The 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and the Creative Communication Arts

BIOGRAPHY of Atmakusuma Astraatmadja

Like most Indonesians, Atmakusumah Astraatmadja was given only one name, Atmakusumah, when he was born on October 20, 1938. Astraatmadja is not his surname, but the name of his paternal grandfather. When Atma was a very young boy, he was called Adam, after the first prophet of Islam. He does not remember exactly when his name was changed to Adang, which was actually a nickname. When he was in second grade, however, his father told him he would be given a new name - Atmakusumah. The first two syllables were derived from his maternal grandfather's name, Atmadiwirija, and his father added Kusumah. The boy's school name thus became Atmakusumah.

Years later, as a young man who was traveling abroad for the first time and needed a surname to write on his immigration form, he adopted his paternal grandfather's name, Astraatmadja. Both his names, Atmakusumah and Astraatmadja, are of Indian origin. His wife, Sri Rumiati, a librarian by profession, has advised him that as a writer he should stick to the name he has been using since the beginning of his journalism career, so as not to confuse indexers.

Atma's family is from the Province of Banten in West Java. His father, Junus Astraatmadja, was from the northern part of the province, where the culture is Javanese, his mother, Ratu Kartina, from the south, where the culture is Sundanese. Both his parents belonged to the priyayi, Java's governing aristrocracy. Ratu Kartina's family in Rangkasbitung owned vast ricelands and her name, Ratu Kartina, is in fact a title of nobility. Atma himself has a noble title but has never used it.

His father belonged to a long line of bupati, or regents, who governed Java's populous districts. They were considered as small kings, or fathers, who had direct communication with their people, and so had to be wise. Junus was a career official, a pamong praja, who began as a government clerk during the Dutch colonial period and who later rose through a series of posts.

At the age of fifty, at a time when Indonesia was newly independent, Junus chose to retire because he did not like the political system and the politicization of the civil service. He believed that members of the pamong praja, as civil servants, should remain objective, neutral, and independent despite political changes. Otherwise, he reasoned, if one became affiliated with the party in power, how could one be expected to be a wise father? Upon retirement, he went into private life and never encouraged any of his sons to follow in his footsteps.

Atma remembers his father as a man of high principles. He recalls that when he was in first grade the Japanese military leaders arrived in Muncang and ordered Junus, who was chief of the remote mountainous subdistrict, to collect rice and send it to the kabupaten, the capital of the regency of Rangkasbitung. Junus refused to obey and, instead, insisted that he be allowed to keep the rice in Muncang. He believed that with the war ending and the Japanese position already unstable, it was wiser to keep emergency food supplies in the subdistrict. He built a long warehouse in a soccer field for the rice. True enough, when the Japanese surrendered to the Allied forces, Junus had a supply of rice to distribute among his people. He had been vindicated.

When the war ended, he evacuated his family one evening, bringing nothing except the clothes on their backs. They were careful not to alert the people to their departure, for they were afraid of being attacked. Months before the war ended, his uncle, a wedana or district chief, had been killed by his own people; there were rumors that other pamong praja had been killed, or at least harassed and molested for having served the Japanese.

But Junus need not have feared. After Indonesia won its independence, the people of South Banten asked him to return and so he was rewarded with the higher position of chief of Leuwidamar district, which oversees the subdistrict Muncang. The grateful people of Muncang came, bringing Junus' family furniture and other possessions that they had kept intact. That day the young Atma learned a precious lesson: to become a leader you must be loved by your people.

Junus and Ratu Kartina had six children, all of them male. Atma was son number five. His parents had an arranged marriage and Atma recalls his mother telling him that she did not love her husband at first. But the bond between them became so strong over time that after Junus died in 1987 Ratu Kartina's spirit seemed to have joined him. She passed away that same year.

Atma says he was closer to his father than he was to his mother. His mother agreed, saying he was his father's rather than his mother's son, an unusual thing in Indonesia where children, whether male or female, usually grow up being closer to their mothers.

Junus was a gentle and generous man who never sent people in need away. Ratu Kartina was the disciplinarian, the strict leader of the household who attended to repairs around the house and often did them herself. She also held the family's purse strings. An entrepreneur even before her marriage, she ran her own trading company. She would buy basic items in Jakarta and sell them in Rangkasbitung where the family lived. She also had a shop that sold textiles and other merchandise.

Junus and Ratu Kartina were not particularly religious, but like good Bantenese families, they observed prayer times and other Islamic practices. Unlike many other Indonesian families, though, they did not force their children to participate in religious rituals. They did, however, encourage their sons to learn about Islam and to learn the Arabic language. In the evenings they sent all except the youngest boy to a small mosque where, along with other children in the community, they learned how to read the Qur'an. In the afternoon after school, they would go to a special government school to learn religion and Arabic. From his parents, who spoke to each other in Dutch, Atma learned to speak a little of the colonial masters' language.

Atma's first school was a government-run institution in Serang, now the capital of Banten province. As it was wartime when he entered school, Atma learned to speak some Japanese in kindergarten. But the lessons were conducted in both Indonesian and Sundanese (the local language was used in elementary school, in addition to Indonesian). The Japanese encouraged the learning of the vernacular languages because they did not want children to learn Dutch. From Serang, Junus was transferred to Muncang subdistrict until the end of World War II.

After the war Junus was assigned to Leuwidamar, and then to Balaraja, still as district chief. Unlike most other parts of the country, Balaraja in Banten was under the Republic of Indonesia, which nationalist leaders had proclaimed in August 1945. In 1948, during the revolutionary war that followed, the region came under Dutch control and his father escaped into the jungle and joined the nationalist forces. He was with his father in Balaraja at the time, while his mother and brothers had gone to live with his maternal grandparents in Rangkasbitung weeks before. Before slipping away, Junus entrusted Atma to a visiting family and asked that the boy be taken to Rangkasbitung.

Junus was soon captured and jailed. Atma no longer remembers how long his father remained in prison. But upon his release Junus was returned to his post in Balaraja and Atma rejoined him there. His father had lost everything he owned-letters, documents, even his son's birth certificate.

From Balaraja his father was assigned to Curug, another district further to the east, while Atma, who was still in the fifth grade, was sent off to Tangerang to stay with family friends. It was the first time he was separated from both his parents. Maybe, he surmises now, his father wanted him to go to a better school, Tangerang being a bigger city, the capital of a regency bordering the national capital city of Jakarta.

