Shade from the centuries-old giant trees in Bogor covered the city main road. Under the canopy, Berry Juliandi, an optimistic biologist from Bogor Agricultural Institute, was driving his car to Jakarta. He was in a rush to go to the capital because he had an interview with a team of journalists at Tempo, an Indonesian magazine known for its stark criticism of the government. The recent debate between two vice-presidential candidates dissected strategies to boost Indonesian research and the magazine wantedto hear Juliandi’s views on the issue as the Secretary General of Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences.

 

Juliandi put his car headphone on to answer my call while driving. For safety reasons, I told him that I would prefer to call when he had already arrived in Jakarta. But he said he wouldn’t have time; the interview would start soon and once it was done, he would immediately drive back to Bogor for another meeting. “It seems talking-while-driving is the only way,” he said.

 

Juliandi has been a busy man since he decided to take on a role as scientist-activist. The general election was now only two weeks away and he was grateful that he could communicate his scientific expertise to the public. Compared with those living in Soeharto’s regime (Indonesian second president, 1965-1998), “today scientists have more freedom to speak up,” he said. But even so, they are still powerless in Indonesian politics, he admitted. His struggle to remove the criminal sanctions embedded in Indonesia’s science and technology draft law will likely be fruitless, since the Ministry of Research and Technology (RISTEK) insists on including them.

 

Despite their powerless position in the political arena, Juliandi thinks Indonesian scientists should be vocal in promoting science in the public sphere. Science, he says, can still actively influence the public to make a political decision. On March 1, Juliandi delivered a talk in a seminar regarding how fake news and hoaxes were processed in the human brain. Currently, hoaxes and fake news are creating a dirty political atmosphere in the country. One of the most popular is about Joko Widodo, the current incumbent president. The hoax says he is the child of a communist.

 

This plays on the feeling of terror evoked in the minds of many Indonesians when they hear the word “communism”. The fear stems from a bloody political upheaval back in 1965 when Soeharto, who was once a military general, accused the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of being the mastermind behind the killing of seven military generals. The event was a stain on Soeharto’s authoritarian leadership in Indonesia. During his three-decades-long presidency (1965-1998), the second Indonesian president brainwashed the people into believing that the communist party was totally evil and sadistic.      

 

After Soeharto fell, historical records started to reveal the other side of the story. It was found that Soeharto himself was involved in the killing of the seven generals and he was responsible for the mass murder of two million alleged communists in Java, Bali, and Sumatra in the early days of his presidency. Some historians also proved that Soeharto’s anti-communist propaganda had removed virtually one entire generation of intellectuals in Indonesia. At least 299 lecturers and 3464 university students were lost, jailed, or killed, and many Indonesian scientists who were studying in Moscow, Prague, and Stockholm became stateless because they refused to condemn the earlier regime.