SOURCE: Mohamad, Goenawan. “Indonesia's Prize Scars.” Far Eastern Economic Review 158, no. 39 (28 September 1995): 39.

In the following essay, Mohamad describes the controversy surrounding Pramoedya's acceptance of the 1995 Magsaysay Prize, citing claims that Pramoedya worked as a “counter-revolutionary” during the 1960s.

He is 70 years old, half deaf, a kind of hero. His past is the subject of a bitter controversy, involving intricate moral problems, political conflict and endless bickering among intellectuals. His name is Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

He is a novelist, detained for 13 years by the Suharto government simply because he was a suspected communist. Today, free from prison, he remains a caged man. He cannot speak in public. His books are banned. Paradoxically this has made him Indonesia's most respected outcast, and there have even been whispers about the Nobel Prize for literature. Now he has been named the winner of the 1995 Magsaysay Award, a prize presented each year to...