The following year he was sent away to Jakarta. His parents had bought a house there for their children. Atma recalls that he had difficulty entering the sixth grade because he did not have a report card, only a piece of paper from the headmaster stating that he was good at drawing and arithmetic and penmanship. While he was in Banten, his school used slate, not paper, which was difficult to procure. His third brother, who was already living in Jakarta, wanted him to attend a prominent Dutch Catholic school. But he was not accepted there.

Despite his lack of proper credentials, however, he was allowed to join his brother at Taman Siswa, a private school known for its emphasis on nationalism and patriotism. To go on to a junior high school other than their own, public school students in Indonesia had to pass a government examination, while those in private schools like Taman Siswa were required to take only the examination in their own school. Atma chose to take both examinations and was one of only four students at Taman Siswa who passed the state-administered test.

Atma's peripatetic childhood and education did not seem to hinder his development. He saw little of his older brothers, who lived away from home. His parents did not supervise his studies, leaving him largely to himself. But his father liked to take him along on his visits to the villages. He remembers that he would cry when he was left behind at home.

From Taman Siswa Atma moved to a government junior high school, or Sekolah Menengah Pertama (SMP), and then high school, Sekolah Menengah Atas (SMA) in Jakarta. Government-run schools were considered better than most private schools, except for those run by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. The medium of instruction at the SMP and SMA was Bahasa Indonesia although students also had to learn local languages. Once a week they would have English lessons, as well. Having opted to take what was called the A (literary) Department in senior high school, Atma had to learn five languages: Indonesian, Classical Javanese, English, German and French.

He did not distinguish himself in academics in senior high school, preferring to be active in campus organizations. While still in second year, he became chief editor of the senior high school magazine Siswa (Student). He was also the deputy manager of the school library.

Books were a passion he shared with his second brother, who was a voracious reader. As a young boy, Atma had discovered comic books about the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and picture books for children.

As he grew older, he graduated to novels by foreign writers. He particularly liked Hector Mallot, a popular French writer at the time and author of The Adventure of a Small Child. In senior high school he began reading Shakespeare in Indonesian translations and other fare such as the Indonesian works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Idrus, the adventure and travel books of Karl May, and the translated novels and short stories of Gorky, Pasternak, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Maupassant, and Balzac. He also read Hemingway, Steinbeck and Darwin, but found the Italian Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine unforgettable. Its theme, the difference between fighting with one's fists and fighting with one's mind, is one that Atma says he still integrates into his articles today. In 1998, when demonstrations rocked Indonesia prior to the fall of President Soeharto, Atma would tell his students how he preferred the peaceful exercise of people power to violent protest. Up till now, he keeps many of these old literary books in the family library, for his children to read.

Atma was still a junior when he began writing articles for magazines outside of school, mostly about his travels, such as to Bali and to West Sumatra to visit his friends and eldest brother. Wanting to become a literary writer, he tried his hand at short stories, usually about poor people, inspired by his childhood visits to the villages with his father. He also wrote articles for news magazines and other types of publications about well-known figures like Shakespeare, Karl Marx, and Jose Rizal, the Philippine national hero. He tried submitting his short stories to Kisah (Stories), a literary magazine, but these were rejected. Some of the stories and his light articles, however, saw print in other magazines. His articles earned him some welcome pocket money. One day he told his mother she could reduce his allowance since he had as honorarium of his own. Even as a school boy he craved independence from his family.

These were turbulent times in Indonesian politics. Although independence had been achieved in 1949, political stability eluded the young nation as separatist movements and armed rebellions erupted in various areas. But Atma had not yet begun to feel the stirrings of nationalism. He was too busy trying to become a writer.

In 1957, when Atma was in senior high school, he gathered all his articles about prominent world figures and interested a publisher in compiling them into a book. A friend of his, a communist sympathizer with whom he often debated communism, provided illustrations. The publisher hoped to use the material for a supplementary textbook with funding from the Ministry of Education. Atma was told that he would have to take out the piece on Karl Marx. He refused, arguing that his article was an objective critique of Marxism. Atma states that while he has never liked communism because of its use of force and terror to impose itself, he does like Marx. The book was never published (and his articles were never returned).

After high school in 1958, Atma landed a job as a junior reporter in the Minggu Indonesia Raya, the weekend edition of the daily Indonesia Raya published by Mochtar Lubis. The Minggu had only a three-person staff, the youngest of whom was Atma. He wrote light features and occasional film reviews.

Occasionally he would attend meetings at the home of Lubis, who was then under house detention. When Lubis won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism in 1958, Atma went to the Philippine Embassy to conduct research on the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. His article, which quoted from Lubis's acceptance speech at the awarding ceremonies held in Manila, did not sit well with the Indonesian military police. Soon after the story was published, the police visited the Indonesia Raya offices and Atma learned later that they had asked the paper to discontinue the report on Lubis' award. Atma had planned to write an even longer piece about it.

October 1958 saw the closure of both Indonesia Raya and its weekend edition. The Soekarno regime had banned the hard-hitting daily six times already, and the publisher thought the paper could not survive in such a climate. Two of its three shareholders wanted to change its editorial policy to a neutral rather than critical stance vis-à-vis the government. Lubis, the third shareholder, was prepared to leave the paper in order to save it, but his staff was opposed to any change in policy and indicated they would leave along with him. Lubis decided to fire his staff so that they would qualify for separation pay. They actually got their money, Atma recalls with some amusement, because the cashier was among their few supporters in the business department.

In truth the "fired" staff was able to publish one more issue; that day, two Indonesia Rayas came out-one produced by the two shareholders, the other by Lubis and his staff. But without a military permit, Lubis could go no further. Indonesia Raya survived for only three months without him, as readers and agents dropped away. The people wanted Lubis or nothing.

Atma was unemployed for a whole year. Then, in late 1959, he found himself a job at Persbiro Indonesia (PIA News Agency), whose editor in chief was Adinegoro, one of the founding fathers of the modern Indonesian press. He also enrolled in the Graduate School of Journalism at Perguruan Tinggi Publisistik (College of Mass Communications), where he was later chairman of the student senate. Outside the university he was a member of the Ikatan Mahasiswa Djakarta, or Jakarta Students Association, which campus cynics derisively called Ikatan Mahasiswa Dansa or Dancing Students Association because its members were fond of Western-style dances. There were other more political student organizations at the time, including communist and other leftwing ones, but Atma just wanted to have fun. "I was not very politicized," he admits.

