ABSTRACT
The case began unobtrusively on 24 May 1993 with an item in the Criminality section of Tempo, a widely read investigative news magazine published during Indonesia’s New Order (1966-98). The Jakarta-based magazine was the first to report the murder of a young female worker and trade union activist from East Java. The story quickly drew the attention of both the Indonesian news media and other news services. Throughout 1993 and 1994 the Legal Aid Society in the nearby city of Surabaya and the Amnesty International Asia Watch teams conducted investigations and circulated their reports on the Internet. The ‘Marsinah’ case, as it came to be known, publicised the murder investigation, trial and aftermath of a single worker’s demise; more broadly it publicised the repressive conditions under which industrial workers renewed trade union activism in Indonesia during the 1990s (Hadiz 1997). The case heightened international scrutiny and drew attention to military intervention in disputes between workers and management in the industrial workplace. For the purposes of this volume, I analyse the politics of representation in the news reporting of this case, and the ways it indexed Indonesian workers as women workers in the broader media and discourse on human rights.
