Scott Burchill – In his first lecture on Indonesian soil after being banished for 26 years, Professor Benedict Anderson spoke about the bewildered expression on the faces of his Indonesian students over the years at Cornell University whenever he asked them "who in Indonesia today do you admire and look up to?"
Anderson regards the inability of his young Indonesian students to name their national heroes as a terrifying indictment of a deformed political culture, dominated in recent years by monsters such as Soeharto, Murdani and Wiranto.
The same question posed to young Australians would have elicited a similar response. In the Australian media, Indonesia has been a regular source of bad news. This is not entirely surprising, given the brutality and corruption of the Soeharto dictatorship and the occupation of East Timor.
But why have we not heard about the inspiring and courageous dissenters who, at great risk, resisted the New Order regime? Why did they remain anonymous when their counterparts in Eastern Europe – the "refuseniks" – were so publicly lauded in the West? The answers to these questions tell us much about our own diplomatic culture.
While Alexander Solzhenitsyn was feted in the West for his indictment of Stalin's gulags, Indonesia's Pramoedya Ananta Toer never appeared on the radar screens of Western political elites. The author of the acclaimed Buru Quartet and The Mute's Soliloquy, the second of which recounts his horrific experiences while incarcerated on the island of Buru from 1969 to 1979, wasn't the kind of political prisoner that interested Washington or Canberra during the Cold War – he was a man of the Left.
No-one who has read Pramoedya's memoirs would be under any misapprehensions about the true nature of the Soeharto regime, which probably explains why his books never found their way onto the shelves of the Jakarta lobby in Australia: for them, Soeharto's crimes were always a case of see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.
Similarly, Carmel Budiardjo's detention without trial (1968-71) and her efforts to free her fellow political prisoners, detailed in Surviving Indonesia's Gulag, was unlikely to be reviewed by those promoting the closest possible relationship between Canberra and Jakarta.
Budiardjo also founded an organisation called Tapol to campaign on behalf of Indonesia's prisoners of conscience; remarkably its name and cause are almost unknown in Australia.
There are hundreds of others with lower profiles who work with extraordinary courage to account for the crimes of their country's leaders. These remarkable people deserve Australia's support, but are unlikely to ever receive it.
Pramoedya, Budiardjo and thousands more were not only the victims of a cruel regime, they shared another unfortunate fate. They had the misfortune to be the political prisoners of a government ideologically allied to the West. By definition they became invisible.
Soeharto was not only anti-communist, he was also admired by politicians in Australia for bringing "stability" to the region. Over 32 years Soeharto's "stability" took a minimum of 800,000 lives and possibly as many as 2 million in both Indonesia proper and East Timor, a record as vile as Pol Pot's and infinitely worse than Saddam's or Milosevic's.
A reckoning is due, if not immediately. An editorial in The Jakarta Post in April puts this and Soeharto's coming corruption trial in their proper perspective: "If the goal is to show that justice will be upheld in this country, then surely corruption, as bad as it is, is the least sinful misdeed that Soeharto committed during his 32 years of tyrannical rule.
"What about the atrocities, from the summary executions of suspected communists to the killing of people in East Timor, Irian Jaya, Aceh and Tanjung Priok? If the Government wants to show that justice and the rule of law prevail in this country, then these and other heinous crimes committed during his reign should be the reasons for the prosecution of Soeharto. Not corruption."
A growing number of courageous Indonesians are no longer frightened of speaking and confronting the truth. They are the real heroes of their country. To find them, however, our leaders will need to stop consorting with "the elite ... that implemented fascism and ran the country by terror", as Pramoedya put it, and focus their attention on those Indonesians struggling against enormous odds to restore pride and honour to their country.
Scott Burchill is a lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University.]