During this period (1960-1961), Atma wrote short pieces for the government-controlled Radio Republik Indonesia's broadcasts on science and the arts, as well as commentaries on art and culture. One day he asked a friend of his, a regular contributor, if he could also try broadcasting. In no time he was given a chance to read his friend's commentary, but, to his astonishment, without first going through a proper training. He must have done badly in reading his commentary because then nothing came of it.

Some time later he met the same friend who asked him if he had claimed his honorarium for his effort. No, Atma replied, and added it was because he wasn't given a chance to go on air again. He then struck a deal with his friend: he would take the honorarium if he could have another crack at broadcasting. A few weeks later his wish was granted and the event helped to change his life and career.

For many years, along with many other young Indonesians, Atma had been listening to Radio Australia, particularly its music stations. Much of Western music, which Soekarno dismissed as ngak-ngik-ngok (noisy music), was banned in Indonesia. Local rock and roll musicians like the Koes Brothers had been sent to prison. But it was not for its musical programs alone that Atma loved Radio Australia; he also admired its critical handling of news reports.

He decided he wanted to move to Australia.

"I wanted to see other parts of the world," he explains in retrospect. Then, too, he was beginning to find the political situation intolerable. The turning point for him was a frustrating experience he had at the Duta Minggu, the weekend edition of the daily Duta Masyarakat (Society's Ambassador), a publication of the largest Islamic social and political organization Nahdlatul Ulama, where he worked part-time while studying at the university.

A senior editor (and high-school friend), humorous columnist Mahbub Djunaidi, had placed him in charge of the weekend edition. One day the military command of Jakarta ordered the paper to discontinue one of its columns on the film industry, for no other reason than that they did not like it. Too late. In his rush to replace the column with something more acceptable, Atma had time only to remove its title and the author's pen name. The offending column was published and the paper received a second warning, more threatening than the first: "The next time, you will be dead."

It was a reality check for Atmakusumah the aspiring journalist. He asked the opinion of the same editor if he should leave the country. "Personally, I don't want you to leave this paper," he said. "But, if I were you," he continued, "I would go."

An Indonesian daily carried an ad for a job in Australia. Atma applied but was turned down. Six months later he received a telegram asking if he was still interested. His answer was an unwavering yes.

It would be a first in his family, a son leaving the country. His eldest brother, heftier than he, gave him a jacket several sizes too big as a going-away present. In 1961 Atma left for Melbourne. Waiting for him there was a job as an announcer in the Indonesian section of Radio Australia, the overseas department of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC).

There was at this time in Melbourne a sizable Indonesian community of students and professionals, including evacuees from Indonesia during World War II. But Atma met all kinds of people there. His first home was a rented room in the house of a kindly old Jewish-British woman and her son. His second landlady was a Hungarian Jew; the third, from whom he rented an entire house, was a Polish Jew. From all of them he learned that human beings are all the same. "There are bad people and there are good people everywhere," he says. Even today he gives his students this gentle reminder: "Please don't use stereotypes when describing people."

For three years at Radio Australia he read news and commentary about Indonesia, some of it critical including "facts about Soekarno and his family and about corruption." Later he was allowed to write his own reports on such subjects as gold mining, lifestyles, Australian football, and horse races. He also played long-playing records on air. Living in Australia he felt homesick and guilty when he thought about the difficult economic conditions he had left behind. He was now eating well-he could buy meat and eggs, for instance-while back home one fried egg would have to be shared by four or five people, even in his own middle-class family.

From Australia, still wanting to see more of the world, he decided to move on to Europe. It took one month to travel from Melbourne to Genova by a passenger ship. He spent a month in Italy, where he hitchhiked for two weeks before buying himself a Vespa scooter; he then moved on to Switzerland for two weeks and then a month in France. He visited many of the historic places he had read about in his youth, among them the birthplaces of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, and Beethoven. All this leisurely traveling left him broke and unable to return to Indonesia as he had intended. He ended up in Cologne, West Germany, where his skills as an announcer landed him a job in the Indonesian section of Deutsche Welle (Radio Germany). Ten months later, he had saved enough money to go home by boat.

He returned to Indonesia in mid-1965, not much richer than when he left. But he had enriched his knowledge of the world and his understanding of human nature. He had only one regret: that he had not visited America. (Atma says he passed the opportunity by because he was homesick.)

During all the years he was away, he had remained in close contact with his homeland as a freelance correspondent for Persbiro Indonesia and later the Antara News Agency. (In 1962, while he was in Australia, the government merged all Indonesian news agencies into Antara.) When he came home, he found that he would not easily fit in at Antara. Many of its editorial staff members were either leftists or outright communists; they were suspicious of his seemingly pro-West leanings and "neocolonial" ways, such as displaying the Vespa scooter stickers he had collected all over Europe.

He had to wait for about three months for Antara to accept him in an editorial position. On October 1, 1965, his first day at the office, he found the staff huddled in a meeting. It was the day after the 30 September Movement, a coup attempt in which several senior generals were murdered. Major General Soeharto, head of the army's Strategic Reserve Command, swiftly crushed the movement and pinned blame on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The failed coup led to the downfall of Soekarno and to Soeharto's assumption of the presidency. Even today, Atma is not sure what really happened, but he believes that "the communist party was just a victim of the struggle to oust Soekarno. We were victims of a coup war."

For the next two years as Soeharto's New Order took hold, the military hunted down and killed Indonesian communists as well as those merely suspected of being communist. Thousands of others were either fired from their jobs or jailed without benefit of trial. Some were exiled to Buru Island in East Indonesia. Journalists were not spared. Adam Schwarz, in his book A Nation in Waiting writes: "In 1965-66, about a quarter of Indonesia's 160 or so newspapers were shut down because of alleged communist links and hundreds of journalists were arrested." (On the other hand, non-communist journalists who had been peremptorily arrested by Soekarno's former government, such as Mochtar Lubis, were now released.)

During a reporting trip to Surabaya in East Java, Atma learned about bodies floating in the rivers in the wake of the massive anti-communist pogrom. It is a story he can't forget. Nor can he forget the sufferings of the children of communist and leftwing families under Soeharto's New Order who were deprived of a bright future because the country's universities no longer accepted them and even private companies shunned them; nor were they allowed to become civil servants or join the military. Atma felt powerless in the face of injustices such as these and yet also deplored the inaction of citizens who might have done something, including himself.

