On March 24-28, Sydney will host one of the most significant gatherings of left-wing leaders from Asia and the Pacific in some years. The Third Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference is being attended by activists from the Philippines to Indonesia, from New Zealand to Vietnam. One of the speakers, is the 74-year-old Joesef Isak, a journalist and left-wing intellectual who survived the brutal massacres of General Suharto in Indonesia in the 1960s. Conference organiser Max Lane explains some of Isak's extraordinary story.
Educated in the Dutch school system, Joesef Isak did not even speak Indonesian when he first saw independence leader Sukarno speak at a huge mass rally in 1943, when the Japanese were occupying Indonesia. He was deeply frustrated at not understanding how Sukarno could move so deeply tens of thousands of ordinary Indonesians.
A journalist, he quickly rose to be editor of Merdeka, one of Jakarta's main dailies. In 1959, he was elected almost unanimously to the presidency of the Jakarta branch of the Indonesian Journalists Association.
As the country's economic and political development stalled in the late 1950s, Isak became a more active supporter of Sukarno's policies of trying to build a self-reliant Indonesia. In 1962, Sukarno rejected the programs offered by the World Bank and told the US to "go to hell" with its aid.
Sacked as the Merdeka editor in 1962 for becoming to left-wing, Isak was quickly elected as secretary-general of the Asia-Africa Journalists Association, travelling to most parts of the "non-aligned" world. He believes it was the AAJA position that saved him in October, 1965 when General Suharto launched a successful coup, killing up to 1 million Sukarno supporters, and detaining hundreds of thousands of others.
Isak was detained several times during 1965 and 1967 in some unmarked army safehouse, but was always released after a short time, and was not tortured (there were so many prisoners, that those released quickly had generally not been gotten around to yet).
He once told me how the prisoners helped each other deal with the experience of torture. The key thing, he said, was for people to realise that no matter how bad the pain became, the chances are that you would not die in these safe houses. Nobody wanted to have to yield to the pain of being whipped with spiked edge of a dried eel, or of being burnt by cigarette butts or worse horrors and give the names of other comrades and friends. Medicines and bandages were the most needed materiel to help prisoners returning from an interrogation session.
In 1968, Isak was finally taken into permanent detention, and he spent the next 10 years in Salemba prison in Jakarta, not being sent to Baru island prison because he was not considered a member of the Communist Party. During his imprisonment in Salemba, his intense personal charm — noticeable when you meet him — earned him a weekly conversation session with one of the more intellectually pretentious guards. After their conversation, the officer would leave some newspapers on the desk, which Isak would avidly read (reading matter was banned in the prison).
Isak would then have the task of recounting the information to the other prisoners. Later — with the aid of his wife and prisoners sent outside prison to throw out rubbish — magazines such as Time would be smuggled in to him to read overnight. Light was no problem — the lights were left on overnight so the guards could see the no-one was escaping. He read them through the night. In the morning, his cellmates turned the magazines into paper mache. He would then write out in tiny script on cigarette paper a summary of what he read, which would then be circulated from cell to cell.
In this way, he "reported" on the US defeat in Vietnam; the growing anti-war movement around the world; the development of women's liberation movements; and the consolidation of the Suharto dictatorship, as well as the defeated student protest movements that shook Jakarta in 1974.
Isak was released in 1977. Two years later, Indonesia's great author Pramoedya Ananta Toer and journalist Hasyim Rachman were among 12,000 prisoners released from the Baru island prison. Isak and Rachman had known each other from the Indonesian Journalist Association, and in 1980 Rachman brought Pramoedya, who had edited the cultural pages of Rachman's Eastern Star newspaper, to meet Isak. Pramoedya and Rachman explained that they intended to set up a publishing company, which would publish writings Pramoedya had smuggled out of prison. Isak agreed to join them in founding Hasta mitra.
Pramoedya's This Earth of Mankind was published in 1981. It is difficult to convey the impact its appearance had. I cannot think of any other case in any country of how a historical novel, set decades before the time of its publication, could have such an impact. It was set at turn of the century in Java, and told of a romance between a teenage Javanese boy, from an elite aristocratic background, and a young Eurasian girl that violated racist colonial laws.
