About Indonesia Raya

Indonesia Raya

Indonesia Raya was an Indonesian-language daily newspaper published in Jakarta, Indonesia, co-founded in 1949 by the journalist and novelist Mochtar Lubis. It was one of the most celebrated and most persecuted newspapers of Indonesia's first three decades of independence. Committed to an independent, critical press, and known for the motto Dari Rakyat, Oleh Rakyat, Untuk Rakyat, From the People, By the People, For the People, it was banned repeatedly under both President Sukarno and President Suharto, and its editor was imprisoned under both regimes. It published in two distinct periods, from 1949 to 1958 and from 1968 to 1974, before it was closed permanently following the Malari riots of January 1974. This profile concerns that historic newspaper, which is unrelated to a later website of the same name launched in 2017.

Founding on 29 December 1949

Indonesia Raya was established on 29 December 1949, two days after the Dutch formally transferred sovereignty to the Republic of Indonesia. Its central figure was Mochtar Lubis, a journalist born in Padang, West Sumatra, on 7 March 1922, who had joined the Antara news agency as a reporter after the proclamation of independence in 1945 and had covered the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 for the agency. Lubis co-founded the daily and served as its chief editor, the role with which his name became inseparable in Indonesian journalism; contemporaries later compared the pairing to BM Diah with Merdeka and Rosihan Anwar with Pedoman.

The founding had support from within the military. Historical accounts record that the paper was initiated by Lubis with the encouragement of officers of the Siliwangi Division, and name Hasyim Mahdan, spokesman of the Jakarta military command, the journalist Hiswara, and Colonel Dan Yahya, the military governor of Jakarta, among those involved at its creation. The paper received irregular funding from military intelligence officers. From the beginning, however, it declared an independent spirit, detached from political parties and groups, and intended to be a daily that represented the voice of the Republic of Indonesia free of Dutch influence. Lubis's guiding principle for the paper was bluntly stated: for a free press, the government was adversary number one.

The parliamentary democracy years

During the parliamentary democracy period of the 1950s, Indonesia Raya became one of the country's leading critical dailies, repeatedly criticising politicians and the government of the day. By 1956 its circulation had reached 40,000 copies. Its reporting was willing to touch subjects other papers avoided. Among the stories that angered the government were its reporting on President Sukarno's relationship with Hartini, whom he eventually married, a scandal that preceded his wife Fatmawati's departure from the presidential palace, and a case of suspected bribery involving former prime minister Roeslan Abdulgani and businessmen.

The paper also played a small but documented part in international literary history. In 1955 Lubis, as editor, hosted the African American author Richard Wright during his three weeks in Indonesia for the Bandung Conference, the landmark gathering of Asian and African nations. Indonesia Raya published several articles related to Wright during April and May of that year. Lubis's own standing was rising in parallel: in 1958 he became the first Indonesian to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism and Literature. His literary work, including the novel Jalan Tak Ada Ujung, which won a national literary award in 1952, appeared alongside his editorship, and his novel Senja di Jakarta, later published in English as Twilight in Jakarta, was the first Indonesian novel translated into English.

Bans, imprisonment, and the first closure, 1957 to 1958

After 1957 the paper's relationship with the Sukarno government collapsed into open conflict. Indonesia Raya was banned six times in the period after 1957, as the government moved against critical publications during the transition toward Guided Democracy. During the first publishing period as a whole, from 1949 to 1958, five of its journalists were detained at various times, for periods ranging from several days to a month. Lubis himself was placed under house arrest and then imprisoned. He was held in Madiun, East Java, from 1957 to 1966, a total of nine years of imprisonment without trial, alongside other nationalist figures critical of Sukarno, including Sjahrir, Mohammad Roem, and Soebadio Sastrosatomo.

The paper's end in this period came through an internal conflict as much as through state action. The three shareholders, Mochtar Lubis, Hasjim Mahdan, and Sarhindi, fell out over the paper's stance: Lubis insisted on remaining critical of the government, while the other two wanted a neutral attitude that would allow the paper to survive. Mahdan and Sarhindi succeeded in obtaining a publishing licence, a Surat Izin Terbit, dated 7 October 1958, and in October 1958 Indonesia Raya was banned in its existing form and Lubis imprisoned. A relaunched Indonesia Raya appeared under entirely new journalists, because the paper's existing staff had all supported Lubis's position. The new version lasted less than three months, collapsing as its subscribers abandoned it. The daily then ceased publication for a decade.

Revival under the New Order, 1968 to 1969

The fall of Sukarno and the establishment of the New Order under President Suharto initially opened space for the papers the old regime had suppressed. Indonesia Raya resumed publication on 30 October 1968, with the permission of the New Order government. Former employees and staff of the first generation were asked to return, and the revived daily was again led by Mochtar Lubis as general manager and chief editor. For its first ten months the revived paper appeared in tabloid format; on 1 September 1969 it changed to a standard newspaper size. The revival was a notable event in Indonesian journalism: a title silenced for ten years, its editor freed from nearly a decade of imprisonment, returning to daily publication with much of its original staff.