Atma's first assignment at Antara News Agency was in the domestic news section of the English edition. He called it the innocent section, since most of his job consisted of translating already censored items from the domestic news section into English. After that he was moved to the national news section, the core of the news agency, where about ten out of a dozen editors had either been fired or jailed following the 1965 coup for their connections with leftwing or communist organizations. In his next position as chief of the foreign affairs desk, he trained the agency's newcomers. His last assignment at Antara was as news-reporting coordinator, or chief of reporters.

In 1968, upon learning that Indonesia Raya would resume publication, Atma left Antara to return to Indonesia Raya as chief reporter. In 1973 he took a three-month leave to attend a senior editors' course at the Editorial Study Centre in Cardiff, Wales. While there, he was offered the post of managing editor of Indonesia Raya. He accepted, and upon his return from Cardiff became responsible for the paper's day-to-day operations.

Two years into his stint at Indonesia Raya, he decided it was about time to think about getting married. Atma was thirty-two when he befriended Sri Rumiati, the chief librarian at Indonesia Raya, and in March 1970, six months after they were first acquainted, they were married. Sri resigned from Indonesia Raya because Atma did not relish the idea of sharing an office with a relative, much less his wife. She found herself another job at the Military History Center of the Armed Forces. Following the births of two sons within two years, Sri decided to go back to the University of Indonesia, because, Atma explains, in Indonesia "a diploma is very precious," particularly for women who have to compete with men for jobs.

A third son was born to the couple while Sri was still at the university. She and Atma had agreed that when she had finished her studies, it would be his turn. In the meantime, he was the supportive husband who took their three young children to the beach for a week so that Sri could have the peace and quiet she needed to work on her thesis. He is proud to say that he was always a hands-on father who shared the responsibilities of parenting and house chores equally with Sri, despite the presence of a pembantu (servant).

Atma and Sri agreed early in their marriage that all their children would have to leave Jakarta after senior high school so that they could learn to be independent. They sent the boys a regular allowance, along with the reminder to save their money except for two items-food and books. Today all three are productive citizens. The eldest, Kresnahutama, finished international relations at the Parahiyangan University in Bandung and now works in a production house in Singapore. The second, Rama Ardana, is completed a degree in forestry and established a nongovernmental organization with his friends called Aliansi Relawan untuk Penyelamatan Alam (ARuPA, Alliance of Volunteers to Rescue Nature); it offers training in forestry management to villagers in Central and East Java. The third son, Tri Laksmana, studied astronomy at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

In the early 1970s, Atma still held positive views of President Soeharto and his New Order. After all, the former general had liberalized the press. But, as Schwarz writes, "as the press became increasingly critical of the New Order's social and economic policies, the government's resistance to criticism likewise began to grow. An independent press came to be seen as an unwanted and culturally misplaced Western import."

In 1973, despite government warnings, Indonesia Raya reported on racial conflicts in Bandung. The Soeharto government was concerned that the turmoil would spread to the other cities. A defiant Indonesia Raya played up the violent demonstrations on its front page, as did other papers in the provinces. In Jakarta, Indonesia Raya was among a few mainstream newspapers that treated the issue prominently; the other papers confined the story to their inside pages under one-column headlines.

The next morning a military spokesman called the office of Indonesia Raya demanding to know who was responsible. As managing editor, Atma replied that he was. He told the spokesman that his paper had only given the story the treatment it deserved. At that point the Indonesia Raya staff believed that the paper would be banned outright, but this did not happen just yet.

In 1974 Indonesia was rocked by student demonstrations against corruption and the government's economic policies, especially Japanese investments in the country. The government accused the press of inciting unrest and cracked down. Twelve publications, including Indonesia Raya, were banned. Leading journalists, Mochtar Lubis among them, were arrested and jailed without trial for alleged involvement in efforts to topple the Soeharto government. Several other prominent journalists lost their jobs.

Until the government crackdown, Atma had believed that there was freedom of the press in his country. His disillusionment came more acute when he tried to have a book published after the banning of Indonesia Raya. He had hoped to interest a publisher in a compilation of articles that he had used as discussion papers, but no one wanted to touch it because of its critical nature. In 1981 Adi Sasono, a critical NGO leader and director of a publishing house (later to become a cabinet minister after the fall of Soeharto), finally agreed to publish the book, which was titled Freedom of the Press and the Flow of Information in Indonesia. The book was reviewed in London and the Netherlands, where the reviewers asked: How could Atmakusumah say there was press freedom between 1965 and 1974 when he himself said that about forty leftist or communist publications were banned by the Soeharto government? Among those newspapers, which were either official or unofficial organs of the PKI, were Harian Rakyat (People's Daily) and Bintang Timur (Eastern Star). For as long as even one publication was banned, the reviewers declared, there could be no freedom.

Atma was without a job for a few months, until he remembered that the press attaché at the United States Information Service (USIS) had asked him, the previous year, to look for an Indonesian who could be his assistant. Atma had referred several of his colleagues to him but never heard from the USIS again. On a whim, he called the press attaché to ask if the position had been filled. When told that no one had accepted the job yet, Atma asked if he could apply. Not only was he told that he could but he was asked to report the following day, even without the required security check.

Still, the USIS had to know his status vis-à-vis the Indonesian government. For that reason, the USIS deputy director and the press attaché went to a military representative and to the Ministry of Information. The Americans were informed that eleven senior journalists had been banned from rejoining the media and from writing articles altogether. No names were given, only the information that four of the journalists were from Indonesia Raya. When the Americans asked whether Atma was one of them, the answer was yes. They hired him anyway.

His first position at USIS was press assistant; later, he was promoted to information specialist. His job was basically public relations, distributing press releases to the media and developing contacts with journalists and other media persons. Occasionally he wrote press releases himself in both English and Bahasa Indonesia.

Although Atma found his USIS job valuable, he missed journalism. His friends in the press had not forgotten him. Sofjan Alisjahbana of the Femina group of magazines invited him to be chief editor of a popular weekly. He needed a permit from the Ministry of Information. Sofjan went to the military and spoke with the head of security, General Sudomo, while Atma visited Sukarno, the director general for press and graphics, at his home. Rather than tell Atma of the restriction on him, Sukarno asked him politely not to put the director general in a "difficult position." Since all media editors and publishers have to obtain a permit from the government before assuming those positions, there is only one solution to "save" Sukarno's position: don't ask for the license. When told about this, Sofjan suggested that Atma accept the job but that another person's name, someone acceptable to the Ministry of Information, would be printed in the credit box of the paper. Atma refused on the grounds of conscience.

