This is a BBC Podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCWorldService.com

Slash Podcasts.

Well we now begin a new Wednesday documentary series. In what can I say, Gary Bryson travels

to four countries in the Asia-Pacific region to find out what people can talk about publicly

without being prosecuted and what they're comfortable discussing privately. Over the

coming weeks we'll hear from Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore. But we begin today in a

rainstorm in Indonesia.

Hello, I'm Gary Bryson and I'm here in a very rainy Jakarta to ask a deceptively simple

question, what can I say? In this co-production for the BBC World Service and ABC Radio, join

me as we visit Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore and today in Indonesia to find out what can

be said out loud without being shut down, sued or imprisoned.

Then you don't have free expression. There'll be injustice and injustice to me in violence.

For nearly 50 years, Indonesia was ruled by two dictators. Firstly by Sakano, who won

the country's independence from its Dutch colonial masters in 1949. And then by the man who

deposed him, the brutal and oppressive General Saharto, whose time and power, which Indonesia's

14 million people remember as the new order, only came to an end in 1998.

In a Jakarta art center, an opera about the communist hero and co-founder of Indonesia, Tan Malaka

is being rehearsed. A dapper in the Nisian man, brimming with energy, is directing the proceedings.

He stands, he sits, talking quietly to colleagues on his left and right.

Poetry is the only space where real free expression is possible.

During the years of the dictatorship, Gona One Muhammad was a radical campaigning journalist.

In 1971, he co-founded Tempo, a news magazine which courageously reported on the corruption

...