The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) suddenly became a hell of a lot more interesting this year as organizers of Southeast Asia’s biggest international literary festival announced just last week in the 11th hour that they would have to cancel a sizable amount of programming on Indonesia’s 1965 killings, under threat of having their permits pulled by local authorities.
There’s been so much press this year, that it’s lead to some theorizing that the drama was all just a big publicity stunt.
Australian Janet DeNeefe, the festival’s founder and director, shut that down quick yesterday at the UWRF press launch that Coconuts Bali attended, calling such conspiracy theories “foolish and illogical”.
“People who say that clearly have no idea what kind of work goes into a festival like this,” DeNeefe stated.
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With solemn faces, DeNeefe and UWRF’s national program manager Wayan Juniarta fielded questions on the unprecedented changes to the festival’s programming, when their carefully-crafted statement still left many reporters’ questions unanswered.
Juniarta expressed his frustration, explaining that the 1965 stuff was not supposed to be about spewing ideology and stirring up incitement, but rather it would have been an opportunity for us to ask ourselves, “What’s the responsibility of this generation, 50 years on?”.
“This has never happened before and it does not bode well. It comes at a time when I believe Indonesians were hoping for some sort of reconciliation and recognition of this violation of human rights, to what has been described by the CIA as ‘one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,'” DeNeefe wrote in an extended statement published on the UWRF website.
“It is extremely disappointing and some might even say cowardly that the Government is refusing to confront this national tragedy.”
The overriding sentiment over the first couple days of the festival seems to be that it was either pull the 1965-related events or take a stand and try to hold their ground—though to do this would likely run the risk of killing UWRF forever. Martyring it, if you will.
UWRF instead will be making a statement by leaving the tables at the canceled panels empty, Juniarta said yesterday to “remind of the organizers of how hard we worked.”
“It’s kind of a tribute to us and the freedom of speech.”
Photo: Coconuts Bali