Atma also received an offer from chief editor Mohammad Chudori to return to Antara, which, as the national news agency, enjoyed a government subsidy. As an initial response, he asked two questions: Could Antara approximate the salary he was getting at the USIS? Would he be allowed freedom as an editor? That would be impossible, he was told. "Then I don't have any choice," he replied. Atma says that, while he would not have minded a cut in pay, the issue of freedom was non-negotiable.

Another offer that came his way was to be chief editor of a declining economic magazine. Again he went to Sukarno, and again the answer was the same. No permit, no media work. But he managed to write articles under the pen name Ramakrisna, a combination of two of his children's names. These were mostly light features, never about the Indonesian political situation. He submitted the articles through his neighbor in the journalists' compound where he and his family lived.

Atma was frustrated that he could not write openly and honestly, even for the USIS magazine Titian (Small Bridge).

Eventually, however, Atma was able to write again using his own name and by the late 1970s he was even publishing the occasional article on press freedom. The Indonesian novelist Bur Rasuanto, managing editor of Tempo magazine, asked him to write an obituary for the former deputy chief editor of Indonesia Raya, Enggak Bahau'ddin, who had died of leukemia, a consequence of ten months in prison. A few days before the article was to be printed, Atma was cleaning his front yard when Goenawan Mohamad, chief editor of Tempo, walked by and casually remarked that he had read Atma's article and liked it, and that it would be used in the next issue. Goenawan, however, wanted to know why, despite the fact that his photograph would be used along with the article, his friend wanted to use a pen name. "Wouldn't people wonder about that?" Goenawan asked. Atma said nothing. He felt that Goenawan would not believe him if he said he had heard he was not allowed to write.

Atma spent a sleepless night pondering what to do. If he told Goenawan he was on the government's blacklist, it would give the impression he was being self-important. On the other hand, if he didn't tell Goenawan, the paper could get into trouble for using his article. He decided to give Goenawan permission to use his real name and his picture. Tempo ran the article and, to his surprise, nothing happened.

Later, on a visit to director general Sukarno's home, Atma informed him that he had started writing again using his own name. He was shocked to hear Sukarno casually say, "Have you?" It rankled him that no one in government ever formally informed him of the ban, if indeed there was one. "No one," he laments, "takes responsibility for the fate of his fellow citizens." That is the reason he would like to see former president Soeharto stand trial someday, just to hear him say "I am responsible."

The political system under President Soeharto created hypocrites, says Atma. "We had double talk, double standards, hypocrites. That's what I never liked. We could speak honestly about our feelings. That kind of situation or system does not create good and honest people. Our family could not accept this." Even in conversation, he recalls, he had to be careful to discuss the political situation only with people who shared his point of view, including historians and other intellectuals.

What he did manage to do was produce discussion papers for student and young journalist workshops; these subsequently became the material for his first book, Kebebasan Pers dan Arus Informasi di Indonesia (Freedom of the Press and the Flow of Information in Indonesia), published in 1981 by Adi Sasono's NGO Lembaga Studi Pembangunan, or Development Study Institute. Many of these papers originally appeared in the 1979 Annual Report on the Status of Human Rights in Indonesia of the Lembaga Bantuan Hukum (LBH), or Legal Aid Institute of Jakarta, for which he wrote reports on the media. After three years, however, he refused to go on because he had grown frustrated with the media for accommodating the political situation. He never again wrote for the LBH, although he continued to speak at its discussions.

Also in 1981, Atmakusumah contributed a chapter titled "Kasus Indonesia Raya" (The Case of Indonesia Raya [Greater Indonesia]) to the book Beberapa Segi Perkembangan Sejarah Pers di Indonesia (Aspects of the Development of Press History in Indonesia). He was also assistant editor of the book. It was published by the Indonesian Institute of Science, which had received funding from the Ministry of Information to conduct research on the Indonesian media. The final draft of the book, complete with cartoons and photographs, was sent to the Minister of Information, whose office approved it subject to only trivial changes.

The Ministry ordered the publisher to have a thousand copies of the book printed. At the same time, the book editor, historian Abdurrachman Surjomihardjo, suggested an additional print run of one thousand to be sold commercially. It seemed like a good idea, and the writers and editors pooled their honoraria to defray the cost of the print order. One agency bought 500 copies; Abdurrachman kept the rest.

But it did not take long for the editor to realize that some officials at the Ministry of Information did not like the book. They learned about the additional order and demanded that the copies be retrieved from the distributor. But Indonesian bookstores had begun selling copies surreptitiously and the book was selling well and had even reached Australia and the United States; only 75 out of the 500 copies remained unsold. Nothing was heard thereafter about the Ministry's thousand copies. (In 2002 the Kompas publishing house republished the book.)

In 1992 Atma was presented with an offer he could not resist. Four years earlier, the government-supported Press Council had initiated the establishment of the Lembaga Pers Dr. Soetomo (LPDS), or Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, a training center for aspiring journalists. (Soetomo, a physician by profession, was an educator and among the pioneers in the Indonesian media.) Although Indonesia already had schools and colleges that offered courses in mass communication, these courses did not adequately prepare graduates for careers in the print media. The LPDS, it was hoped, would provide the transition from theory to practice, from the academe to the media organization.

Atma had been invited to participate in the planning meetings for the Institute but he never had time to attend them. When it opened, he was invited to be a lecturer but he begged off, pleading lack of time. This time, it was R.E. "Ted" Stannard, Jr., a former United Press International correspondent in East Asia who had helped draft the curriculum of the LPDS, who asked him if he would be a lecturer. Atma had now been with the USIS for eighteen years, and he felt it was time to be involved in local journalism again-if not as a writer or editor, then at least as an educator.

The decision to leave USIS six years before he reached retirement age meant that he would have to wait that long before getting his pension. But he was determined to be a journalist again. During all the years he was with the USIS, he had spent a lot of time discussing journalism and freedom of the press with students, sometimes in secret meetings. He gave lectures at the University of Indonesia occasionally until Rector Nugroho Notosusanto put a stop to the practice of having speakers from outside the institution. Activities like these were monitored by the army and police, who intervened to cancel seminars in which they planned to participate. To circumvent this, the organizers sometimes changed the venue of a seminar or workshop from one place to another. Once, Atma recalls, he waited to be fetched at a railway station in Bandung for hours because the organizers of a meeting did not want anyone to know where it was going to be held. Such strange things happened in Indonesia for at least twenty-five years until the end of the Soeharto regime, he says.