The Pertamina investigations

The revived paper's defining campaign began in 1969, when Indonesia Raya published a series of articles on corruption in Pertamina, the state oil and gas company, which had grown into one of the most powerful and least accountable institutions in the country. The reporting was controversial even among fellow journalists. Some newspapers, including Kompas, supported Indonesia Raya's stance. Others accused the paper of having a conflict of interest with Pertamina and charged it with attempting to blackmail the oil company. In August 1970 the paper was told to stop its Pertamina reporting or face serious repercussions.

Lubis's editorials of this period ranged widely across Indonesian public life. His cultural criticism in the paper took up subjects from the character of national development to the persistence of mystical and occult beliefs, including a November 1970 article on the problem of klenik, occult practice, among Indonesians, prompted by cases such as a widely publicised miracle baby claim that police investigation exposed as a fraud. The editorial voice was moralising, anti-corruption, and increasingly critical of the direction of the New Order, whose early promise of reform the paper had initially welcomed. The student movement that emerged on university campuses in the early 1970s as a self-described moral force, critical of corruption in state enterprises including Pertamina and the state logistics agency, read and echoed the same themes the daily was pressing in its columns.

Thailand coverage, Malari, and the final ban in 1974

In October 1973, mass student demonstrations in Thailand brought down that country's military regime. Indonesia Raya covered the Thai demonstrations and the fall of the regime prominently. That coverage has been suggested by press historians as one of the causes of the Malari incident in Jakarta, the riots of 15 January 1974 that erupted during the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, amid student protest against foreign investment, corruption, and the privileges of the regime's inner circle. Whether or not the coverage directly inspired the protests, the government treated the critical press as part of the problem, and its response fell heavily on the newspapers.

In the aftermath of Malari, the government revoked the publishing licences of twelve publications, among them Indonesia Raya, Harian Kami, Abadi, Pedoman, and the Jakarta Times. Indonesia Raya was banned again in 1974, a closure attributed in part to its reporting of corruption in Pertamina, the campaign it had refused to abandon in 1970. This time there was no revival. Mochtar Lubis and several other journalists were imprisoned without trial, while others were blacklisted from the profession. Lubis was arrested on 4 February 1975 in connection with the 1974 riots and spent more than two months in Nirbaya prison without trial before his release on 14 April 1975, an experience he later recorded in a prison diary. He observed on his release that other prisoners, such as former air force chief Omar Dani, had been held without trial for years. With its licence gone, its editor imprisoned, and its staff scattered or blacklisted, it was decided to discontinue the newspaper. Indonesia Raya never published again.

Mochtar Lubis after Indonesia Raya

Lubis remained a public figure for three decades after his newspaper's closure. He had founded the Obor Indonesia Foundation in 1970 and co-founded the literary magazine Horison, and he later helped to found the Indonesian Green Foundation, turning part of his attention to the environmental damage he associated with rapid, foreign-capital-led development. He continued to speak out for freedom of the press and kept his reputation as an honest, direct reporter who treated governments of every kind as objects of scrutiny rather than partners. In 2000 the International Press Institute named him one of its fifty World Press Freedom Heroes of the previous fifty years.

Lubis died at Medistra Hospital in Jakarta on 2 July 2004, at the age of eighty-two, after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease; contemporary obituaries also reported lung disease. He was buried beside his wife Siti Halimah, who had died in 2001, in Jeruk Purut Cemetery. His funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners, including the journalists and writers Rosihan Anwar, Aristides Katoppo, and Ramadhan KH. His former managing editor Atmakusumah Astraatmadja, paying tribute, said that Mochtar could not be separated from Indonesia Raya, and recalled the decision taken after the 1974 ban: after that, we decided not to publish the daily again, but Mochtar always spoke out about press freedom.

Legacy in Indonesian journalism

Indonesia Raya's historical importance exceeds its circulation, which peaked at about 40,000 in the 1950s, respectable but never the largest in the country. Its significance lies in the stance it embodied and the price it paid for it. It was banned repeatedly under two opposed regimes, Sukarno's Guided Democracy and Suharto's New Order, which between them agreed on little except that this newspaper should not be allowed to publish. Its editor spent nine years in prison under the first regime and was imprisoned again under the second, both times without trial. Its Pertamina reporting anticipated the state oil company's spectacular debt collapse of the mid-1970s and remains a reference point in Indonesian discussions of investigative journalism and corruption.

For those reasons the paper is a standard case in histories of the Indonesian press, including David T. Hill's study of the press in New Order Indonesia, and its story is retold whenever press freedom in Indonesia is debated. The daily itself published for the last time in 1974, and no edition has appeared since. It should not be confused with the unrelated website of the same name that appeared in 2017; the historic Indonesia Raya belongs to the era of the independence generation, and its record, of independence asserted, punished, resumed, and finally extinguished, is one of the defining newspaper stories of twentieth-century Indonesia.