Media spotlight on a socialist
By Margaret Allum
The newspapers of the establishment do, from time to time, cover the activities of those fighting against the system that the rich and powerful uphold. Occasionally, the media even interview them.
But rarely is an interview published which refrains from belittling either the political cause or the sanity of those dubbed "the looney left" by most from the Murdoch, Packer and Fairfax school of journalism.
So I was pleased and refreshed (and a little surprised!) to read a four-page feature article in the Good Weekend, the Sydney Morning Herald's Saturday magazine, on April 22 about the political relationship between Indonesia's greatest living writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Max Lane, chairperson of Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET) and a leader of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).
The article, entitled "The dissident and the diplomat", written by Nikki Barrowclough, describes the first meeting between the two men in Jakarta in 1980 and what followed. "When a young, idealistic Australian meets a courageous Indonesian radical with terrible stories to tell, his life is changed forever", the story begins.
Lane was then the second secretary of the Australian embassy in Jakarta and Pramoedya, only a few months out of prison, was still under state surveillance.
By the time of their meeting, Lane had already started to question the relationship between the Australian and Indonesian governments, and the cooperative good relations his government seemed determined to uphold. Already keenly interested in Indonesian politics, Lane wanted to learn more about the nature of the Indonesian regime from someone who knew of its violence and brutality firsthand.
Pramoedya had been a well-known writer and a leader of a left-wing cultural group affiliated to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). In 1965, when Suharto seized power in a military coup and began a mass liquidation of the PKI and the Indonesian left, Pramoedya was arrested and sent to the prison island of Buru for 14 years.
There, in the midst of a bitter struggle to survive, he was able to write the "Buru quartet" — This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass — which was banned under Suharto but, once published, earned him considerable acclaim, even a possible Nobel nomination.
Lane offered to translate these works into English, in the hope of getting Pramoedya's story out to the world — a task which was to cost him his posting in Jakarta and any hope of a future career in the diplomatic service.
By then, Lane says he'd become thoroughly disillusioned with the diplomatic corps in any case, especially after overhearing his ambassador, Rawdon Dalrymple, remark to the Indonesian minister for education and culture that they had to work out some way of silencing Indonesia's critics in Australia.
Dalrymple vehemently denies this, saying Lane "has spent his whole life denigrating the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian foreign policy" (is that an insult?).
Barrowclough and her editors allow Lane a space rarely granted to speak about radical politics. After his recall to Canberra, "I probably would have resigned anyway", Lane says, "because the whole experience with Pramoedya in Indonesia during that period had a big impact on my political consciousness. One of the first things I did when I got back was to very quickly become active in the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia. You could say that Pramoedya indirectly recruited me."
There is even a recognition of the importance of international solidarity work, carried out by Lane and many others like him, to the eventual overthrow of Suharto and the end of the occupation of East Timor.
Lane has been a founder of successive solidarity groups — the Campaign Against Repression in the Pacific and Asia (CARPA), AKSI (the Indonesian word for "action") and now ASIET — and a pioneer of Western contacts with Indonesia's re-emergent left, particularly the People's Democratic Party (PRD).
One of Barrowclough's interviewees, film-maker Gil Scrine, describes him as "one of the unsung heroes of the revolution".
A rare plaudit indeed from the mainstream press: socialists who are no longer sinister and obsessive but ordinary people who, together with others, manage to achieve extraordinary things.
[Pramoedya Ananta Toer will be touring Australia in November. Contact ASIET on (02) 9690 1230 for details. His books are available from Resistance Bookshops, details on page 13.]