Jakarta – The law that serves as a basis for the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) to ban the circulation of books is no longer contextual or relevant under the current situation.

“The law was made because [Indonesia’s first President] Sukarno needed to control things that conflicted with the spirit of the revolution from within and outside the country,” said National Human Rights Commission Chairperson Ifdhal Kasim during a seminar titled Monitoring Media Regulations and Regulators: Caring for Press Freedom and Democracy held by PR2Media on Tuesday June 15.

The law he was referred to is Law Number 4/PNPS/1963 on the Securing of Printed Materials Whose Contents could Disturb Public Order. None of the conditions that served as a basis for this law exist any more. Problems related to books, such as defamation or blasphemy can be dealt with under criminal law.

Author Taufik Rahzen highlighted the fact that since the time of Dharmawangsa, the last king of Medang, there has been attempts to control the written word in order to maintain and legitimise power. The current banning of books is still within this context. “These book bannings are counterproductive in terms of improving the foundations of the nation-state”, he said.

Historian Asvi Warman Adam said that there were no book bannings in 1998-2005. Between 2006 and 2009 however, book bannings have resurfaced. These bannings, according to Adam, are mistaken in several ways. He gave the example of the banning of history books that were prohibited in 2007 because they failed to mention the 1948 Madiun affair or only mentioned 1965 30 September Movement without mentioning the Indonesian Communist Party. “Three volumes were banned, yet the first and second volumes were about the archipelago’s kingdoms and colonialism, only the fourth book was about Indonesian independence”, he said.

Another speaker, Godang Riadi Siregar, who is an intelligence researcher with the AGO, said that the AGO works in accordance with the authority given to it by Law Number 4/PNPS/1963. (EDN)

[Translated by James Balowski.]