Despite the sudden rise in anti-communist sentiments in Indonesia over the past few weeks, there are still some people in authority here who actually care about intellectual freedom. But, unsurprisingly, the people who aren’t buying into the current “communist panic” are academics.
Mohammad Nasih, the Dean of Airlangga University (Unair) in Surabaya, yesterday said that its students have always been allowed to read books on leftist values, and will continue to do so, regardless of how the general public perceives such values.
“Academically, those books are beneficial for my students,” Nasih said, as quoted by Tempo yesterday.
Unair students also said they appreciated the freedom to read leftist books, with topics ranging from Marxism to Tan Malaka to the banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
“I’m a social studies student, I need to learn about ideologies like socialism and communism,” said Adrian, a student at Unair.
To be fair, Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung recently said that the enforcement of the 1966 laws criminalizing the propagation of communism must respect press freedom and academic freedom, which is clearly the case in Unair and hopefully other respected academic institutions.
However, based on historical experience, there’s still a serious chance that the general public will get swept up in the government’s paranoia about communism if authorities continue to arrest people just for wearing t-shirts containing “communist symbolism” while the National Library publicly supports the banning of leftist books.
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