When Atma signed on as a regular lecturer and instructor at the LPDS, he hoped he would have time to write books. That was not to be. He was assigned to teach seven courses: news writing, feature writing, news and feature editing, Indonesian journalistic language, journalistic ethics, investigative reporting, and precision journalism. To be effective, his classes were limited to sixteen students at a time. In the beginning, only working journalists in both print and broadcast were accepted. Training took ten months at the start, but this was later tightened to six months of intensive study. The students came from all over the country, from the biggest cities to the small provincial ones. All of them received the same training, which, in Atma's words, was "universally accepted journalism."

Many of the students could not afford to pay tuition and had to be subsidized. The Institute was sustained by funding from American institutions, like Freedom Forum, the Asia Foundation, and the US Agency for International Development, as well as from Indonesian media organizations like Kompas, Indonesia's largest newspaper, and Tempo news magazine. At one point, Atma himself invested some of his dollars to save the LPDS.

In 1994 Dja'far Husin Assegaff, LPDS's director, was appointed ambassador to Hanoi. Atma was asked to replace him. As executive director, he initiated more seminars, workshops, and discussions. Because he wanted to train his students to be objective, he invited even government people, as long as they spoke candidly. Any government official who proved to be evasive and less than open was never invited again. Atma also welcomed public relations officers as either students or lecturers.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1990s, Atma also became more active as a spokesperson for the free press and as an expert witness in the trials of writers, publishers, and printers of unlicensed, underground, and NGO publications. In many cases the charge against them was defamation of the president. Among the accused were Ahmad Taufik and Eko Maryadi of Independen, Andi Syahputra of Suara Independen (Independent Voice), and Tri Agus Susanto Siswowihardjo of the NGO publication Kabar dari Pijar (News from the NGO Pijar). In at least two cases, Atma testified as an expert witness for editors of magazines sued for blasphemy or defamation-Jakarta Jakarta (sued by some Islamic organizations) and Tajuk (Editorials) (by an intelligence officer).

Under Indonesian law, says Atma, it is not only journalists who can be put in jail for media-related offenses, but also printers, merchants, and even students who produce, sell, and distribute forbidden books. To his frustration, accused journalists often landed in jail, but he drew comfort from a lawyer-Luhut M.P. Pangaribuan, the director of the Jakarta branch of the Legal Aid Institute-who told him, "Pak Atma, we all know whatever we do, our defendants will go to jail. But as long as we can speak out, even in a courtroom witnessed by, listened to by, a limited number of people, it is still very important to speak out."

In the run-up to the 1998 elections following the Southeast Asian economic crash of 1997, which hit Indonesia particularly hard, anti-Soeharto political activities erupted. During this period, Atma was invited several times to join demonstrations related to press freedom. He was not surprised when Soeharto was forced to step down on May 21, 1998. He had been discussing this possibility for years with his close friends and colleagues, including Mochtar Lubis, and they all believed that, one day, the dictator would be forced to leave office in disgrace. Yet, when it did come to pass, Atma was surprised that fate was so kind to the deposed president. He says, "I thought that people would be very angry . . . and very, very violent against Soeharto. What has happened to him has been very soft."

Only after the Soeharto regime ended did Atma learn how terrifying his years of journalism and underground activity had been for his wife Sri-how she had suffered when he didn't come home when expected, and how she had worried when she was pregnant with their first child and had no way to reach him.

Atma felt encouraged when former vice president Bacharudin Jusuf (B.J.) Habibie replaced Soeharto and showed signs of being a more enlightened leader, including his position on the press.

The press in Indonesia had long been guided by a national ideology created by Soekarno and enshrined in the 1945 Constitution. Known as Pancasila, it contained five principles: belief in one supreme God; justice and civility among peoples; national unity; democracy through deliberation and consensus among representatives; and social justice for all. Under the Soeharto dictatorship, the media was required to conform to these principles and to advance them in accordance with government interests. Article I of the Code of Ethics of the Indonesian Journalists' Association stated: "An Indonesian journalist shall be faithful to Pancasila."

In 1968, a press council, to be chaired by the minister of information, was established to monitor the press' faithfulness. The Council, according to journalist and Jakarta Post editor Raymond Toruan, ensured that newspapers "fan the spirit of dedication to the nation's struggle," "strengthen national unity and integrity" and "exercise social control which is constructive." But, cautioned Toruan, "the boundaries of Pancasila are a matter of interpretation. The government can tighten the reins on the press, or it can be relatively lenient in enforcing strict codes on them."

In Soeharto's time, under the Basic Press Law drafted in 1966 and amended in 1982, all periodicals were required to acquire from the Ministry of Information a press publication business license, better known by the acronym SIUPP (Surat Izin Usaha Penerbitan Pers). Through the SIUPP, the government controlled the number of newspapers being printed in the country and blocked the creation of any one strong newspaper group.

Self-censorship was very strong in Indonesia under Soeharto. The following subjects were to be treated with great care: ethnic issues, religious issues, racial problems, intergroup conflicts, personal criticism of the president and his family, and anything that might antagonize the military.

The Soeharto government also required all media practitioners to become members of the Indonesian Journalists' Association, which Toruan described as "a forum to indoctrinate journalists and to sift out the less malleable members of the profession."

When B. J. Habibie assumed the presidency in 1998, writes Indonesian journalist Warief Djajanto, "the press underwent perhaps the most thorough transformation among Indonesia's institutions. In days, it turned from the hounded press to press hound. It was a switch from night to day, from not having it to having it. That 'it' is press freedom."

Although Habibie's presidency lasted only seventeen months, Djajanto recalls that "media leaders worked fast and furiously with a forward-looking information minister and concerned legislators to make press freedom legally binding." This freedom was made possible by a new press law, for which a committee was created composed of government officials, legal experts, and Indonesian media personalities. The initiative was also supported by international NGOs.

To his surprise, Atma was among the journalists invited by the minister of information, Muhammad Yunus Yosfiah. "I was," he says, "probably not considered as an enemy by many people." His friends reminded him that he was suddenly being invited to join government discussions because he was the most critical person on press issues.

