His Excellency General Suharto
President
Office of the President
Jakarta
Indonesia

Vienna, 17 October 1994

Your Excellency,

The International Press Institute (IPI) strongly protests the attempt to prohibit members of the recently-formed Alliance of Independent Journalists from covering the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) summit in Jakarta.

The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) was established in August 1994 by a group of about 50 Indonesian journalists after the Ministry of Information revoked the licenses of the country’s three leading news weeklies, Tempo, De Tik and Editor.

We believe that AJI, which includes a significant number of journalists affiliated with the three banned publications, is an important and much-needed alternative to the state-sponsored Indonesian Journalists’ Association (PWI), which is recognized by your Government as Indonesia’s sole journalists’ union and is now attempting to prevent AJI’s members from covering the APEC summit.

Any attempt to bar journalists working for AJI from official events is not only a violation of everyone’s right to “seek, receive and impart information”, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also a severe threat to the livelihood of these journalists and evidence of your Government’s determination to crush efforts to develop a press independent of state control.

IPI, representing editors and leading journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcasting organisations and news agencies in over 80 countries, strongly urges you to ensure that AJI is recognized as a representative organization of journalists and that its members are given equal access to the APEC summit in November.

I thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Johann P. Fritz
Director
CC: His Excellency Mr. H. Harmoko
Minister of Information
Foreign Ministry
Jakarta
Indonesia