Indonesian writer speaks about rights

Indonesia's best known novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, will speak tomorrow at a memorial service for victims of human rights abuse at Toronto's Metro Square at 3 PM. Human rights groups estimate that more than 200 people are currently imprisoned in Indonesia for their political beliefs. Although the current regime has released a number of them, Pramoedya (Javanese rarely use family names) is skeptical.

"The current leadership has little sense of what Indonesia is," he told a group of academics and human rights activists at the University of Toronto yesterday, Speaking metaphorically, he said that new volcano is being formed in the Sunda Straits, near Krakatau "and no one in Jakarta has noticed."

Like Oscar Wilde, Jacob Timerman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the slight, humorous, frail-looking Pramoedya is a master of that unhappy genre, the prison memoir. He has spent almost half his life - 74 years - in prison or under house arrest, first under the Dutch colonial government in the 1940s. A communist sympathizer, he was made a powerful culturecrat under the Sukarno regime. But he fell from favour and was imprisoned for criticizing the government's treatment of Indonesia's Chinese minority. Under Suharto, he did 11 years of hard labour followed by 15 years of house arrest.

This latest recollection of his years under the eyes of prison guards is 'The Mute Soliloquy', his first non-fiction work to be published abroad. It was published last month by Hyperion. Much of the book consists of letters to his children, describing his early years growing up under Japanese occupation. This material is bracketed by descriptions of the writer's experiences while he was in prison for more than a decade in the penal island colony of Buru, 1,360 kilometres northeast of Java.

There Pramoedya cleared jungle and built camps, and was reduced to foraging for lizards, worms, and rats to eat. There was no hope of a trial - indeed, he was never formally charged. He kept his fellow prisoners entertained with stories, and in the final years of his imprisonment he was permitted to write them down. The material later formed the basis for his fictional masterpiece, the Buru Quartet. The quartet of novels, translated into 28 languages, (but still banned at home), earned him serious consideration for the Nobel prize.

Deaf as a result of police clubbing, Pramoedya remains eloquent. Indonesia's only hope, he has said, lies in the new generation "whose hands are not bloody and whose mouths have not been soiled by the government's cakes."

By Val Ross
The Globe and Mail, May 28, 1999