News against the grain: twelve years of Indonesia on apakabar
From a dial-up conference in 1990 to the last post in February 2002, John MacDougall's apakabar carried Indonesia's news, rumours and arguments past the New Order's censors. 140,833 of its messages survive. This is what they show.
What survives
Apakabar began on 7 October 1990 as a conference on the progressive network IGC, run by John A. MacDougall of Indonesia Publications in Maryland. It grew into a family of moderated lists (indonesia-l, indonesia-p for news, indonesia-views, indonesia-docs and others) that MacDougall edited, mostly alone, until February 2002. Every message went into a searchable database hosted by Hamline University and later Ohio University Library. Both copies are gone. What remains are the pages the Internet Archive happened to capture.
Those captures hold 136,431 messages. The database filed its messages in a folder per day, and the Internet Archive also kept the folders' own listings, which name every message filed: they survive for 3,746 days, and on the 334 other days of the period nothing was filed at all. By that count the database held 137,146 messages, and 99.5% of them survive; the other 715 are known only by their date, size and the first words of their titles. For the 1990s the archive holds 97,930 of 98,206, against MacDougall's own count of about 100,000 postings by the end of 1999. To these come 3,341 messages from the separate list archives at indopubs.com. Removing 3,910 duplicate copies leaves 135,895 distinct texts. The chart below shows them month by month. No month lost much: the worst (May 2001, May 2000, May 1997) keep 95% of their messages.
Recovered messages per month, by language
Numbered markers: 1 Santa Cruz massacre · 2 press bans · 3 attack on the PDI · 4 rupiah floated · 5 May 1998 · 6 East Timor referendum · 7 Megawati president.
From a foreign conference to an Indonesian forum
The first apakabar was written for outsiders. In 1991, 98% of its messages were in English: scholars, solidarity groups and journalists abroad trading news about a country whose own press was managed. That changed in three years. Indonesian rose to 29% of messages in 1994, 62% in 1995 and 78% in 1996, and stayed above half for the rest of the list's life.
The shift coincides with the arrival of commercial internet access in Indonesia in the mid-1990s and with a change in what the list carried: from MacDougall's English summaries to Indonesian newspaper articles reposted in full, and to arguments among Indonesians at home and abroad. Apakabar became a public sphere for people the regime could not easily see.
Reading the banned press by e-mail
On 21 June 1994 the government revoked the licences of Tempo, Editor and DeTIK. Apakabar's response is visible in the data. Its news came increasingly from outlets the regime had closed or never licensed: Tempo Interaktif, the underground SiaR and Xpos, Kabar dari PIJAR and PRD bulletins. Their share of reposted news averaged 12% a quarter in 1997 and peaked at 84% in the third quarter of 1998. That peak needs a caution: the database itself received few messages that quarter, and of its 424 news messages most are SiaR bulletins.
Share of reposted news from underground outlets and the successors of the banned weeklies
SiaR, Xpos, Kabar dari PIJAR, PRD and AJI bulletins at any date, plus Tempo Interaktif and D&R between the June 1994 bans and the end of 1998; dashed, foreign press and wire services. Shares of all news messages whose outlet is known, by quarter; quarters with fewer than 30 such messages are left out.
Once Soeharto fell and the Habibie government stopped licensing the press, the underground lost its reason to exist and its share collapsed. The dashed line tells the earlier story. Until 1995 most identifiable news on the list came from Reuters, AFP, UPI, Kyodo and foreign papers, which MacDougall summarised in English. Once Indonesians could post their own press, foreign reporting fell to a tenth of the news, and rose again only when the world's attention turned to Indonesia, as in the East Timor crisis of 1999 and after 11 September 2001.
What the list talked about
Nineteen themes trace the list's attention year by year. Each is defined by a short, published list of Indonesian and English terms; a model fitted on 914 hand-checked messages then separates the messages that are about a theme from those that only mention it. East Timor dominated the early 1990s: 37% of the messages of 1992 are about it, and it returned with the 1999 referendum (22%). Messages about the economy rose from 0.9% in 1996 to 4.3% in the crisis year 1998, and about corruption from 0.4% to 3.6%. Communal conflict in Maluku, Poso and Kalimantan appears almost from nothing in 1999 (0.1% in 1998, 4.1% in 1999), as Aceh returns (1.0% to 6.7%).
Share of each year's messages about each theme
A message counts toward a theme when the model judges it to be about the theme. Shading is relative to each theme's own peak year. Each theme has its own threshold, set for 90% precision, so read a row across the years rather than one row against another. The terms are listed under Themes.
| '90 | '91 | '92 | '93 | '94 | '95 | '96 | '97 | '98 | '99 | '00 | '01 | '02 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| East Timor | 12 | 21 | 37 | 27 | 27 | 20 | 9 | 7 | 4 | 22 | 8 | 5 | 1 |
| Aceh | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 2 |
| Papua / Irian Jaya | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Communal conflict | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 3 |
| Labour | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Student movement | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Press freedom and censorship | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| PDI and Megawati | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| The left and 1965 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Islam | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Chinese Indonesians | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Military | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 2 |
| Human rights | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| Economy and the crisis | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Corruption and the Soeharto family | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Elections, parties and parliament | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 1 | 6 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Environment | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Women and gender | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The military is the constant. Between 22% and 39% of each year's messages from 1991 to 2001 mention ABRI, the TNI, Kopassus, soldiers or the generals, and between 2.4% and 7.2% are mainly about them. Under the New Order and after it, the armed forces ran through almost everything the list carried.
How fast the news travelled
For 35 dated events, the archive shows when the first message appeared and how much the list wrote in the following month. The Santa Cruz massacre in Dili on 12 November 1991 reached the list the same day, through TAPOL. The storming of the PDI headquarters on 27 July 1996 was reported the same day and drew 716 messages in thirty days. The East Timor referendum of 30 August 1999 drew 994.
Silence needs care, but it is not always the archive's. The labour activist Marsinah was found murdered on 8 May 1993; the list first mentions her 21 days later. That delay is the list's own: from February to July 1993 the database received messages on only 94 of 181 days, one to seventeen at a time, and all of them survive.
All events, with day-by-day charts →
Who was named
People named in the most messages
Distinct messages naming each person, 1990–2002, matched on a list of names and spellings. MacDougall himself, named in his own notices, is left out.
Soeharto is named in more messages than anyone else; the presidents who followed him and the generals around them come next. Co-occurrence of names, period by period, is under People.
Two readings for further work
The May 1998 sexual violence
617 messages from 13 May 1998 onward speak of rape or sexual violence in the same paragraph as the riots, Chinese Indonesians or the inquiries (TGPF, Tim Relawan, Komnas Perempuan, Ita Martadinata), and 57 of them are mainly about it. They record how the reports spread, who doubted them and how the denial was argued. Read the case study →
Busiest month: July 1998, with 62 messages.
Gerwani and the memory of 1965
Gerwani is named in 164 messages. The list carried both the New Order's version of 1965 and the first open challenges to it, from former political prisoners, exiles such as Sobron Aidit, and readers of Pramoedya. Read the case study →
Limits of this reading
These figures describe what was captured, not everything that was posted. Themes and names are matched by word lists, which miss synonyms and catch some homonyms, and a model trained on hand-checked messages decides which messages are about a theme; every theme, flag and list is checked on a sample of fifty messages, and the result is shown beside it (see How reliable the figures are). Outlets are identified for 73% of messages. Language is a best guess. Every count links back to the messages it was computed from, so each claim can be checked by reading.