Indonesian PRD resumes open campaigning
By a special correspondent in Jakarta and Max Lane
On March 21, the People's Democratic Party (PRD) organised a series a public meetings in several Indonesian cities to proclaim that it was back in full fighting spirit following its suppression by the Suharto dictatorship in 1996.
The PRD has been organising as an essentially underground organisation since July 1996, when many of its leaders were arrested and the regime ordered the arrest of all "PRD personnel".
The PRD recruited and organised clandestinely, its influence being felt in the campaign activities of a myriad of local action committees on campuses, in factory areas or poor squatter areas. The PRD has been formally legal since a lower court lifted the ban on it in September 1998, citing a technical deficiency in the banning order, and the regime announced that it would accept the court's decision.
Since then, the PRD has been restructuring its organisation to take advantage of legality. During February, it established new open provincial branch offices in 14 provinces and in numerous district branches in each province.
As a result, it was also able to secure registration as a participant in the coming June general elections.
The March 21 meetings were organised to declare the PRD back in business as a national legal political party.
More than 1000 people crowded the 400-seat hall in a Jakarta main street for the national relaunch. The meeting overwhelmingly comprised young people, almost half women.
These were the activists and cadre of the PRD from the Jakarta area, including the industrial belt on the western outskirts. They were mostly students, workers and urban poor. To symbolise the social base of the PRD, there was a symbolic swearing in of one representative each of the workers' sector, the university student sector and the high school student sector.
In a speech by the chairperson of the Central Leadership Council, Faisal Resa, the PRD reaffirmed its perspective of struggle for democracy and social change through the organisation and mobilisation of popular power.
"The PRD will continue to choose mass action as its method of struggle, because it was mass action that toppled the Suharto dictatorship, giving the people a sense of confidence and a belief that they have an energy that cannot be defeated."
Resa himself was involved in organising students at the University of Indonesia until he was kidnapped in March 1998. He was kept in an unknown safe house for several weeks and severely tortured with beatings, electric shocks to all parts of his body and cigarette burns
"Parliament," said Resa, "is for us by no means the only place of struggle. It is among the people in the factories, villages, mountains, campuses, forests and even in the prisons that the 'real parliament' must be built."
According to Resa, the role of the PRD in a new "not yet democratic" parliament would be to expose the impotence of this parliament, dominated as it would be by elements of the old regime as well as "democrats famous for their willingness to compromise and to be won to concessions to the old regime".
"We will be critical of the 'big and rich parties' who use the parliament just for careers or as a means to executive power for the sake of power", he said.
Resa emphasised that the new parliament would also be compromised from the start by the presence of 38 unelected armed forces representatives and that any compromising attitude to their presence would be the same as legitimising a political role for the military.
PRD Central Leadership Council secretary Ida Nashim read out a speech from jailed PRD chairperson Budiman Sujatmiko, which was addressed to PRD cadre. Budiman also emphasised the mass action perspective of the PRD.
He went on to remind PRD cadre that the party's perspective for the future period is not only the struggle for democratic reform but also "social transformation".
"Popular social democracy is a form of war against exploitation of some human beings by others, either in the form of capital's exploitation of labour or the exploitation that arises from patriarchal domination. We can achieve this aim only through democratic forms of struggle, which requires a system of popular multiparty democracy. So we do not need just [political] reform but also a struggle to establish more just social relations.
"We will call for a social transformation in the life of Indonesian society, so that there is no longer a concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. We will not accept a situation where the freedom provided under democracy only benefits the forces of capital in dominating every aspect of the mental and material life of the people."
Budiman also attacked those who tried to paint the process of democratisation as an aspect of so-called "globalisation": "This is usually accompanied by the call for international capital to be able to enter this country freely. The PRD is not anti-foreign capital, but the PRD will oppose any flow of capital into the country that is not subject to the control of the Indonesian people. We have seen during the last 32 years how this freedom for foreign capital has caused suffering for the people.
"Furthermore, the uncontrolled expansion of foreign capital has also resulted in the massive exploitation of natural resources and has caused great damage to the environment."
Budiman explained that popular social democracy as a perspective enveloping commitment to defence of multiparty democracy, struggle for change through mass action and a commitment to social transformation ending the domination of capital is "democratic socialism".
The March 21 public meeting also involved the swearing in of a high profile new member who symbolised the continuity of the PRD's struggle with the radical tradition in Indonesian politics before the military seizure of power in 1965: the revolutionary intellectual and writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, now 72 years old.
Pramoedya was a guerilla fighter against the Dutch in the 1940s and then at the forefront of anti-imperialist campaigning during the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the period of rapid expansion of the Indonesian Communist Party.
He was kidnapped and detained by the military in 1959 for his defence of the Chinese community in Indonesia. Then in 1965 he was detained as part of the massive purge of revolutionaries and worker and peasant radicals organised by Suharto. He was thrown in the notorious Buru Island prison camp, where about 15,000 workers, peasants and intellectuals were forced, under military guard, to eke out their own existence in the infertile land of the island.
Despite beatings, torture and imprisonment for 15 years and threats of more imprisonment, he refused to comply with a ban on his writing after his release in 1979 and started publishing revolutionary novels. They were immediately banned but have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has been nominated now several times for the Nobel prize for literature.
In his speech, he expressed his total confidence in the PRD, indicating his respect for its courage and stating his pride at being among a party whose leaders had been jailed or kidnapped and were still continuing the struggle.
"You are of the left", he told the 1000 young cadre, "that is, you side with the people, those in the lower [economic] stratum of society. This is good, because for so long they have been just the playthings of the elite, except during the Old Order [1959-65] when there were political forces standing beside the people. The fall of the Old Order meant that the people and the country became loot for multinational capitalism working together with the national elite as their guard dogs."
At the public meeting, the PRD read out or announced greetings from individuals and organisations outside Indonesia. These included the East Timorese nationalist youth organisation, RENETIL, the recently formed Timorese Socialist Party (PST) and the Free Papua Movement.
Greetings were also announced from Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET), Resistance, the New Zealand Alliance, Malaysian People's Party, Socialist Democracy Group of Britain, Labour Party of Pakistan, Socialist Party of Labour in the Philippines, Socialist Party of the Netherlands and the Socialist Workers Party of the Netherlands. Democratic Socialist Party member Samuel King read a solidarity message from the DSP.