There was no obvious satire of the Suharto regime or hidden comment on contemporary Indonesia. But it was the beginning of a straight, but brilliant and evocative, explanation of why a generation of young people turned away from the cultures of their past and the social class from which they came and began a search for something altogether new. Three more volumes of the story were published over the next six years.
As the book was universally hailed, Isak and Rachman were caught in a whirlwind. Isak's living room was swallowed up by Hasta Mitra's secretariat. Twenty other former political prisoners, many desperate for an income, worked as staff in the lounge-room office. There were cartons of books everywhere. And more former political prisoners came in and out asking for books that they could sell door-to-door. The back rooms were used as a warehouse, and a disused bathroom became home to Indonesia's first typesetting machine. This room, which came to symbolise Isak for those who know him, was to host so many lessons on Indonesian history and politics.
Today, the old typesetting machine has gone, replaced by two old Apple macs and a PC. The room's floor has been tiled, there is stronger light and air conditioning. In that tiny room, about 2.5 metres by 5 metres, Isak and one aide, Subowo, have typed out, laid out, edited and sub-edited more than 25 of Pramoedya's major works, as well as scores and scores of other books. Isak still works out of the same office today, and still publishes books every year. There are
no pensions for former political prisoners, and the repeated banning of Hasta Mitra's books always meant that there was never any real profit for Hasta Mitra either.
In 1981, however, producing manuscripts was the least of Isak's problems. The universal praise protected the publisher from Suharto's attacks at first — the vice-president, Adam Malik, even had a photo session with Isak, Rachman and Pramoedya in his palace, urging school children to read the book. But, little more than a week later, the black propaganda began. A newspaper published a petition signed by a 17 mainly unknown intellectuals and writers claiming that This Earth of Mankind was communist. Others joined the campaign against the book. Both Rachman and Isak were summoned by the attorney-general's department.
Isak bore the brunt of the interrogations, having to report to the attorney-general every day, from early morning till knock-off time, for a month. An attorney interrogated him for hours on end about the contents of the books and about Pramoedya. "What has Pramoedya written?" the attorney asked, exasperating Isak with the level of ignorance that the New Order created. Pramoedya was one of the country's most well-known writers from the 1940s to the 1960s.
In October, 1980 about two months after This Earth of Mankind was published, a formal ban was issued. Isak tells of how he first heard about the ban from an announcement on radio and TV. There was no order sent to the publishers. So Hasta Mitra just kept on publishing until a formal order arrived on October 23, stating that the book was being banned for conveying Marxist-Leninist teachings. These specific teachings were not identified, it explained, as Pramoedya's great writing skills meant the Marxist ideas had been successfully disguised.
This Earth of Mankind had been reprinted five times during the four months since it was released. A sixth printing was not possible. But Hasta Mitra did not end its struggle then. Over the next five years, they would scrape money together and publish another volume, which would be banned soon after. And then another, and then another. By the late 1980s, the repeated banning was financially exhausting the company.
During this period, Isak became, as far as I have ever heard, the only political prisoner from his generation to be re-detained after release. His son, a student at the University of Indonesia, invited Pramoedya to speak on campus. The university authorities responded by expelling Isak's son and three other students. Isak was also detained for four months while he was investigated for being the "puppet-master" behind the event. After release, he got back to the business of publishing Pramoedya's work again.
Hasta Mitra, still working out of the bathroom, remains one of Indonesia's most important publishers, now concentrating on publishing books to rewin a sense of Indonesia's history after the falsifications of the Suharto era.
Joesoef Isak's story, which still needs telling in the full, is part of a much bigger untold story, the story of the other Indonesia, the one Suharto literally buried, and which people like Joesoef Isak and the younger generation for whom Hasta Mitra has become an icon of resistance to authoritianism, are now trying to recover.
Hasta Mitra has just published the first Indonesian translation of Karl Marx's Capital, and an 800-page translation of CIA and US State department documents relating to the 1965 mass murders.
[Isak will also be a guest at a function hosted by PEN Sydney during his visit.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 23, 2005.
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