur fanatic supporter groups. When Megawati was in power, the PDI (Indonesia Democrat Party) was the threat. Nowadays, the threats would come from certain organizations that don’t like certain types of news broadcasted. For example Trans TV broadcasted an infotainment program called “Celebrities Are Also Human”; in one episode, it featured a story on moral scandal of the head of PAN (National Mandate Party). The party then went and demonstrated to the Trans TV and demanded the program to be stopped from airing. Due to the high political pressure, the Trans TV management decided to stop airing that particular feature story.

ST: How are the direction and the situation of the Indonesia media right now? Is the media one of the effective tools in forming civil society?

Stanley: Yes, but media relatively has its own interests; there is investor’s interest for sure. We can observe grouping of ownerships within the existing 11 TV stations in Indonesia. TV7 that belonged to “Kompas” now joined Trans TV that belonged to the Golkar Party. Another example, TPI that was belonged to Tutut (President Soeharto’s daughter) joined with RCTI and TV Global. SCTV and Metro TV are currently still independent. I believe there will be 3 big groups at the end and there will more capital alliances in the future. If you asked me how the media future is, the future of Indonesian media will be facing difficult times if the journalists can’t be professional and independent. What needs to be done is creating unions at the work place. We are trying to do that and the effort is supported by IFJ (International Federation of Journalist) that is headquartered in Brussels. This hopefully can support and push Indonesia to start having professional unions that are more independent.

JW: There seems to be a lot of international interactions. Can you tell us a bit on how important international support is?

Stanley: International support is very important, because the Indonesian media is relatively very dependent on capital, the readers, ratings, and on numbers of subscriptions. What is needed is how to build alliances not only at the international level but also at the regional level. For example, we tried to form SEAPA (South East Asia Press Alliance). ISAI was founded by AJI. (Alliance of Independent Journalists). Currently some journalists’ organization from the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor Leste are joining us. What we are trying to do is to create a strong basis of support for the profession. In addition, we need to improve the knowledge and skills. Lately there have been numerous natural disasters in South East Asia like the tsunami and the earthquakes, while we didn’t have adequate methods on how to report disasters. Journalists were confused on how to report the tsunami disasters especially on the first and second day, how to access and gather data, thus we do trainings on how to report catastrophic/large-scale disasters. Besides, while Philippine has the biggest number of journalists’ killed, how can we help? We can try to push urgent action at the international level; we work together with SEAPA that can cry out to the international world to pressure the Philippine’s government to increase the safety of their journalists. At the international level, we also have connection with Committee to Project Journalist (CPJ) in the US and RSF (Reporter Sans Frontier, Reporter Without Border) in Paris. If there is a journalist that is killed or persecuted, the international world would put pressure to the government. It is really good, since politically it’s really hard for us to make movements from inside the country, but it will be easier for organizations outside of Indonesia. The same thing, if there are things going on in Thailand that endangered its journalists, all of us will put pressure to the Thai government and air our protests.

ST: So the motivation is solidarity?

Stanley: Yes, solidarity and also to give freedom for the journalists from the political pressure so that they can broadcast the objective factual news. The media’s duty is to maintain a public domain so that the people can know accurate information about its government.

ST: Mr. Stanley, could you share with us what are the urgencies in Indonesia right now?

