Jakarta – Police in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta have raided book sellers, impounding hundreds of titles considered leftist or communist-linked, to save them from being burned by anti-communist zealots, reports said Friday.
The Jakarta Post quoted Yogyakarta police chief Brigadier General Saleh Sa'af as saying Thursday's raids conducted on street stalls and book shops in the East Java city were "preemptive". "We were not confiscating the books, we only asked the book owners to entrust police with keeping them in a safe place," Sa'af said. "We'll return them when the situation has returned to normal."
Sa'af also urged private citizens in possession of "leftist" books to voluntarily hand them over to police for safekeeping. "It will be safer for them to put the books here in the police's hands. We're afraid of possible conflict between the owners of the books and the anti-communist groups."
A newly formed anti-communist coalition last month burned a pile of leftist books and threatened book shops countrywide with raids if they did not clear their shelves of all books considered left-leaning by May 20. One of the groups, the Islamic Youth Movement (GPI), has also threatened to start raiding authors considered leftist after May 30.
The GPI, which falls under the Anti-Communist Alliance (AAK), a new coalition of 33 hardline Muslim groups, launched its first raids last month. Many Jakarta book stores – including branches of the country's largest book retailer Gramedia – have pulled about 30 titles from their shelves after telephoned threats of raids by the AAK.
The Indonesian government said Thursday it would not allow the raids, but did not spell out how it planned to stop them. Among the titles targeted by the AAK are books by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's leading author and a Nobel prize nominee whose books were banned for decades under former president Suharto for alleged leftist tendencies.
Suharto brought in a blanket ban on teaching and publishing the works of all communist ideologists after an abortive coup attempt blamed on the Communist Party of Indonesia in 1965. The party was outlawed and 500,000 followers were killed in the ensuing bloodbath, according to the official count. Hundreds of thousands were also jailed without trial. The ban on distributing and selling books with a communist ideology remains in place, but sales of books such as the biography of Che Guevara have been brisk for the past two years since Suharto fell.