In fact, Atma was involved in writing of the total revision of the law. He also helped an ad hoc group of print and broadcast journalists write their own version of a press law. He met many times with skeptical government officials and members of parliament, convincing them of the need for a law that would free the news media from the restrictions imposed by the Soeharto regime.

During one discussion, he found two articles in the draft particularly objectionable. One concerned religion, the other, ideology. Ishadi Sutopo Kartosaputo, the director general for radio, television and film, was about to declare the meeting adjourned when Atma thundered, "I said, how can you measure a journalist's belief in God? Do you measure by emotion, for example, or by the rituals performed, . . . or from someone's social activities like giving to charity? How do you measure them? So what is the article for?" He had grown exasperated with the silence on the two articles, but not being a brave man by his own admission, he waited until he had reached breaking point. On the matter of ideology, he flared, "'The Indonesian press should not be based on communism, Marxism, or Leninism.' These words have been used for three decades. We have had victims because of this. Many children of so-called leftist or communist families could not get proper education, proper work. What is this sentence all about," he asked.

Feeling his confidence rise, he proceeded to say, "Why don't we also admit that the Indonesian press should not be based on Machiaveliism, fascism, even authoritarianism? Because we have just experienced it for three decades. It is even more important to put it there." Of course, he clarifies, he was being sarcastic.

One day, he found an envelope on his office table. It contained the latest draft of the press law. As he read it at home that evening, he noticed that the two articles to which he had objected were no longer there. The taste of victory had never been sweeter.

On September 13, 1999 the House of Representatives passed a 21-article press bill. Ten days later, President B.J. Habibie signed the bill into law. The 1999 Press Law is Indonesia's third press law, annulling the 1966 and 1982 press laws.

Atma had not been in favor of having a specific press law. "Why do we need a press law at all," he would ask. What he wanted instead was a simple constitutional guarantee, as in other countries. But he welcomed the new press law because he believed it would encourage professionalism among media workers.

Djajanto described the difference between the old press laws and the new one as "the difference between an obstacle course and a tollway." Article 4 of the new law states that press freedom is guaranteed as a basic right for citizens: "… the press is free from any form of prevention, prohibition and/or pressure so that the public right to information is guaranteed. The press is free from censorship and is not subject to publication and broadcasting bans." In Soeharto's time, a press license was required to print a paper, and Jakarta editors were often invited to briefings at the Ministry of Information on what they could and could not print. Under the new law, no permit is required and any Indonesian can start a paper by setting up a legal body; foreign investors can become minority shareholders in a local print media company.

The new law also assures media adequate access to pertinent information. Anyone who disturbs, prevents, or obstructs press freedom can face either two years in prison or a maximum fine of Rp500 million.

Abdurrahman Wahid, who became Indonesia's first democratically elected president on October 20, 1999, strengthened the guarantee on press freedom by abolishing the Ministry of Information. Information, he argued, is society's business, not the government's.

The 1999 Press Law also abolished a requirement that journalists belong to a government-sanctioned professional organization and called for the creation of a new Press Council that was wholly independent of government. Atma drafted the ground rules for the new Council. As part of his research, he asked the Freedom Forum Asian Center and Library in Hong Kong and London's Article 19 (a free-expression advocacy group) for materials on laws governing the news media in other countries. He also received materials on press ethics and media laws from the Australian Press Council in Sydney, the British Press Complaints Commission in London, and the Inter Nationes in Bonn. He needed these to allay the fears of government officials that a free press would turn on them.

The functions of the new Council were defined thus: to prevent outside interests from interfering with press freedom; to settle public complaints arising from news stories; and to help improve the quality of the profession. The members of the Council would represent professional journalists, media companies, and non-media people. No government representative was to sit on the Council, in contrast to the practice under Soeharto.

In early 2000, the so-called Press Council Working Committee-a special election committee set up by the old Press Council-asked journalists' organizations and representatives of media companies to nominate members to the new Council. Thirty-three associations of journalists and seven associations of media companies nominated a total of 121 candidates. A joint meeting of members of the Working Committee and the old Press Council decided that there should be only nine members-three to represent the journalists; four to represent the media companies; and two to represent society at large. Chosen to represent the last category were Atmakusumah Astraatmadja and Benjamin Mangkoedilaga, the chief judge of the state administrative court.

The first meeting of Indonesia's new Press Council was held the following May. Atma, who arrived late, had just started to say he was proposing Benjamin as Council chair because of his experience in government and because by tradition in other countries the chair had to be a retired judge or law professor. His proposal was greeted with silence. Finally one of the members, Jakob Oetama, senior journalist and the publisher and founder of Kompas (Compass) spoke and announced to a stunned Atma that in his absence they had already decided that he should be chair.

Atma believes the Press Council has the urgent mission of handling public complaints, improving professionalism in the national press, and upholding democracy. He says the Council is needed to protect the press and journalists from intimidation and injustice and to mediate public complaints against the media.

These days, when a controversy involving the media erupts in Indonesia, it is Atma's views that are invariably sought first.

In 1998, when some leaders and the staff of Gatra, a leading news weekly owned by Soeharto associate Mohammad "Bob" Hasan, resigned en masse following an internal conflict within the management, Atma declared that freedom of the press was not only a matter of government policies but also of investors' interests. The issue, he said, was who should have the upper hand in a conflict between press freedom and the business and political interests of investors. In a separate statement, he advised journalists to retain their professionalism in order to strengthen their bargaining power in situations where their interests conflicted with those of media owners. Such conflicts, he said, were a "classic problem," hinting at more frequent occurrences since "now anyone with money can issue a publication."

Commenting on a bankruptcy law passed in 1998, Atma expressed concern that it posed a threat to the survival of publishing companies. Under the law, creditors could obtain a court ruling declaring a media organization bankrupt and have it shut down. He suggested that the uniform application of the law could impede the people's access to information, since it could be used by creditors to prevent the publication of unwelcome or unflattering news.

In 1999, when government eased controls on the media, the country was flooded with tabloids which, while tame by the standards of other countries, shocked many Muslim Indonesians. The country's conservative elements warned that the "excesses" of the tabloids were an indication of things to come from a liberal media. Atma dismissed the controversy and defended the tabloids as an exercise of free expression, even though he agreed that the publications could provide ammunition for those who wanted to derail press freedom. At the same time he stressed the need for responsibility among media people, warning his colleagues that without press ethics and responsibility, "the press is like a ship that has lost its beacon in dense fog."