Stanley: From my perspective, the first thing we need to do is to take care of poverty which level is staggering. Right now it is estimated that 60 million out of 230 million Indonesian people live under the poverty line and 80% of them probably live outside of Java Island. In Indonesia, we have varieties of social gaps: rich-poor, village-city, man-woman, Java-non Java, etc. If poverty isn’t taken care of, it will be a factor that can trigger a bigger “social bomb”. Another matter that we need to face is the uncertainty of the rule of law, including past human right violation cases that need to be resolved. How can we build the country if the process of social reconciliation doesn’t happen? Social reconciliation will be possible if the crimes are exposed by the State, just like what happened in South Africa. The third thing is how KKN (Corruption, Collusion, and Nepotism) can be decreased. KKN is so huge in our country, even though we already have several committee and organizations that are supposed to eliminate corruption. But as we can see, right now we only have selected corruptors that are in trial, not all of them. We need to exercise the law principle of “equal before the law”, that means any official no matter what his rank is should have the same position before the law like others. The fourth one is the destruction of natural environment that is happening rapidly. If we see some of the disasters that happened such as flash flood and other disasters, it is because our own failures in maintaining the forestry, such that illegal logging is happening widely and causes flash flood during rainy season. Another thing that we need to do is to have a reformation agenda in the structures that hold power and regulate weapons such as police, military, and intelligence agency. They need to be reformed. Because it can be considered zero progress, if after 8 years of reformation we tried to democratize the government but we haven’t been able to touch the intelligence agency. It is our opinion that the old intelligence methods of doing intimidations need to be stopped. In principle, intelligence cannot do self-tasking, it can only gather information, do the analysis, then submit the analysis to the end-user. The end-user, who is usually the president, then makes the final decision. In Indonesia, the intelligence can do self-tasking, capturing people on the street. The proper way is to let the district attorney, the police as the law and order officials to take actions, the intelligence should not.

JW: How is the social capital and social trust condition in Indonesia?

Stanley: If we are talking about social capital, I think it has collapsed, we have changed 4 presidents and not one of them can show a stronger social cohesion. All the social conflicts show how much suspicion we have with each other. The main thing from my perspective is to reduce the fundamentalism elements in the society and don’t give it a space in the Republic especially in the government, let it be only within the domestic domain. The public domain should be a place where everybody can feel safe to live as a citizen of the nation. There should not be any religious law that rules the public domain. In Indonesia now, we have some areas that are starting to implement Sharia Law within their Perda (Regional Law). Those laws try to rule all the general public’s life, which is very dangerous, because people in East Indonesia might wish to implement some sort of Christian laws, for example, no work on the Lord’s Day. It will be weird, it will be as if we’re going back to the middle ages, and there will be no ending war between the Moslems, Christians and Jewish. From my perspective, a country or government should be a secular institution not a religious institution, because only through it can pluralism be maintained and guarded by the country.

ST: Do you mean an example of secularism like in Europe or United States?

Stanley: Maybe like France, where in the public domain we can not talk about religion. You can freely practice your religion, but you can’t include it in the constitution.

ST: But I think there is a big difference, French people now are mostly not religious. It’s different from Indonesia context where most of the people are still religious.

Stanley: This is something that we have to maintain. I don’t want to be as extreme as French where people can’t wear too much of religious symbols such as Jilbab, Tazbeh, or too much Cross necklaces. I believe we should just let the pluralism flourishes but don’t force it on people. Don’t force all people to wear religious clothes, because this domain is a domestic domain. Let only the public domain be guarded by the government.

ST: If I could ask from your personal life, what are the challenges of becoming a journalist and activist?

Stanley: There are a lot of challenges but I think those challenges make my life very exciting. It is hard to not have a regular life in this modern age, everyone demands us to be regular, to have a fixed office hours. As an activist, I have a pretty good flexibility; the job, the deadline, and the agreements determine my schedule. Besides, as a journalist and researcher, I am given opportunities to travel all around Indonesia, meet a lot of different people, and write about them. All these are very extraordinary experience, something that I want to do until I die, since it is so interesting and challenging. Another real challenge is to divide the time with family. Because I travel a lot, my child sometimes blames me. So usually if I have some extra time, I take the family for a recreation time wherever they want.

ST: So from the personal side, it’s mostly hard to divide time with family?

Stanley: Yes, including the possibility of facing dangers. Family is one of the hardest considerations, should I sacrifice the family for something bigger. That is one of the things that I sometimes think about. For some stuffs, I asked my wife if she’s ready to face the consequences. On other times I need to make the necessary preparation to protect my family.

JW: Mr. Stanley do you have any messages for our readers who want to be in the media industry?

Stanley: I think Media is something that is strategic for the future. Message is power, who controls the media will actually control the future. The media situation in our country is still screwed up right now. So if there are friends who are interested to be in the media industry, they are potentially able to make significant contributions, specifically in improving the professionalism of the journalists.

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