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RI leading novelist launches new book

JAKARTA — One of the country’s most renowned writers, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, yesterday said his country was being choked by a stagnant social structure despite 55 years of independence.

"Indonesia nowadays is in a state of decomposition," Pramoedya said during at launch of the English edition of one of his books, "Tales of Jakarta".

The writer, who has spent years in prison camps, said after the country fought its Dutch colonial masters and gained independence, the colonial social structure of the nation was left unchanged.

"The source of the bureaucracy has not yet changed, from the colonial era up until now ... the common people remain oppressed," he said.

He said the bureaucracy remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Pramoedya, who was jailed by a succession of the country’s rulers, has had his works banned until now, He defended his leftist leanings, often reflected in his work, by saying:

"This is not politics or an ideology, but the result of an education within my family. I stay on the side of the people."

Hailed internationally by critics as Indonesia’s leading modern novelist and mentioned several times as a potential Nobel Prize winner, Pramoedya, 75, has now stopped writing because of health reasons.

He was imprisoned for three years by Dutch colonial administrators in the late 1940s and by the country’s first president Soekarno, between 1960 and 1961, for penning a piece about the Chinese in Indonesia.

In the 1960s, Pramoedya was one of the main figures of Lekra, a communist-affiliated arts organization which frequently suppressed dissenting writers through the significant number of media venues it controlled at the time.

Under the New Order government of former president Soeharto, his links to the communists landed him in jail for 14 years without trial following a bloody 1965 coup attempt, officially blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party.

Ten of those years were spent at the notorious Buru Island labor camp in the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku.

Following his release in 1979 he spent a further decade under house surveillance. — AFP

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