In an interview with a Filipino journalist in 2000, he said: "The (Indonesian) media now are very free, which accounts for some abuse. They are not used to the new situation and lack the skills for proper reporting. (The reportage) is very shallow and superficial." He added that despite the new law on the press, true media freedom remained dependent on government. "(It remains to be seen) if the government will truly let the media be free because the Constitution has a provision which says that, although freedom of expression is guaranteed, restrictions can be imposed should national interest and/or security demand them." This could explain his earlier opposition to a separate press law and his preference for a guarantee of press freedom in the Indonesian Constitution.

The lifting of the government's requirement on licensing resulted in a sudden surge in the number of media organizations. As of 1999, the Ministry of Information had registered three hundred new publications. Rather than government restricting the number of publications, Atma told the Filipino journalist that people should be made to choose and the press would have to listen to public opinion. "It is better to allow a free press to keep the public properly informed rather than to return to the rumor mill, which existed under a strictly controlled press."

The previous year, Atmakusumah had issued the following statement after the government revoked a 1984 directive requiring publications to secure licenses before they could operate: "The (Indonesian) press has struggled against political and economic repression since the time of the Dutch colonial rule and it will carry on with this struggle even after Indonesia becomes a democratic country. In modern democratic countries, press freedom is occasionally impinged upon, but the public's right to information is guaranteed by law. In Indonesia, people who have disagreed with certain reports have staged demonstrations. That, too, is an impingement on press freedom, and as such is a form of repression."

In 1999, a controversy broke over the publication in the Islamic weekly magazine Panji Masyarakat (Banner of Society) of the transcript of an alleged taped telephone conversation between then President B.J. Habibie and Attorney General Andi Mohammad Ghalib-contradicting their known public views that former president Soeharto should stand trial. Atma defended Panji's investigative report: "The press is here to educate the public about affairs they should know about, and it is entrusted with the task of always presenting something new."
In expressing that view he differed from his mentor and friend, Mochtar Lubis, who felt that Panji Masyarakat should have first verified the authenticity of the tape and sought confirmation from Habibie or Ghalib before running the story. Lubis was quoted as saying, "Journalists must know the limit, the extent to which they can or cannot go to publish information, particularly if it concerns the state's interests."

When an Indonesian court threw out a defamation suit filed by a son of Soeharto against another weekly, Atma took advantage of the situation to call on the public "to seek alternative forms of mediation rather than immediately filing lawsuits, a process which takes both time and money." It was better, he said, for aggrieved individuals to send a letter of complaint to the media, and urged media at the same time to provide space for complaints against them. He cited the examples of the United Kingdom and Australia, where the majority of disputes involving the media are resolved out of court, through their press councils.

At the time, Soeharto himself was contemplating filing a lawsuit against the American magazine Time. Atma suggested that the former president rethink his options, arguing that Soeharto would be better advised to reply to Time through a statement. When the media, by way of a protest, threatened to suppress coverage of a controversial state security bill that gave the military wide-ranging powers to infringe on press freedom, Atma said such a move would limit dissemination of vital public information. He proposed instead a public debate on the bill's provisions. "We have to know whether we really need the bill or whether it is common in other countries to enact such a state security law," he said. (In the end, this legislation did not push through.)

Since the new Press Law went into effect, Atma has taken pains to remind the government, the public, the police and other law enforcers, and all other sectors of Indonesian society of its provisions and to warn them of the consequences of interfering with free expression.

Arnold Zeitlin, director of the Asian office of Freedom Forum in Hong Kong, has nothing but admiration for Atma and his unflagging advocacy of press freedom in his country. "I have never observed a person who is so much a motivator. He is tireless, overflowing with enthusiasm and under the most trying circumstances, with good humor," Zeitlin said. He describes Atma as "an unsung giant among journalists and journalism educators in Asia… or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world."

Although Freedom Forum is usually opposed to press councils, believing they diminish the responsibility of editors for their product, Zeitlin sees the rationale for the existence of the Press Council in Indonesia: "to protect the news media from its enemies." This is Atma's vision for the Council as well.

His vision for the Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, meanwhile, is this: he hopes that what it teaches-"to probe, research, evaluate, and analyze"-will prepare its students for work in a more liberal atmosphere by exposing them to the "universal tenets of journalism."

Atma continues to break new ground at the Institute. Today, in addition to its skills upgrading courses, it also offers programs on specialized reporting like environment, science and technology, economics, as well as a five-month practicum for new graduates and working journalists with different levels of expertise and experience.

The LPDS has graduated more than 1,700 students, some 1,300 of them journalists and the rest public relations officers and other professionals. It has ten regular and in-house lecturers and instructors and 40 on-call lecturers and instructors. Although some of its programs are supported by foreign donors, the bulk of its funding comes from Indonesia's media organizations which send their journalists to the Institute. Students pay minimal tuition and receive a subsidy of as much as 80 percent. Most graduates from the provinces return to their organizations upon completing a course, but there are those who choose to stay in Jakarta hoping to land jobs in the bigger papers there.

During the Soeharto regime, journalists complained that, because of the authoritarian nature of the government, they were not able to make full use of the skills they had learned, among them investigative reporting. Be patient, Atma would advise them. For a while, the LPDS promoted the concept of Pancasila, as required by the New Order and the institute's charter. Over time, however, Atma dropped it from his lectures.

In June 2000 Atma introduced a five-month-long training program for working journalists, including ten from East Timor. The program was designed to help rebuild the devastated news sector in East Timor (following the violence surrounding the new country's passage to independence from Indonesia), but also to bridge the gap of animosity between East Timorese and Indonesians.

Raul L. Locsin, a Filipino journalist and newspaper publisher who received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism in 1999, paid Atma the ultimate tribute when he said: "No single individual in Indonesia symbolizes the tremendous turnaround the news media is making since the ouster of President Soeharto in May 1998. From a cowed, controlled news media for thrity years under Soeharto, the Indonesian press, radio and television is growing in confidence and esteem toward complete freedom of expression. The way to an independent, free news media in Indonesia remains pitted with obstacles. Among a remarkable group of journalists, Atmakusumah Astraatmadja stands out in the struggle to smooth the way."

Indeed, journalists everywhere in the world have much to learn from Atma's awesome perseverance amidst adversity and his passionate pursuit of press freedom.

Lorna Kalaw Tirol