With The Mute's Soliloquy, an account of suffering under Suharto's oppression, Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been hailed as Indonesia's Solzhenitsyn. Zuraidah Ibrahim reports

The Soviet Union under Stalin had its gulags. Closer home, Indonesia under Mr Suharto had its string of penal colony islands.

Created ostensibly to wean political prisoners off their ill-informed anti-nationalist ideologies, the camps were in reality far less sophisticated, using brutality to strip people of their basic human rights and crush their spirits into acquiescence.

This shameful side of Indonesia was rarely seen, or talked about, while the country was prospering under the former President's New Order government.

His critics at home were silenced both by the impressive economic growth figures, particularly the self-sufficiency in rice production that lifted millions out of poverty, and, of course, the tried-and-tested methods of force.

Among those who suffered incarceration under Mr Suharto was Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of the most gifted writers Indonesia has produced this century.

His latest offering to be translated into English is The Mute's Soliloquy, a loose autobiography woven from essays and letters written during his years of exile on the remote barren island of Buru, off Sulawesi and a stone's throw from riot-torn Ambon.

Soliloquy is a raw remembrance of repression. It is stark testimony to the Indonesian military's mutilation of flesh and soul in the name of nation-building.

The writings were smuggled out of the colony by a Catholic priest, and the Bahasa Indonesia version of the book was banned in Indonesia until the fall of Mr Suharto in May last year.

The author was among the first inhabitants of Buru Island, spending a decade there in grinding labour, but not before being tortured in other prisons in Jakarta for four miserable years.

He was arrested at his house in East Jakarta in October, just a month after the failed coup in 1965, which led to the ouster of Sukarno, Indonesia's first president.

That night of what was actually plain kidnapping was a harrowing experience recalled several times in the book.

He had just settled down to edit a collection of short stories written by Sukarno, when soldiers banged on his door, offering to lead him to safety before a seething mob that had gathered and surrounded his house under the cover of darkness.

It was not safety that the military officers hauled him to, but docile surrender. As soon as he walked out, his hands were tied behind his back, a noose was flung around his neck, and his body shoved onto a truck that sped away as the mobsters rained stones on his house and set his beloved library burning.

His pleas to save his archive of books were met with a blow on the head from the butt of a rifle. It left him almost deaf.

From then on, the horror only deepened. From the struggles en route to Buru in a rotting steel bucket of a boat flooded with faeces, to the blatant robbery of the prisoners by the military guards, to the killings that went on regularly on the island, the book exposes the brutality that lurked beneath the benign alabaster cast worn by the Suharto regime.

Among some of these prisoners were young children who had scoured the jails of Jakarta to search for their missing fathers. Having found them, they refused to leave and ended up serving interminable sentences, too.

As for Pramoedya, he claims he did not know what it was that he was arrested for. To this day, there has been no official explanation. Elsewhere, however, others have argued that he was pro-communist and a sympathiser of the PKI or Indonesian Communist Party, and before his arrest, he had been highly critical of anti-communist writers of the early '60s.

Pramoedya is adamant that he was never communist nor a sympathiser. He says he had only been an adviser on a cultural body affiliated to the PKI.

His anger and bitterness over his arrest is unequivocal even as he says he is not out for revenge or reparation. The New Order government, he says in the book, was built on a "foundation of mass murder".

This is an undeniable fact of history. Hundreds of thousands of communists and alleged PKI sympathisers were killed in the years immediately after the coup. To this day, the numbers on how many were executed remain hazy and the interpretation of events vary with different accounts.

Even if the question of whether Pramoedya was communist or a sympathiser is never settled by any official word, there is another more obvious reason why he had to be shut away.

He intimates this very subtly in the book. In a chapter about freedom and release, he recalls how scores of fellow prisoners from all corners of the island travelled through dirt, crocodile-infested rivers and elephant grassland to ply him with presents and bid him goodbye when rumours flew that he would be among the first to be sent home.

In a deeply-moving account of their affection for him, a young man said he was glad in a way that he was not freed after all because the prisoners still had someone who was a father to them.

Another said that the prisoners were all hoping that he would be released: "It doesn't matter if we have to stay as long as you are freed."

Writers who connect with the people they write for have always been a threat to the legitimacy of oppressive regimes. And it is this ability to connect that would have made Pramoedya a dangerous commentator if left unmuzzled in the social and political turbulence that ensued after the 1965 coup.

The military regime had reason to worry. Not without his own ideas of what nationalism and independence ought to mean for Indonesians, Pramoedya was an influential, well-known writer at the time of his arrest. In 1960, he sparked controversy with a book called Hoakiau (The Chinese), which was banned by Sukarno.

While Soliloquy documents the harshness of the life of a political prisoner, it is not without hope.

Despite the indifference to life showed by the guards at the Buru camp or by the prisoners too bone-tired to care, Pramoedya himself stays sane and refuses to submit.

In his musings, he considers such issues as freedom, the role he could play in the nation and the inhumanity of the Suharto regime.

"This manifestation of an unjust and uncivilised society, one lacking in any sense of humanitarianism, must be engraved in national memory," he writes in one of the essays.

Transmigration, a policy started by the Dutch to move populations from overcrowded regions such as Java to the more remote islands while displacing the indigenous peoples, and which was intensified by the New Order government, is also examined.

As for how ethnic clashes can threaten Indonesia's unity – a major theme in the past year – the lessons were learnt by Pramoedya and his fellow prisoners during their stay on Buru, when the indigenous people killed some of their fellow prisoners out of spite and anger.

More down to earth but just as bursting with ideas are his letters of advice to his children. Whether it is about loving their stepmother or liking social science and passing on study tips, Pramoedya the absentee parent tries his best to offer fatherly advice through his letters, even though he doubts they would reach his children.

While in prison, he also receives a letter from none other than Mr Suharto, who said enigmatically: "For every person, a mistake in judgement is common, but that must of course be followed by its logical consequence, that being 'honesty, courage, and the ability to rediscover the true and accepted road'."

In true Javanese non-speak, he did not say what the mistake was. From him came an equally polite reply, intimating that, yes, his parents, too, had taught him to admit to mistakes and there, he left the argument.

It is his writings and his refusal to submit to the aggressor that saw him through his years in prison. He was able to write only after several years on the island, and it enabled him, as he says, "to suppress life's personal disappointments".

It is tempting to wonder if, in another age, he would have suffered the same fate, and to lament the loss of what could have been the most valuable years of his writing genius. But then, would a different history have made Pramoedya what he is today?